Have you ever felt irritated or frustrated because your stomach is not fine? Or do you get an upset stomach more frequently with just feeling sick all the time? Then you need to work on eating healthy for your gut. Your gut is directly related to your brain with a constant connection that’s why your emotions affect your eating habits.
Our gut is a home for millions of healthy bacterias that work to keep you healthy and fit. They are known to produce various vitamins and minerals for your body like vitamin B12. Therefore, it is important to keep them healthy as well. Here is a list of foods that keeps your gut healthy:
1. Fibre: Human body cannot digest fibre to generate energy like it is done for other forms of carbohydrates but fibre feeds your gut bacterias. These good bacterias utilise fibre as food to get energy and maintain their health. Specifically, soluble fibre helps them grow better because of its ability to get fermented by gut bacterias. Therefore, include more fibre rich food in your diet like fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and much more.
2. Fermented Foods: Food items like curd, idli, buttermilk and others help in keeping the gut healthy by providing probiotics. Probiotics are referred to good microorganisms consumed through food that are thought to have benefits to humans. For example, curd contains Lactobacillus strain bacteria which helps in improving the diversity of healthy bacterias in the gut.
3. Adequate Hydration: Right hydration keeps your body healthy by helping keep toxins out of the body. Accumulated toxins can damage gut flora and destroy their health. You can start adding drinks like buttermilk, coconut water or lemon water to get the right hydration, probiotic benefits and much-required micronutrients and electrolytes.
4. Manage Stress: Higher stress levels can make you more prone to emotional eating where you look for comfort food to feel better. These comfort foods generally are junk food including ice cream, chips, chocolates, desserts and much more which have no to little fibre or good quality nutrients which degrades the health of gut bacterias. Therefore, include some physical activity like walking, yoga, gym, aerobic exercises or meditation to manage your stress levels.
5. Treat Gut Allergy: If you keep getting diarrhoea, upset stomach or if you keep popping anti-allergic or antibiotic medicines then you need to find out a long term solution. You can maintain a food diary to find out if you are allergic to any specific food by tracking your symptoms and eating pattern.
Focus on eating a healthy and balanced diet to keep your gut healthy to get the maximum benefits.
