New Year Low-Bloat Detox

The holiday season is over and the New Year is upon us. This is the time of year for new health resolutions. Some of you may be trying to find more time for exercise or maybe a little more time for yourself, and others may be looking for ways to restore their gut health. The holiday season is full of sweets and indulgent foods. Lots of foods that, while delicious, can have a huge impact on gut health. If you're looking for a few tips to get your gut back to baseline and reduce your bloating, here are a few things you can do:

Reduce Starches and Sugars

Sugars and starches, especially low fibre starches such as potatoes and white rice, are highly fermentable and contribute directly to gas and bloating. This is especially true in the case of bacterial overgrowth. In fact, a gut with bacterial overgrowth can be more than 50 times faster at digesting carbohydrates than a balanced gut. This increased speed may sound like a good thing, but what it really means is that carbohydrate digestion is creating gas at a much faster rate than your body can deal with, leading to lots of bloating and discomfort. Giving your gut a break by reducing sugar and starch for a few weeks can go a long way to feeling better.

Increase the Right Fibre

Increasing fibre is often critically important for improving gut health. It improves motility, feeds good bacteria, and helps to bind and clear toxins, excess hormones, and cholesterol. However, many common fibre supplements, such as psyllium husk, are highly fermentable and can actually increase bloating before they improve anything. The best method for increasing fibre is always to increase the amount in your daily diet, especially nuts, seeds, and leafy greens. These sources are low on the fermentability scale, giving you the benefits of increased fibre without the bloat. But if a fibre supplement is needed, you may want to try partially hydrolyzed guar gum. This soluble fibre is non-fermentable, interacting very little with the bacteria in your gut so it doesn’t trigger excess gas production.

Diversify Your Diet

When bloating begins, a common coping mechanism is to limit one’s diet, finding foods that don’t cause bloating and sticking very closely to those foods, and those foods alone. On the surface, this behaviour makes a lot of sense; if certain foods trigger your bloating, you should cut them out. However, there’s an additional step that must be taken: every time you cut out one food, you should add in one or more other plant-based foods that you don’t normally eat. This is because a diet high in plant-based diversity is fundamental in producing and sustaining a healthy microbiome (the good bacteria in your gut). Diets low in diversity will selectively feed only certain bacteria - those that prefer that limited food source. Any bacteria that prefer other food sources will disappear. This leaves space for those well-fed bacteria to overgrow, leaving you bloated and uncomfortable. So by limiting your diet, you may be improving the symptoms in the moment, but leaving yourself vulnerable to a much worse problem down the road.

If you have any questions about gut health, New Year detox, or resetting your microbiome, feel free to book a consult with me here.