Greetings, Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand.
Thanks for coming back.
I'm going to do a video today on what I consider are some of the best foods for gut health
and digestive health.
I've entitled this video the 10 Best Foods For Gut Health.
I'm sure I can make a list of the hundred best foods but these 10 are pretty darn good,
and if you can incorporate these 10 into your diet, it should help you significantly with
things like gas, bloating, constipation, diarrhea.
Along the way I'll mention a few little hints and tips regarding these particular foods,
how you can incorporate them into your diet, and just then see if I can just pad it out
with some more information.
Let's start off with one of the excellent foods is called Jerusalem artichoke.
I might have spoken about this in a previous video, but these are really nice sweet little
tasting tubers.
I don't know if you've ever seen them, but the actual Jerusalem artichoke belongs to
the sunflower family.
It's got a quite a tall stalk.
It's got a sunflower on the top, and it's got these neat leaves like a sunflower.
You need to be careful where you put it in your yard.
It can get a bit invasive and take over.
The artichokes are very nice roasted up, even just cooked or fried or grated.
I find them quite sweet and quite crunchy and tasty.
Just be careful because they're also called Jerusalem fatty chokes if you have too many
of them.
Artichokes contain a lot of inulin.
I think 15 to 20 grams of this only being a small handful so it's quite a lot of this
particular sugar called inulin.
So don't freak out.
Jerusalem artichokes are not linked with increase in candida in the diet at all.
They don't stimulate the production of candida.
But any kind of really sweet food you eat, especially if you're not used to it like this,
can give you a lot of bloating or gas if you start eating lots and lots and lots of it
all at once.
No different from eating any other kind of sweet food.
But this has got a very powerful prebiotic potential.
This will travel through, right through to the colon, small bowel, large bowel, and will
start feeding up the beneficial bacteria there.
I've seen many patients with stool tests who have shown very low levels of lactobacilus
and bifida bacteria, but after consuming the artichoke for several months and we repeated
a stool test we've seen this big increase in the numbers of the beneficial bacteria,
all without taking probiotics by the way.
So if you've got beneficial bacteria and you want to boost the numbers, this is a really
good one to do.
You just need one or two small pieces of Jerusalem artichoke per day to do that.
You don't need like pounds of it.
I've just made a note here.
It's good to ease people into these things very slowly.
So if you've got a very sensitive digestive tract, don't go crazy on this because you're
going to feel very sick.
Second one is bananas.
Bananas is one my favourite fruits.
Now bananas you need to be careful of on a candida diet.
The green bananas or we call plantain bananas may be okay for you to eat when you've got
candida, particularly if you've cooked them in coconut milk or coconut cream, then you're
going to have a more of an antifungal ability about these bananas as well.
Bananas are actually very, very good.
There are a lot of compounds in bananas that help to build good health, reduce inflammation,
and also these things act as a prebiotic and they're great for constipation so they really
help to build up good levels of beneficial bacteria when you eat banana regularly.
Again, if you're not used to eating them, you're not going to eat four or five every
day right off the cuff.
You're going to get sick and bloated and gassy.
If you've got constipation bananas can help, but as I said, cooking them in the milk, in
the coconut milk will really aid constipation.
Make sure you eat them when they're not too green and when they're not too brown.
You've got to sort of eat them when they're right at that in-between stage.
I have got several candida patients who can't eat bananas but I've got many others who can
eat bananas, so it could be a trial and error thing for you again.
But one banana per day is a fantastic addition to the diet of a healthy person to build really
good colon health.
Third one is garlic.
Garlic would have to be one of my favorites when it comes to gut health because it is
a prebiotic but it's also antimicrobial.
It puts a lot of flavor into the food, a lot of spice into the food, and it certainly helps
to clean the gut up of a lot of unwanted bacteria and yeasts.
But what a lot of people don't know is it actually boosts beneficial bacteria.
A 2013 study published in Food Science and Human Wellness found that garlic boosted the
creation of many good gut microbes.
Research shows that garlic prevents many gastrointestinal diseases.
This is one you need to add to your diet regularly.
I got a recent question from a subscriber on my channel calling me an idiot saying that
garlic was toxic and made people sick and was linked to cancer.
So it just goes to show how some people have got some rather world views of different foods
that are healthy.
Garlic is good, but make sure you purchase garlic that's organic, grown in your region,
not imported from China where it's been irradiated and it could potentially contain heavy metal
contamination in it.
So always get an organic garlic.
Garlic contains a lot of sulfur compounds in it which attract heavy metals to it by
default, so don't be surprised if you did a hair analysis down the track and you've
been eating a lot of Chinese going to discover you've got a lot of lead or cadmium in your
hair, in your body because you could have that.
Yeah, include some garlic in your diet.
The fourth one is butter.
Butter may seem like an unlikely candidate in this list of healthy foods, but butter
actually contains very good fats, very good lipids in it that help us to build good hormonal
health.
Butter also contains butyric acid in it.
The butyric acid really helps to build up our short chain fatty acids in our intestinal
tract which leads to very nice colonic health.
Butter is a lovely food to include into your diet and ghee is even better.
Ghee is clarified butter where all the milk solids have been taken out and you're basically
just left with the fat.
I think so it's a lovely food to enter the diet.
Ghee's been linked to reducing inflammation in the body and it's one I particularly like
people to have with inflammatory conditions like psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis.
Yeah, if you get a good quality butter and have small amounts in your diet, it really
helps to build good gut health.
Make sure the butter is from grass-fed cows, it's organic, and it's good quality.
Number five, broccoli and cruciferous vegetables.
This is something we eat a ton of in our place.
We grow all of these foods, kale, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli.
