12 Anti-Inflammatory Foods I Buy Every Single Week for Gut Health

Foods that protect your gut will also protect your heart and your kidneys and your brain and your joints, basically every part of you. And this is what I talk about on the channel all the time because your body, remember, is one incredibly complex interconnected system rather than just separate parts. Your organs, remember, are not just sitting there in isolation. So what helps one part of you will absolutely help the rest. And whatever damages your heart or damages your brain is usually damaging your gut and your kidneys as well. Now, we divide the body up into specialties and systems because it is the only sensible way to train doctors and to run a hospital. So there is a cardiologist for your heart and there is a gastroenterologist for your gut and a nephrologist for your kidneys. And that works perfectly well once something has already broken. The problem though is that this leaves people with the impression that these are separate machines sitting in separate rooms. When in truth, they share the same blood supply, they share one immune system, they are being damaged by the same handful of processes running in the background for 30 or 40 years. And what we know about the lining of your gut specifically is that it renews itself quite a bit faster than almost any other surface in your body with the cells of that inner wall replaced every three to five days. So the food that you put into your shopping basket this week is the material that your gut gets rebuilt from next week. Now, new cells are born into little pockets down at the base of the wall and then they travel upwards to the surface. They do their job there for a few days and then they get shed into the gut and then passed out of you because everything recycles, which means you are constantly rebuilding the single most important barrier that you own. And it really is just a single layer. It's literally one cell thick, separating everything that you've eaten from your bloodstream, which sounds impossibly fragile until you understand just how quickly it actually gets replaced. Now, folded out flat, your gut lining covers something like 30 square meters. So roughly the floor of a decent sized studio flat or something like that. And you'll often hear people say a tennis court or a football pitch, something like that, which turns out to be a massive exaggeration. It's not quite that big, but either way it is still the largest point of contact you have with the outside world, far bigger than your skin in fact. And when that lining is well fed, and by that I really do mean when you're eating really nourishing whole foods that your great grandparents would have recognized as food a hundred years ago, it stays tight and properly sealed, which keeps your immune system sitting just behind it really calm and settled. Now the cells are stitched together at the edges by proteins that we call tight junctions. That is the name of them. And they behave a bit like the seal around a door. And on top of them sits a layer of mucus, actually two layers with the outer one where your bacteria live, and the inner one is meant to stay more or less sterile so that nothing ever touches that wall directly. It's all quite complicated, isn't it? And sitting immediately behind all of that is something like two thirds of all of the immune tissue in your body, which tells you just how seriously your body takes this particular barrier, this particular border. Now, when it isn't well fed by eating a lot of processed foods, stuff that's been formulated in a lab by scientists squeezing as much profit out of us as they can, that barrier quite literally gets leakier and small fragments of bacteria slip across and your immune system responds with a low level of inflammation that carries on for years without ever causing any serious symptoms that you would ever notice. Now, the fragments in question come from the outer coat of certain bacteria and your immune system has receptors that recognize them instantly because for most of human history, anything from a bacterium turning up in the bloodstream meant a serious infection was underway. Now, if you take blood from somebody a few hours after a large, greasy, heavily processed meal, you can actually measure those exact fragments circulating in the blood at a very low level for a few hours afterwards, and then it settles down. If you do that once, then not a lot will happen, but if you do it three times a day with each of your meals for 20 or 30 years, then obviously you've got a very different situation. And if you think about it, it makes complete sense, doesn't it? Because if what is arriving in your gut is a man-made formulation of artificial ingredients and emulsifiers and thickeners and E-numbers as well, which is what you'll find in nearly all ultra-processed food, you can understand why your body wouldn't recognize much of it as food and then would just launch a bit of an attack on it. Now, emulsifiers are worth a bit of a mention on their own here. These are a very specific type of ingredient because their entire job in the factory is to stop oil and water separating, which is like a detergent sort of action. When you add fairy liquid to your sponge and then you're washing your plate up, you can sort of merge the oil and the water together