Not so long ago, the five-a-day rule was the only dietary advice we seemed to need. According to the World Health Organisation, eating five daily portions of fruit and vegetables within a balanced diet was key to good health. Now it’s more complicated.
“Good health” has been replaced by “gut health” and there’s more talk of fibres, phytochemicals, kefir and kombucha than you can shake a pickle at. Research from the American and British Gut Project has concluded that the key to a healthy gut – which is vital for overall health – isn’t “five a day” (especially if it’s the same five every day) but the variety of plants in our diet. This changing advice stems from our increasing understanding of the gut microbiome – something few of us would have heard of a decade ago but now attracts huge amounts of scientific research.
So what should we really be eating for the happiest, healthiest gut, and why? How diet impacts your gut health “Good gut health means having a good biodiversity of the gut, a diverse ecosystem of microbes,” says Dr James Kinross, a reader in colorectal surgery and consultant surgeon at Imperial College London and author of Dark Matter: The New Science of the Microbiome . “An important part of that comes from diet. The way I describe it to patients is that the engine in your car is obviously dependent on the fuel you put in it.
” The gut microbiome , the collection of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that live in our digest.