I grow about four different types of Chinese vegetables choy sum, pak choi, bok choy, and
gailan, and there's another one called tatsoi, nice round green one.
These are quite bitter and they pair out very nicely if you cook them with chicken or tofu.
You can make vegetarian dishes out of them, all sorts of dishes.
Delightful to add these to the diet.
These contain glucosinolates.
These are particular type of compound that help to break down toxins in the body.
They help phase two liver detoxification quite long.
Cruciferous vegetables contain sulfur containing metabolites like glucosinolates which are
broken down with microbes to release substances that reduce inflammation and reduce the risk
of many different cancers in the body.
So yeah, this is why I recommend.
You got the fiber, you've got the different compounds found in these cruciferous vegetables,
yeah, really known to build up good levels of lactobacillus in particular.
I find these to be good for the small intestine and for liver function.
Try and incorporate some of these brassicas into your diet on a daily basis, especially
if you really want to like me want to look and avoid cancer as you get a bit older.
Number six will be the berries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, any kind of berries,
goose presenting berries like this.
These contain many different compounds in them which help to benefit our overall health
by reducing inflammation and oxidative stress.
They contain pigments in them, anthocyanins, the pigment that gives blueberries a bold
color.
You're also going to find different fibers in these berries, so it's very impressive
what they do to gut bacteria.
They have multiple effects on the body.
Berries should be high in your list to include in your diet if you want good gut health.
Number seven, beans.
All kinds of beans you can eat that really improve your gut health, so any legumes really
help to build up again a little bit like the butter, the short chain fatty acids.
These strengthen the intestinal cells, they build good powerful intestinal walls, these
fibers.
They help for you to overcome constipation as well and bloating and gas.
Introduce them slowly into your diet to begin with.
These foods encourage proper weight loss because they make you feel full.
When you eat a meal with beans in it, you're getting all the protein and you're getting
this very slow burn of calories over a period of time.
They're great for people who want to mind their weight.
These also have a great effect on beneficial bacteria.
The fiber, the protein, they contain a lot of B vitamins and folic acid, they play a
powerful role in regulating gut function.
So try and to add some beans into your diet.
There are black beans and there are white beans, pinto beans, adzuki beans, there are
so many beans you can add into your diet.
Again, a little bit like the artichokes start very slowly and build up.
Don't eat large amounts of beans if you're not accustomed to it.
All these powerful foods can make you bloat and make you feel sick pretty bad.
Number eight, we're going to talk about the fermented foods, especially the plant-based
ferments, the miso and the tempeh.
Tempeh is one of my favorite.
It's basically tofu and it's been inoculated with the bacteria and it ferments.
It's almost got a meaty like flavor about it.
Very powerful in terms of inoculating the gut again with good bacteria and allowing
the proliferation of good bugs in your digestive system.
Lots of minerals are found also in these and different vitamins.
If you've not tried tempeh before, I recommend that you give it a try.
And miso as well.
Miso soup is quite nice for wintertime.
Yeah, but when it comes to other kinds of cultured and fermented foods you could look
at sauerkraut as well to add this into the diet, which is one of my personal favorites
is a nice sauerkraut.
Sauerkraut, tempeh, and miso are three things that I like to include in my diet.
You may for example prefer yogurt or a bit of kefir.
These and other foods.
There's kumis, which is a Greek drink, there's buttermilk.
There are many other kinds of fermenting cultures.
Be careful with these foods if you've got a weak digestive system or you're trying to
recover and you've been sick for a long time because it can make you very, very sick if
you incorporate these foods too quickly into your diet.
Number nine is an unlikely candidate and it's seaweed.
Seaweed, so there are many studies that show that seaweed actually improves the beneficial
bacteria of the digestive system.
A study of Japanese women found that high seaweed intake increases many different strains
of good bacteria.
Another study suggested that alginate, a substance in brown seaweed, can strengthen the gut mucous
membrane and slow down digestion and also improve constipation.
Seaweeds contain an abundance of minerals and a massive amount of fiber in them.
These are one of the most mineral dense foods you can ever eat.
It's a little bit like a green salad from the ocean.
Have a look at different seaweeds and try and incorporate some of these into your diet.
If you're eating sushi right now, you're probably already incorporating seaweed without even
knowing about it.
In miso soup, so there's kombu, there's wakame.
One of my favorites is hijiki, long black strands.
You could boil that up and then add that into a salad.
It gives it an exciting appearance too, you've got all these nice colors in the salad.
You can get red seaweeds and green seaweeds and black seaweeds.
Have a look at some recipes on the internet and see how you can go.
You might be able to incorporate the seaweed into your diet as well.
The 10th one which I think is one of the most powerful ones is apples.
Green apples in particular are very, very good because they contain so many substances
in them to build your health.
A 2014 study published in Food Chemistry found green apples boost good gut bacteria.
These are great for a snack.
You can also stew them.
You can eat them later on, cold, they're quite nice as a side serve.
You can have a little bit of yogurt and a little bit of stewed apple for example.
This is one of the peak foods for people with constipation is stewed fruit, especially stewed
pears or stewed apples.
Apples also contain malic acid, so it's good for people with fatigue, helps to build energy.
Take some magnesium supplements and have one or two green apples a day.
It does wonders for energy, sleep, and metabolism.
Great for weight management, perfect for gut function the green apples.
Try and incorporate some of these fruits into your diet and vegetables on a regular diet.
You will get a noticeable benefit from adding these 10 foods into your diet.
I would call these 10 some of the best you can get.
Others I could add to the list for example could be strong contenders could be avocado,
could be high on this list as well.
But yeah, try that all out and give me some feedback on this guys.
Tell me what you think about these top 10 foods.
Thanks for tuning in.
I always appreciate it.