and then you can rinse your plate off and it's nice and clean. And the mucus layer protecting your gut wall is largely made of fat and sugar chains held together in water. Now, if you feed those compounds to animals, then the mucus layer thins and the bacteria end up living closer to the wall than they are supposed to. And the early work in people in human trials is pointing in the same direction. Now, that is your body trying to keep you safe. It treats these things rather like a poison. And obviously, no, it's not gonna kill you today, but it knows it isn't good for you. Your body knows that these things are doing you harm. And that is why it releases this low-grade inflammation as a defense mechanism. And that is the very same inflammation that turns up a couple of decades later in your arteries and your joints and your brain as very specific diseases. So after that very long-winded introduction, I'm gonna go through the 12 foods that go into my basket every single week. I'll talk about what is actually happening in your body when that food gets down there into your gut and how we use those ingredients at home. Hello, my name's Dr. Alex. And before we start, if you'd like to hear from me every single day, then head over to dralexnewsletter.com and sign up to my brand new daily newsletter. It is a really quick read every single morning, a different thing each day, something to help you stay healthy and to get the most out of your life. And it's completely free. It's written by me. We've already got a huge number of people already subscribed and I think you'll really like it. So the first thing that goes into my basket every single week is tinned sardines. Now, what makes them really worth it is their long chain omega-3 fats, which is a type of fat that your body cannot really make for itself and it has to get from food. Now, those fats get built into the outer membranes of all of your cells, including the cells lining your gut and your body uses them as the raw material for the signaling molecules that bring an inflammatory response to an end once it has done its job. It is a very important process. And the part that I find really, really fascinating is that switching inflammation off is an active process rather than just a passive one. It doesn't just fade away when the danger is gone. Your body has to manufacture a specific set of molecules whose literally only job is to call the immune cells off and clear away the debris and to tell the tissue to start repairing. And those molecules are built directly out of the omega-3 fats sitting in your cell membranes. So if the raw material isn't there, the fire gets lit perfectly well, but the fire brigade turns up shorthanded and the whole thing just smolders on for far longer than it should. So put simply, it isn't just about avoiding the things that stir inflammation up that causes the inflammation, your body also needs materials to calm it back down again. An oily fish is where a lot of that comes from. Now, the other reason I go for sardines specifically rather than something bigger like a tuna or like a bigger fish, is that these sardines and mackerel are very small and short-lived animals. They sit right near the bottom of the food chain, don't they? Because it makes more sense. So they've had no time to accumulate the mercury that builds up in the big predatory fish. And because you eat the soft bones as well, you're getting a good useful amount of calcium whenever you eat these fish as well, because you won't notice when you're eating these bones. Now, we have our sardines or mackerel probably twice a week. We either mash it onto a toast with a bit of lemon and pepper, or if the taste puts you off a bit, you can get all of these different fish in like a tomato sauce or a peri-peri sauce, just something that helps you to eat these foods, because I get that they're not for everybody's taste. Now, the next thing is extra virgin olive oil. Now, extra virgin means the oil is pressed from the olives rather than extracted with heat and chemicals. And this gentler approach leaves the polyphenols intact, which is exactly what you want. Those are the bitter, slightly peppery plant compounds that dampen inflammatory signaling and feed the bacteria in your colon, your large bowel. And there was a really good thing that you can actually do yourself here, because if you swallow a spoonful of really good oil, you know, neat without adding anything to it, you will get a really peppery catch at the back of your throat, and it can make you cough a bit if you're not used to it. And that sensation from a really good extra virgin olive oil, that comes from one particular compound in there, which acts on the same inflammatory pathway that ibuprofen works on, but in a much gentler sort of way, obviously. It irritates a receptor that happens to sit only at the back of your throat, which is why you feel it there when you eat this sort of oil neat. And as a bit of a rough and ready guide, the more it makes you cough or the sort of more peppery and spicy that oil tastes, the more of the good stuff is in the bottle. And if you buy a really, really good quality one, and we get ours from citizensofsoil.com, because they'll often print the polyphenol count on the actual bottle. So if you get that and then you sniff it and then you taste it next to a standard