diet

Are You Really Eating Enough Whole Grains?

A critical part of a gut-healthy diet is eating the right amount of dietary fiber every day.

Depending on which experts you study, the amount of fiber you need to consume in order to make a healthy difference varies between 20-38 grams a day. Those numbers may sound like a lot, until you realize 30 grams of fiber amounts to 1 powerful ounce of protection.

When people go to the grocery store in search of good sources of dietary fiber, they often look for processed foods made from whole grains. You can find them listed on the product labels of many foods, including breads, cereals, brown rice and pastas.

Still, you may not be eating enough whole grains and it may not entirely be your fault, according to a recent study appearing in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

What’s A Whole Grain Food?

The heart of the problem are overlapping definitions of what really constitutes a whole grain food based on competing interests, ranging from the FDA and American Heart Association to the American Association of Cereal Chemists and Whole Grains Council.

Using data collected from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 2003-18, scientists at Tufts University and New York University compared those definitions of whole grain foods to the diets of nearly 40,000 adults.

Overall, patients participating in the survey ate anywhere from 40-62 percent of the suggested healthy daily amount of whole grains, depending on those same inconsistent definitions.

The confusion between healthy and less healthy sources of whole grains becomes easier to understand, when you know that many processed foods labeled as containing wheat, multigrain or whole grains probably don’t contain nearly enough to make a real difference.

In fact, the lead author of the study, Mengxi Du from Tufts’ Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, admitted having problems identifying foods labeled as rich in whole grains in her own trips to the grocery store.

So, what do you do if food labeling is inconsistent and unreliable and even big organizations don’t agree on what whole grain means?

Know What You’re Buying

There are plenty of things you can do to increase your fiber intake with help from whole grains. Looking back on our recent feature on the benefits of dietary fiber, search for whole grain foods like these in their purest, unprocessed form.

• Brown rice
• Spelt
• Whole oats
• Quinoa

Be sure to examine all food labels very closely. If the list of ingredients in foods feature whole grain or whole wheat at the top, experts say you’re making a good choice.

Foods containing refined grains may contain essential nutrients, but once they have been milled, they lose iron, many B vitamins and dietary fiber.

While you’re on the lookout for good foods to complement your gut-friendly diet, be sure to give your gut all the help it needs by taking a probiotic, ideally with multiple strains of beneficial bacteria and a prebiotic (that feeds the bacteria in your gut) like EndoMune Advanced Probiotic.

References

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

New York Times

Tufts University

John Muir Health

Heart.org

USDA

Are Tomatoes Good For Your Gut?

You’d be surprised by the number of calls we get every time a story pops up on the evening news about the latest probiotic food “discovery.”

Suggestions — whole foods like walnuts — make some sense, but others — beer or kombucha tea — are more challenging and depend on factors largely out of your control.

Recently, tomatoes joined that growing list of foods based on a joint study from a research team at Ohio State and Penn State University specializing in food, crop and animal sciences and the microbiome

Their focus made sense, given that tomatoes make up more than 20 percent of the vegetable intake in the average Western diet and their consumption has been associated with reduced risks for the development of some forms of cancer and cardiovascular disease.

However, there’s always caveats when it comes to evaluating the efficacy of most foods in the laboratory for their microbial benefits, and this case is no different.

How Tomatoes Affect The Gut

To measure the benefits, scientists fed two sets of recently weaned pigs either a standard diet or one that was fine-tuned slightly to include a 10 percent mix of freeze-dried powder made from tomatoes for two weeks.

Gut changes were measured from fecal samples taken before the study started, then seven and 14 days after the tomato-laden diet started. Then, researchers used shotgun metagenomic sequencing, a technique used to sequence genomes to calculate the composition of microbes, to compare those samples.

Overall, the pigs eating a tomato-based diet experienced increased gut microbial diversity, and higher ratios of beneficial bacteria linked to good health outcomes. For example, previous research has linked tomato consumption with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and some cancers.

Although the results were positive and measurable among animals eating tomatoes, scientists did not learn how or why that change occurred.

That said, pigs have GI tracts that more closely resemble those in humans than mice, which suggests a future trial in humans could happen, says Dr. Jessica Cooperstone, senior study author and an assistant professor at Ohio State.

The Takeaway For Your Health

Still, the real unknown is understanding how foods like tomatoes make an impact on human gut health, says Dr. Cooperstone.

Even taking these positive results into account, the real test for any food is to consume enough of it to have a positive impact on the balance of bacteria in your gut without creating more health problems, like worsening conditions like GERD (gastroesophageal reflux) or migraines.

Very simply, it’s hard to eat enough of a single food to make a gut healthy difference, but a diet rich in dietary fiber can do a lot of good and only takes about 1 ounce of fiber a day to notice a difference.

But there’s more you can do to give your health a gut-friendly boost every day, especially if you have a hard time eating enough fiber.

Taking a multi-strain probiotic formulated with beneficial bacteria from the Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium families and a proven prebiotic (FOS) contained in EndoMune Advanced Probiotic every day can make a gut-healthy difference in your health.

And, you can save the tomatoes for a salad or your favorite sandwich…

References

Microbiology Spectrum

Ohio State News

Health

News-medical.net

Your Gut or Your Blood: What Affects Your Health More?

We posted an article last year that asked a provocative question about what affects your health more: Your gut or your genes.

From that report, we learned once again how the quality of our daily diets shaped the diversity of our microbiomes in ways that can leave us more vulnerable to serious health problems or protect us from them.

That’s not all, according to a pair of recent studies conducted in Sweden and America.

The human gut exerts its influence through diet and even the medications you take on the composition of metabolites that drive countless functions throughout your body’s bloodstream.

But how much does your gut really affect your health? Much more than you would ever assume…

The Connection Between Your Gut and Your Blood

Two recent studies conducted in Sweden and America came to strikingly similar conclusions. In both cases, gut microbiomes drove variances in blood metabolites.

After examining the presence of 930 blood metabolites in more than 1,500 patients, researchers from the Institute of Systems Biology (ISB) in Seattle concluded more than 60 percent of those metabolites were tied directly to the gut microbiome, a patient’s genetic makeup or both.

Of that number, 69 percent of those connections were driven solely by the microbiome and an additional 16 percent were controlled by a genetic-microbiome hybrid. Only 15 percent of the metabolites tracked were associated with a patient’s genetic makeup.

Swedish researchers from Lund University and Uppsala University came to similar conclusions, estimating as much as 58 percent of the variances of individual blood metabolites are linked to the microbiome.

Moreover, this team documented more than 546,000 associations between specific gut species and blood metabolites.

The Main Takeaway

So, in simple terms, what does this knowledge really mean for our understanding of the gut microbiome and your own health?

For one, understanding the variances between the composition of bacteria in the gut and metabolites in the blood can help scientists find more targeted approaches to health problems, says Dr. Sean Gibbons, an ISB faculty member and study co-author.

Also, these findings suggest that our gut health drives a majority of the metabolites in our blood, and that they can be treated and enhanced by basic lifestyle interventions.

For example, eating a diet rich in dietary fiber can make a huge difference. Just adding one ounce of fiber is all it takes, and it’s doable if you enjoy nutrient-dense foods like lentils, green beans, oats and mushrooms.

Researchers also suggested taking a probiotic could provide a healthy boost to your metabolites.

To the end, be sure that any probiotic you take is formulated with multiple strains of beneficial bacteria from the Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus families as well as a prebiotic (that feeds the good bacteria in your gut) like EndoMune Advanced Probiotic.

Resources

Nature Metabolism

Institute for Systems Biology

Gut Health News

Uppsala University

Nature Communications

ScienceDirect