There’s no shortage of advice about what to eat, including hype about the latest superfoods that will help you live to 100, or about the newest restrictive diets that claim to help you lose weight and look beautiful. As a researcher from the Farncombe Family Digestive Health Research Institute, I’m well aware that there is no universal “healthy diet” that will work for everyone.
However, most professionals would agree that a diet should be well balanced between the food groups, and it’s better to include more things like vegetables and fermented foods in your diet than restrict yourself unnecessarily. Eating foods that promote gut health improves your overall health too.
Why is everyone so concerned about fibre?
The importance of fibre has been known for decades. The late great surgeon and fibre researcher Denis Burkitt once said, “If you pass small stools, you have to have large hospitals.” But dietary fibre does more than just help move your bowels. Fibre can be considered a prebiotic nutrient.
Prebiotics aren’t actively digested and absorbed, rather they are selectively used to promote the growth of a beneficial species of microbes in our gut. These microbes then help digest foods for us so we can obtain more nutrients, promote gut barrier integrity and prevent the growth of harmful bacteria.
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