vegetable oil, like sunflower oil or a rapeseed oil, you can absolutely tell the difference. They smell and taste like completely different things, you know, because they are. The vegetable oil, it probably won't smell or taste of anything, but the extra virgin olive oil is a bit spicy and a bit peppery. It's really, really delicious. Now you wanna try, if you can, to look for a harvest date rather than just a best before date. And those will usually come in a dark bottle or a tin to try and keep it out of sunlight because light and heat very slowly destroys the very compounds that you're paying extra for. Now, the evidence behind extra virgin olive oil is pretty strong stuff. There was a five-year Spanish trial, linked below if you wanna take a read of it, where around 7,500 adults at high risk of cardiovascular disease, these people were put either onto a Mediterranean diet with plenty of extra virgin olive oil or the same diet with extra nuts, or the third option was a standard low-fat advice diet. And both Mediterranean groups ended up with roughly a third fewer heart attacks and strokes and deaths from heart disease. And a big part of that is the fat that comes with this way of eating. You know, we have a pretty high-fat diet in our family, but it's all good fat. We hardly eat butter, probably once a week, because we think it tastes really nice. But most of our fat comes from nuts and seeds and olive oil and oily fish as well. Do not be afraid of healthy fats. Healthy fats are completely different from bad fats. Then we've got kefir, which sits by the yogurt and the milk in a normal supermarket, but it tastes a bit funky. It tastes like a very thin, sour drinking yogurt, almost like a thinner version of a yogurt that you can drink from a glass. Basically, what you're drinking is milk that has been fermented by billions of live bacteria and yeasts. It sounds so appetizing, doesn't it? My mum will not drink this stuff. She says anything fermented just sounds a bit too funky for her, and I totally get that. Basically, every glass that you drink, because of that stuff that's in it, it delivers a fresh load of friendly bacteria into your gut that already has trillions of them living in it. I had a glass literally about 20 minutes ago. I'll have a glass every single day. And that mix of yeasts alongside the bacteria is what separates it from ordinary yogurt, which tends to be fermented by two or three species, whereas kefir is made with a cluster of organisms living together in like a little rubbery grain that gets fished out and used again for the next batch. This is how it's made. So you're getting a far wider range of organisms in a glass that you will ever get from a pot of normal yogurt. Now, those bacteria do real important work for you. They break down fiber. They literally make vitamins, and they crowd out the less helpful ones so that those bad ones cannot take over. Now, the honest picture with kefir is that these bacteria don't move into your gut and then settle there permanently. They pass through you over a few days. And I think people find that a bit disappointing when they hear it, but it doesn't matter anywhere near as much as you'd think because while they're passing through, they are producing acids and small proteins, and they are brushing up against the immune cells sitting behind your gut wall. And that conversation, that sort of brushing up is where a good part of the benefit actually comes from. Now, the fermentation also does some of the digestive work before you've even opened up the bottle, breaking down much of the lactose, which is why a lot of people who cannot manage a glass of milk, they are perfectly fine on kefir because of the lactose in that drink. Now, if you're not used to kefir, before you pour yourself a big glass of it, just try a bit on your porridge or in a healthy smoothie that's mostly veg, if that's something that you drink, just try a bit on something that you would have milk or yogurt on and then gradually build up. Within a week, if you're having this most days, you'll be able to drink it straight from the glass. Now, the next thing that I buy, every single week there was always this big jar in the fridge. This is sauerkraut, which is basically just cabbage fermented in salt or sometimes we have kimchi, which is the spiced Korean version. Now, the salt in the kimchi or the sauerkraut is actually doing something quite clever because it is just the right amount of salt to hold back the organisms that would rot the cabbage, like make it go off really quickly, while letting the salt-tolerant lactic acid bacteria get going and as they multiply, they turn the sugars in the cabbage into acid, which drops the pH and preserves the whole thing without a fridge or a factory. This is how people kept vegetables through the winter for thousands of years before anybody had heard of a microbiome. There's a really interesting study actually, and as always, there's gonna be a link in the description below for you, where a few dozen healthy adults were put at random onto either a fermented food diet or a high-fiber diet, and after 10 weeks, the first group, that fermented food group, they had a wider range of bacterial species living in their guts and a really good fall in the inflammatory proteins in the blood, while the fiber group didn't shift nearly