My Top 5 Daily Foods For Gut Health
Here are my favorite five foods that you can introduce every single day to optimise your gut health, and why!
But before I get into the details, make sure you read the Gut Crash Course as an introduction to how your digestive system works. This 11 page document starts at the mouth and works its way down to your bowel movements, explaining the journey your food goes through and what happens to it along the way!
The Gut Crash Course will help you understand why I love the following foods for gut health, and how to implement them to meet your specific needs.
Bone Broth
Bone broth is rich in glutamine which is shown to decrease intestinal permeability (leaky gut) and improve the health of your villi. This is important for anyone with eczema, allergies, coeliac disease, or any other auto-immune conditions.
Gelatinous cuts of meat such as ox cheek, oxtail, lamb shank, or any other cuts of meat on the bone also offer a meal rich in glutamine. Chicken bone broth is especially rich in type 2 collagen which can make the broth super gelatinous.
There are many ways to implement bone broth into your diet, use it as a stock in soups and sauces, cook your rice, add it to mash potato, heat up food in a pan, or just sip on it as a gut nourishing snack.
You can make your own following my easy homemade bone broth recipe, or buy some premade options from either Take Stock or Ossa Organic (Use code ABBY10 for £10 off over £50 spend).
Apple Sauce/ Stewed Apples
Stewed apples provide plenty of healthy fiber to promote healthy digestion and feed your microbiome. This is a great way to support efficient detoxification and help your body remove metabolised estrogen, which is especially important if you struggle with painful, heavy periods, PMS, acne, and conditions such as endometriosis, PCOS, and adenomyosis.
Keeping the skin on when stewing helps to release pectin, an important dietary fiber that feeds your microbiome and promotes healthy digestion. I like to add a pinch of cinnamon to stewed apples for the antibacterial properties, as well as the delicious taste.
Try my Blood Sugar Balancing Applesauce recipe, you can use ti to make a crumble, add to yogurt or porridge, or eat alongside a roast pork dinner!
Raw Carrot Salad
The raw carrot fibers bind to endotoxins in the digestive system to ensure they are eliminated through your bowel movements without being reabsorbed.
Overproduction of endotoxin in the digestive system is usually due to a state of microbiome imbalance, they both exaggerate one another and can lead to, or be a cause of, chronic constipation, bloating, acne, eczema, PMS and other hormonal related issues.
You can eat a raw carrot sprinkled with some sea salt for ease, but if you have a spare 5 minutes I recommend making the raw carrot salad recipe every day, ideally on an empty stomach.
Cooked Beetroot
Beetroot is a rich source of glutamine, the amino acid that is essential for the health of your intestinal lining. When cooked, it is also rich in gentle fibers which support healthy bowel movements and create a healthy environment for your microbiome to thrive.
Beets are shown to support the liver's detoxification process by providing key nutrients such as betaine, betacyanins, and glutathione, all of which support the liver’s ability to break down toxic waste efficiently and move it through the digestive system to be eliminated through your daily bowel movements.
You can buy pre-cooked beetroot from the supermarket (fresh), buy it raw and roast it or boil it yourself, or make a delicious gut healing Borscht Soup recipe.
Ginger Tea
One of ginger's most powerful benefits is its ability to optimise digestion by supporting stomach acid production, bile flow and gut motility, all of which ensure food is broken down, nutrients are absorbed and waste is efficiently removed when these systems are working optimally.
I recommend 3 grams of ginger per day for the therapeutic benefits, and 1 tbsp of freshly grated ginger is roughly 6 grams. I like my ginger strong, so I use about 2 tbsps of grated ginger for my infusions and sip on this over a couple of days.
Here’s how I make my Ginger Tea Infusion, enjoy!
There you have it, my top five favorite foods for gut health that you can eat every day! Not everyone will be able to tolerate all of the above food, so choose the recipes that work for you and stay consistent.
Your symptoms and healing journey is highly dependant on your current circumstances, so be curious about what the root causes of your health issues are and evaluate what changes you have made so far, and how they have helped.
Other factors that are detrimental to our health and healing journey are external stressors from work, relationships, medication, processed foods and even pollution.