Making My Gut Happy

This afternoon I was leafing through the latest issue of the AARP Bulletin and found an article about gut health and how it can affect health in general. I learned that a healthy gut can help control your weight, reduce the risk of Alzheimer's, help you live longer, and increase happiness.

The article went on to say that the first step in a healthy gut microbiome is to feed it whole (instead of processed) foods. A satisfied gut likes a wide variety of whole food plant based items. The people with the healthiest microbiomes ate at least 30 different types of plants every week, which includes vegetables, whole grains, fruits, nuts, seeds, and legumes. The article also said some people strive to eat at least 20 different plants every single day!

For grins, I decided to see how my diet today had stacked up. The article just said different items, not how much of each, so I figured that small amounts would count.

• Breakfast was a bowl of cereal with blueberries (1) and walnuts (2). 

• Lunch was baked tofu (3), a container of vegetables with carrots (4), celery (5), colored peppers (6), cauliflower (7), zucchini (8), and grape tomatoes (9), a homemade muffin that included oatmeal (10) and whole wheat flour (11), and a pear (12).

• Mid-afternoon I nuked some spinach (13) and mushrooms (14), then added a handful of wasabi peas (15). 

At this point I realized that hitting the 20 different plants goal was actually doable, and really leaned into the project.

• Dinner was already going to include lettuce (16) that needed to be used up. The meal turned into a main dish salad with chopped tomatoes and carrots (not counted, because that would be double dipping), pickled watermelon rind (17), green onion (18), roasted chickpeas (19), and sunflower seeds (20). On the side there was some good sourdough bread. Dessert was strawberries (21).

Lest you think I had a perfect eating day, ten minutes after dinner was cleaned up I also had a couple of truffles from my Mother's Day present box.

With no expectations, I'm going to try to find ten more plants to consume before a week has passed.

Easy-Peasy.AI