as much over that time, which we suspect is because a gut that has been running on very little fiber for years, it needs quite a bit longer to build up the species that can actually use it. Now, why does any of that even matter? Well, different bacteria do different jobs, so the more varieties living down there, the more of those jobs get done properly, and the harder it is for one troublesome species to take over and start causing some trouble. A gut like that keeps the wall sealed and the immune system really quiet, and a quiet immune system isn't one that is slowly damaging your arteries in the background. Now, you can buy sauerkraut or kimchi from the chilled section in most supermarkets, maybe not things like Asda or Morrison's, but certainly the, I guess, the better supermarkets or online, you can definitely buy it from. And the reason why chilled is so important is that the jars that have been kept at room temperature, these have typically been pasteurized, meaning heated to kill the bacteria. You wanna use a clean fork every time you get some out of the jar and keep the veg pushed down beneath the surface of the brine, the salt water, and then start with a forkful alongside your meal and just sort of gradually build up over the next few weeks rather than having half the jar as a snack. Sauerkraut doesn't really work like that. Just a bit on the side of whatever you're eating and then build up slowly. The next one is oats. And look, these are not the same thing as granola or the instant oats that you get from something like ready bread. We're talking about proper jumbo whole rolled oats, the ones that actually look still like part of a plant when you tip them into your hand, they look just like an oat that's been flattened, not the stuff that has been ground down. So when you add milk to it, it just turns into like a bit of a paste, proper oats. Now, oats contain a soluble fiber called beta-glucan. So soluble meaning it dissolves into a thick gel rather than passing through as roughage. And that gel travels into your colon, your large bowel, largely untouched, where your bacteria ferment it into short chain fatty acids. Now, one of those fatty acids called butyrate, that is the main fuel for the cells lining your colon wall. So you are feeding the bacteria that in turn feed your gut lining. And this is the bit that I would love you to take away from this video because those cells burn butyrate in preference to almost everything else. And burning it uses up oxygen, which keeps the inside of your colon almost completely oxygen free. Now, that low oxygen state is exactly what your good bacteria are built for and exactly what the troublesome ones cannot cope with. So a well-fed gut lining is very quietly holding the whole community in balance simply by breathing hard. Now, if you starve it of fiber, then those cells will run short of fuel and oxygen starts leaking into your gut. And the species that thrive on oxygen, which tend to be the ones that cause you problems, they then get their opportunity to thrive. And there's a second thing that happens when fiber runs low, which is that some of your bacteria are perfectly capable of eating the mucus layer instead because it's made of sugars as well. So a low fiber diet doesn't just simply leave them hungry, it turns them on the lining itself. Now, that gel has another job on the way through you as well because it traps bile acids in the small intestine before it reaches your large intestine and it carries them out of you. And since your liver makes bile acids out of cholesterol, your liver then has to pull more cholesterol out of your blood to replace what has been lost. So your cholesterol naturally falls. The key here with oats isn't to make porridge and then drown it in honey or Nutella or Biscoff spread or something like that, as a lot of people do. What we do is we have overnight oats around once a week as a bit of a treat for breakfast, mixed with some milk or some kefir, with some blueberries or blackberries and flax seeds on top as well. Now, soaking them overnight rather than cooking them in the morning, that actually changes the starch in the oats itself. And what happens is that more of it resists digestion and it reaches your bacteria instead of being absorbed as sugar. It becomes resistant starch. This is very much a good thing. Now, this is the sweetest breakfast that we will have all week, but there is no cooking and George loves it as well. And we usually have it before our morning run at the weekend. The next thing is tinned pulses. So things like lentils and chickpeas and butter beans and red kidney beans and black beans as well. And you can tell all of these are related because the inside of a bean or a lentil or a chickpea, it sort of looks and it feels the same and it tastes fairly similar. And they're all really, really high in fiber and high in protein. And they're all super cheap as well. So what's not to love about these amazing foods? They're also incredibly versatile. They can take the place of a carbohydrate like rice or they can take the place of meats like beef mince in a chili or something like that. And since different bacteria specialize in different fibers, mixing them up feeds a broader community than eating the same plant every single day. They also bring resistant starch again, the same as those