This Eating Habit Can Significantly Improve Your Gut Health, Says New Study
Your gut is arguably one of the most important parts of your body. The gut, also known as the "second brain," helps many other parts of your body function properly. It is even connected to things like the health of your skin and hair, as well as your mental health! And while the gut is powerful, it is also delicate.
Your gut is delicately balanced with bacteria, and when something throws it off balance, it can mess up the overall "gut microbiome."
Many of us may not even realize this problem exists, but your gut contains certain microbes that can resist very common antibiotics. Common antibiotics such as tetracycline and aminoglycoside are needed for many different health conditions, and experts around the globe are concerned that our gut's resistance to these antibiotics may continue to get worse in the future.
Thankfully, researchers are working hard to find the best solutions to this common problem known as anti-microbial resistance. And many of these solutions can be traced back to some of the foundational choices we make each and every day, including the types of food we consume.
According to a recent study published in The American Society of Microbiology, eating enough fiber on a daily basis can help you improve your gut health overall, but may also help to reduce the number of antibiotic-resistant microbes in your gut.
Here's what this means for you and your gut health, and for more healthy eating tips make sure to check out Best Eating Habits if You Don't Like Vegetables.
First off, what does the food you eat have to do with resistance to antibiotics? According to Science Daily, it all starts with your gut microbiome. Antimicrobial resistance is found in your gut microbiome, and those microbes are known to "carry genetically encoded strategies to survive contact with antibiotics."
This is the main reason the research results from ASM are so important to us. If we can care for our gut and continue to cultivate a healthy gut microbiome, we can improve our overall health in ways we may not have even thought of before.
The results of this new research concluded that getting at least 8 to 10 grams of soluble fiber (found in oats, seeds, beans, and certain fruits and vegetables) per day can significantly decrease the antibiotic-resistant microbes in your gut.
"And we're not talking about eating some exotic diet either, but a diverse diet, adequate in fiber, that some Americans already eat," says molecular biologist Danielle Lemay, who was a researcher involved in the study, via Science Daily.
But what researchers found to be even more important than fiber intake was diversity in your diet. "This suggests that we may want to eat from diverse sources of foods that tend to be higher in soluble fiber for maximum benefit," says Lemay.
