Daily Tip #5 - Feed Your Gut Bugs
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VARSHA: [00:00:00] Welcome to Functional Medicine with Dr. Var. This podcast is to help you explore the underlying root causes of your chronic symptoms and health challenges. Reset your health and reclaim your life.
Welcome to the podcast. Here's daily tip number five .
Your microbiome is one of the most important things to keep healthy for good health. Your microbiome contains essential bacteria that produce substances, which we call postbiotics, and one of those postbiotics is something called short chain fatty acids or SCFA for short. And these short chain fatty acids have so many important functions.
They help reduce inflammation. They help heal your gut lining, so it reduces your risk for intestinal permeability or leaky gut. It even helps regulate your neurotransmitter signaling from your gut to your brain because some portion of your neurotransmitters, [00:01:00] such as serotonin, dopamine, and GABA are produced in the gut.
They're also produced in the brain, but you have some portion that's produced in the gut, and the short chain fatty acids help with signaling those up the gut brain axis, where you have a nerve called the vagus nerve that connects your brain to your gut. Your short chain fatty acids can also help improve insulin sensitivity, so that way your own insulin that you're making works optimally. So it reduces your risk for insulin resistance, which then can reduce your risk for developing pre-diabetes and diabetes.
And these short-chain fatty acids may also regulate your appetite and satiety hormones, so it may also play a factor in your weight management. So how do you get these short chain fatty acids? Well, you wanna make sure that you feed your microbiome. You wanna feed these good bacteria, and this is the term prebiotics.
You may have heard of that term, but prebiotics are basically [00:02:00] fibers. And this is a food source that these wonderful bacteria in your microbiome love
So it's really important to include certain fibers in your diet, and it's good to include fiber overall.
So prebiotic. fibers are foods like garlic, onions, leeks, asparagus,
bananas that are on the unripe side, so ones that are a little bit greener because they have more resistant starch, which is a good fiber to feed these wonderful bacteria. And then of course you wanna include other fiber sources from plenty of fruits and vegetables of a variety of colors because they have something called polyphenols.
Polyphenols are what give your fruits and vegetables their deep rich pigments and these good bacteria love that. So my daily habit challenge for you today is to add a prebiotic food and try to work up to e eating more fiber in your diet. Now, most of [00:03:00] us eat about 10 to 15 grams of fiber a day, but really we need about 25 to 35 grams a day.
Work up slowly so your gut doesn't rebel, but you know, if you're only eating like 10 grams of fiber a day, then make it a challenge over the next week to add about another five grams and keep increasing every week as you feel comfortable to get to the goal of 25 to 35 grams a day.
Now, I do wanna say that if you are adding fiber foods to your diet and you actually feel worse, then you could have a condition called sibo, SIBO, which stands for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. So if you do feel worse after eating these fiber rich foods, then you definitely wanna see your functional or integrative medicine provider so that they can diagnose you and treat you for that.
But if you don't have any problem with it, then definitely work up with these fiber foods.
If this helped you, please subscribe so that you don't miss a day. And you know, these habits are [00:04:00] meant to stack on top of each other, Don't forget to still incorporate daily habit number one and two, you may not be able to incorporate everything every single day, but the idea is to help you realize that improving your health can start with little small changes that over time can lead to big results.
So, I hope you will continue to join me and keep me posted on, on how you're doing with these habits. I'd love to hear about it. And then if you like to watch it in video, don't forget to head over to my YouTube channel and you can follow me there. I also have other videos that aren't on the podcast, uh, that you may find useful.
Thanks for watching and listening, and have a fantastic day.