overnight oats that we just talked about, which is a starch that resists digestion in the small intestine and behaves much more like fiber. And the reason I'm keen on that particular fiber is that it survives further along than most. So it's still being fermented right down at the very far end of your colon, which is where the wall tends to be thinnest on fuel and where a disproportionate amount of bowel disease or colon disease, like inflammatory bowel disease actually shows up. Most of what we eat has been fermented and finished with long before it ever gets down there. That's why these foods are so good. Now, recently we've had them in salads, we've had them in a chili con carne, we've mixed them with grains alongside some salmon and a bit of a dressing and some spices as well. We've had it with some marinated chicken with a rocket and watercress salad. So there are loads of things that you can do with these sorts of pulses. If you're not used to them though, if you literally never eat lentils or chickpeas or any sort of bean, then just go gently and build up over a few weeks, I would say about a month, because they contain sugars that your own enzymes cannot touch. And until your bacteria have adapted to handling them, you will get pretty windy. You will be stinking your place out until you get used to them. I promise you for most people that will happen, but that's fine. That is your gut and your body adapting to these super healthy foods. So, you know, you will get used to it. And then after that, most people are gonna be fine. Okay, next we have got frozen berries. And the reason I say frozen is that you are far more likely to eat them if they are already in the house. Now, fresh berries, let's be honest, they tend to go off within a couple of days. If you buy a box of strawberries or raspberries, couple of days later, some of them might be a little bit moldy or, you know, not super, super nice to eat. That is what, you know, that's what it's like in the UK anyway. Other places around the world, it might be a bit better. But berries are not great from most supermarkets in the UK. That's been my experience anyway. They certainly don't last the days that you would expect them to. But frozen berries are picked ripe and then frozen within hours. So you lose very little. You don't really lose anything. And they defrost really easily and they make lovely, really, really healthy desserts. If anything, the freezing actually works in your favor because the ice crystals burst the plant cell walls so that when they thaw, the pigments and the compounds inside them are actually easier for you to get at Now, the deep red and purple pigments in things like blueberries and raspberries and blackberries, those are the polyphenols again. And the interesting part about these is that you only absorb a small fraction of them yourself. Something like 90 odd percent of them are still there when they reach your colon, which for a long time was assumed to mean that they were useless. And it's only fairly recently that we've understood the opposite is true. The rest travel down to the colon where your bacteria break them apart into smaller compounds. And those are the ones doing much of the useful work. So the berry is partly a delivery system for your microbes. And you can have them with kefir or as a snack or in your overnight oats. But really, if you want to have them as a snack to eat, then it's going to be the fresh stuff that you want. But for most other things, frozen berries are absolutely fine. The next thing in the basket every single week is leafy greens. So that's spinach or kale or chard or rocket, aka arugula. Now, green leaves are one of the best sources of dietary nitrates, which your body converts into nitric oxide, which is that molecule I talk about all the time that relaxes and widens the walls of your blood vessels and brings your blood pressure down a bit as well. And the route it takes to get there is one of the strangest things in human physiology because you absorb the nitrates from the leaves. It goes around in your blood and then your salivary glands, you know, that then receives that blood, deliberately pull it back out and concentrate it in your saliva, your spit, at levels many times higher than in your blood, purely so that the bacteria living on the back of your tongue can get hold of it. So once those bacteria have got hold of that nitrate, they convert it into nitrite, like with an ITE at the end. You then swallow it and your stomach acid finishes the job. And that is where a great deal of your nitric oxide actually comes from, which means the bacteria in your mouth are doing a step that your own cells cannot do. And it also explains the finding that gets a lot of attention actually, which is that if you rinse your mouth after you brush with a really strong antibacterial mouthwash a couple of times a day, you are completely wiping out those bacteria in your mouth. And then you are obviously gonna blunt that blood pressure effect entirely. Now, these green leafy veg, these also bring folates and fibers that protective gut bacteria actually feed on. And because these greens tend to wilt down to almost nothing when they're heated, the easiest way to get through a decent amount of them is a pretty large handful stirred into the pan at the end of cooking, rather than