If you want to improve your health, start taking care of your gut – research suggests it’s at the ver y foundation of wellbeing.
You’ve probably noticed the term ‘gut health’ cropping up more and more over the last 10 years or so, and with good reason. As Dr Sarah Berry, a nutritional scientist at King’s College London, explains: ‘This is an exploding area of research. As the science has evolved, it has exposed the fact that the gut is far more important and more widely involved in the health of our whole body than we had previously realised.’
Unlike so many new health buzzwords, this is not a temporary fad but an evidence-based new frontier in medical science, with the potential to transform aspects of our healthcare and personal health in the near future. Which sounds exciting – and it is. But what exactly is ‘gut health’?
And if it really is so important, what can we do to improve ours? In this magazine, we’ll be looking at how our gut shapes our health, and what we can do to make sure it’s in optimal condition.
Our ‘gut’ is actually a whole nine-metre length of digestive tract coiled inside our bodies. One of its basic functions is the one we all know about – that it helps us extract nutrients from the foods we eat so they can be distributed around our body. But the big breakthrough discovery of recent years has been the gut biome, which is a universe inside our bodies, a complex ecosystem of trillions of bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites that live inside the digestive tract – most of which come under the simplified but basically accurate description of ‘friendly bacteria’. We now know that these bacteria impact virtually every organ and function of the body, from heart and liver health, to chronic illnesses such as diabetes and many cancers, and even our mental health.
Dr Megan Rossi, also known as The Gut Health Doctor, is a registered dietitian and nutrition researcher at King’s College London, and runs her own gut health clinic (theguthealthclinic. com). She believes that a healthy gut is the cornerstone to health, and we should all be more gut aware. ‘Although we still have a lot more to discover, we already understand enough to know that the health of our gut biome is critical to our overall health and wellbeing,’ she says. ‘Poor gut health is now being associated with an enormous range of illnesses from autoimmune diseases to neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s.’
BOOSTING THE BIOME
The good news is that we don’t have to ‘get lucky’ and be born with a healthy gut. ‘Genet
