Top tips for gut health

As 29 per cent of you guys are feeling less happy right now, we wanted to find out if we can really boost our mood with focusing on gut health. And what can we do for better gut health.

How has our gut health changed over the years?

I have been a nutritional therapist for the best part of a decade. Our gut health has had a bit of a battering over the past couple of decades with the overuse of antibiotics, lack of fibre in our diet, increased amounts of stress, poor sleep. And if you add all of those things together you end up with a gut that’s not very happy, and that links into how our brains are functioning.

Is the likelihood that you get to +25 and have had something affect your gut?

Absolutely. You may have not even knowingly done something. It doesn't necessarily have to be gut related, it could be other things. Maybe you drink a lot, your nutrition slips and maybe this goes on for years and you disconnect from people in your life. It's not one thing, it all adds up. As a practitioner, it's working out what that trigger point was and helping to balance all of those other things.

What's the link between serotonin and the gut?

It’s a relatively new science - only in the last 30 years have we understood the pivotal role of the gut. 70-80% of your immune system is located in your gut. But more recently it’s about the gut brain connection. It’s actually pretty mind blowing that 90-95% of our overall serotonin production (our 'happy neurotransmitter’) in your body is in our gut, not in our brain.

Knowing that changes the whole landscape of what makes us happy. Looking after the health of the microbes in our gut is really important if you're talking about optimising the overall levels of serotonin.

How do you go about overhauling diet - top tips.

Nutrition is much more prescriptive, so what works for one person, may not work for another. But, that being said the basics of gut health are:

1 - Work from a place of abundance rather than restriction. So if you like your tuna sandwich it’s not about not having it. It’s about what we can add in that’s going to help you.

2 - Including as much diversity of dietary fibre in your diet is key, because fundamentally that’s what feeds your micro-biomes. So things like vegetables, fruit, whole grains, nuts and seeds. Get a bit of rotation. Add a bit of spelt flakes on to your oats, nut butters on your toast.

3 - Eat the rainbow! And that’s where we will get the more diverse micro-biomes and lots of
micronutrient polyphenol - which are special plant based chemicals which also helps feed our micro-biomes too.

4 - Adding some sort of fermented foods is a good idea - kombucha, milk kefir or just things like live yoghurts and cheese. A good unpasteurised cheese is going to contain trillions of beneficial bacteria which is more than your average probiotic.

But one supplement brand you would recommend?

I am a believer in food first - then supplements when you need to add in, but Symprove is the only supplement brand I recommend. They have huge clincal data to back up, and they're pioneering new ones, and they have masses amounts of positive customer feedback.

To learn more from Eve Kalinik watch the interview here