Tend to Your Microbiome Garden

Good morning, lovely friends! It’s the start of a new week and a fresh opportunity to optimize our health. Much like tending our internal flower bed, we can actively choose to become healthier by adding diversity to our gut microbiome. Happily, unlike an actual flower bed, which can take months or even years to flourish, the microbiome is incredibly adaptable and can change for the better in just a matter of days.

“A study, published in Nature, indicates that these changes can happen incredibly fast in the human gut—within three or four days of a big shift in what you eat. We found that the bacteria that lives in peoples’ guts is surprisingly responsive to change in diet. Within days we saw not just a variation in the abundance of different kinds of bacteria, but in the kinds of genes they were expressing.”

What this means is that even if you have taken massive antibiotics which trashed your gut, or you have eaten a crummy Standard American Diet (SAD) for decades, or you have spent the last two years coping with the pandemic by subsisting on candy, potato chips, and vodka (zero judgement - we all got through the best we could), you CAN change your gut for the better in a matter of days and start to heal.

How do you optimize your chances of gut bug diversity? You eat at least 30 different plants a week. SO, GET COUNTING! How many different plants can you add in this week? Getting to 30 may be a breeze for some of you and a real challenge for others. It’s not a race. No matter where we start, we can always do better to keep improving the diversity of our gut microbes. So, go tend your microbiome gardens and let me know how many plants you eat this week.

Happy gardening!

🌱💕