A new eating style is on-trend right now: the microbiome diet. It’s all about eating with the health of the bacteria in your gut in mind.
Lately, there has been a lot of scientific studies about the effects a damaged or healthy microbiome or gut bacteria has on the body. It can influence your mood and prevent depression. Healthy gut bacteria can protect your brain from Parkinson’s disease. But it can also slow down the aging process. Of course, this makes what you eat even more important for your overall health than we previously thought. And when we’re talking about diets, a microbiome diet, targeted to keeping your gut healthy, might just become the newest and hottest trend.
And wouldn’t you know it, someone actually has written a book about it! It’s called ‘The Microbiome Diet’ and was written by Dr. Raphael Kellman, a physician who specializes in gut health.
The book and the diet details a three-phase plan to take better care of your gut. Let’s see what the steps are.
The microbiome diet in 3 phases
1. Remove, repair, replace, reinoculate
This means removing chemicals, preservatives, hormones, and other inflammation-causing foods from your meals. Then you eat things that help repair your gut and repopulate the gut with good bacteria. This lasts for 21 days.
You should eliminate items like processed foods, corn syrup, trans fats, canned fruits, juices, all sugars and sweeteners, all dairy products, legumes except for chickpeas and lentils, eggs, soy and soy products, peanuts and peanut butter, high-mercury fish, potatoes, sweet potatoes or yams, and canola oil. Phew, that seems like a lot!
What can you eat though? Go for probiotic-rich foods like fermented veggies, fermented dairy like yogurt and kefir, prebiotic-rich foods like garlic, leeks, asparagus, onions, carrots, radishes, chickpeas, lentils and so on. You can have non-processed meats and non-starchy fruits and vegetables as well.
2. Metabolic reset
This lasts for 28 days and the good news is that you can reintroduce some of the banned foods from the list, like other legumes, eggs, dairy, and so on. But the specialist recommends that you still eat foods from the ‘approved’ list 90 percent of the time for this phase.
That means about four cheat meals per week. So be careful!
3. New lifestyle
The next phase doesn’t have a recommended time frame to be followed. That’s because… This is your lifestyle now. The idea is to keep following that approved foods list and make your gut microbiome happy every day, for your health. The author of the book recommends doing that at least 70 percent of the time.