eating the equivalent as a salad. That is what we do with spinach, but for things like rockets or watercress, you can eat these really, really easily with a bit of a dressing, a bit of salt and pepper, a bit of extra virgin olive oil. These things are really easy to get into you. The next food on my weekly list is broccoli, but we either steam it or we roast it. We never boil it. The boiler just loses all of the goodness into the water. Now, the interesting thing about broccoli is that it keeps a particular compound and an enzyme in separate parts of the plant cell. And when you chop it or you chew it, those two things meet and they produce a separate chemical which switches on the cell's own internal defense system, essentially telling it to make more of its own protective machinery. And that is a different sort of benefit from simply swallowing an antioxidant because rather than mopping up one bit of damage itself, it goes into the cell and flips a switch that tells your own genes to start producing your own protective enzymes, which then carry on working for a day or two afterwards. It's all very complicated, isn't it? But basically, instead of the broccoli doing all of the protecting, it is your own cells provoked by the broccoli, if that makes sense. Now, if you boil it really hard to the point where you could stick your knife in really easily, which is how my nan used to cook every single vegetable under the sun, then you will destroy the enzyme before any of that can happen. So it is best to be eaten when it's still fairly crunchy, which is either roasted or steamed. Now, there are two tricks that are really worth knowing about here because if you chop up your broccoli and then you just leave it sitting there on the board for 30 or 40 minutes before it goes anywhere near heat, that reaction has already happened and you keep the benefits and if you've already overcooked it, then adding something like a scattering of something raw and mustardy over the top, like mustard or rocket or a few mustard seeds, those put that missing enzyme back in and it rescues a good amount of that process. Now, some of your gut bacteria can perform that conversion as well, although people vary enormously in how well they can actually manage it. Quite often, we will get tender stem broccoli and then just dip it into hummus before our evening meal, which gets fiber in alongside all of that healthy fat and protein so that you sit down to dinner and you're already a bit satisfied so then you're less likely to snack after your dinner. The next one is walnuts and there is always a really big bag of them sitting next to our kettle in the kitchen. Now, they bring a plant form of omega-3. So omega-3 usually comes from oily fish, but they're also in walnuts as well and alongside that, they also bring polyphenols that your gut bacteria break down into compounds involved in everyday housekeeping that your cells do to clear out their own waste and sort of worn out parts. What's happening there is that your cells are basically constantly identifying their own knackered components, anything that's a bit worn out, particularly those little power stations inside your cells that produce your energy and dismantling and recycling them before they start leaking damage and that process gets slower and a bit sloppier as we age. The compound that your bacteria make out of walnuts, polyphenols, the stuff that is inside the walnuts, appears to nudge that recycling process along and just sort of help everything run a bit more smoothly and the thing that I find remarkable is that only around a third to a half of people carry the bacteria capable of making it at all. So two people can eat the same identical handful of walnuts and only one of them ends up with the compound in their bloodstream, which is probably part of why nutrition studies produce such crazy mixed results. Now, there's another strange thing with nuts as well, which is that you don't absorb anything like all the calories printed on the bag because a fair chunk of the fat in these nuts, and they're probably around 50% fat, a big chunk of it stays locked inside the cell walls that survive the whole journey and come out the other end untouched. So the real figure is something like a fifth lower than the label says. Now, if you eat a load of nuts, the next day and you look at your poo, you will see big chunks of those nuts. Not all of it is digested and the fat released. Now, I did a video recently on walnuts if you wanna check that out, a full dedicated video, but the short version is that a small handful a day, roughly like 30 grams, is the sort of amount used in these studies that show these enormous health benefits. Garlic and onions we use literally every single day in most things that we eat, whether that is a cooked meal or a salad. Garlic and onions go in most things. Both of them are rich in a fiber called inulin, which you cannot digest at all. So it arrives in the colon intact and it feeds a group of bacteria that help to keep the wider community more stable. And the thing about these bacteria is that they don't actually produce butyrate themselves, the fuel that I mentioned earlier that your gut lining runs on, but they break the inulin down into smaller pieces and leak out the byproducts that a completely different set of bacteria then pick up and then they turn into butyrate. It's all quite interesting and complicated all at the same time. So they are feeding their neighbors and the whole thing runs as a nice little food chain rather than one species doing everything at once, which is exactly why variety in what you eat matters more than any single ingredient. And garlic does something similar to broccoli as well in that the compound everybody talks about doesn't exist in the intact clove and it's only created when the cells are broken open and two things that were kept apart get to meet, which is why crushing it and letting it sit for 10 minutes before it hits the hot pan gets you far more out of it than chopping it straight into the oil. But the thing is, because I'm using garlic so often and because quite often we're in a bit of a hurry or we've got to cook the meal within half an hour because it's George's bedtime, like an hour later, sometimes we use lazy garlic or the easy garlic that comes sort of ready diced in a jar, which makes life just so much easier unless I'm roasting it, in which case we just sort of keep the cloves whole. And then finally, the last thing in my basket every single week without a fail is ground or milled flax seeds. Now, this is sometimes called linseed in the US, but in the UK, we call it flax seeds. So this brings a soluble fiber that forms that gel again, and it helps everything move through the bowel more comfortably, along with compounds called lignans that your gut bacteria convert into forms which interact with your hormone pathways as well. And that conversion is another one that is entirely dependent on which bacteria you happen to be carrying. Now, that gel that is formed, that needs water to work properly. So if you add a lot of ground flax seed without drinking more water, then you can end up feeling a bit more blocked up rather than less. You know, if you're eating loads of fiber from vegetables that have lots of water in them, then that's fine, but if you're eating things like ground flax seeds that basically contain no water, then you've got to make sure you are well hydrated, otherwise you could become constipated. Now, the important thing with this type of food is that you get ground flax seed rather than whole flax seeds, which just pass straight through you completely undigested. So get it milled or ground and keep it in the fridge because it does go off quite quickly after it's opened. So a tablespoon in your porridge in the morning or yogurt, just like a tablespoon a day is all it takes. It is one of the healthiest things that I use all the time. And it's probably the only supplement, you know, inverted commas, that I actually use every single day. So those are the 12 things that we eat every single week at the moment. And look, I've made plenty of other videos in the past about foods that I'm eating, because look, we go through phases where we eat something a lot and then don't touch it for a little while. So these sorts of videos might contain different foods each time. But the common theme is that these are whole natural foods, things that your grandparents and great-grandparents would have recognized as food, say, a hundred years ago. Nobody has tampered with them. Nobody has refined them or, you know, altered with their texture or taste profile or anything like that. There was no scientist or factory behind them trying to make them more tasty than they need to be and, you know, to extract more profits. And if there's one number that is really, really worth keeping in your head out of all of these, it is variety rather than quantity. Because when people have looked at what actually separates a resilient gut from a fragile gut, the count of different plants, sort of like the number of different plants going through you in a week, that does more of the work than the total weight of the plants, like the amount that you eat. It is variety rather than quantity. So somewhere around 30 different plants a week is the figure that gets quoted. And it sounds impossible until you realize that herbs count and spices count and tinned pulses and, you know, a mixed bag of grains or ground different seeds, all of those counts. Most of us in this country and in the US are getting nowhere near the 30 grams of fiber a day that we should be eating, or really probably more than that, more like 40 or 50 grams in some studies. The point is to bring these foods in gradually because as you do, they will naturally replace all of the ultra processed stuff that you would normally eat without you having to fight it. And since there's only so much room in a day and you can only eat so much stuff, so the more whole stuff that you eat, the less ultra processed stuff you're gonna be eating as well. And if you wanna know in like a lot more detail what we actually eat day to day, then Steph and I are working on something, well, we've been working on it for a long, long, long time. And we're really excited to start sharing this with you over the next few weeks and months. We're hoping to launch it this year, although we'll see, we'll see what happens. So keep an eye on the channel if you're really interested in food, healthy eating, and particular recipes as well. I really hope you found this video useful. Please do give it a like and a hype and subscribe to the channel if you did, and I'll see you next time.