Upgrade your gut health with these 5 easy prebiotic habits

Your gut bacteria are hungry – are you keeping them well-fed? 😉

Prebiotics. We’ve all heard of them, but what exactly are they and how do we know we’re getting enough? Let’s take a look at what prebiotics are, why you need them, and how you can get more into your diet!

What are prebiotics?

Prebiotics are essentially a type of fibre that act as food for probiotics – the beneficial bacteria that live in your gut and are also found in certain foods. These microbes rely on fibre to survive, which is why a fibre-rich diet is key for a healthy gut. Some of these microbes are quite selective in what they consume. Some may thrive only on specific types of fibre, like the kind found in walnut skins or kidney beans. Because different microbes prefer different fibres, the goal is to eat a wide variety of plant-based foods to ensure you’re feeding as many of them as possible.

Here are 5 easy ways to add more prebiotic-rich foods to your diet and boost your fibre diversity!

1. 30 Plants a week

As a general guide, aim for 30 different plants a week. This includes fruits, vegetables, wholegrains, beans, pulses and legumes, and nuts and seeds. Herbs and spices also count towards your 30 a week. For example, if you make a curry with three different spices, garlic and onion as a base, five different vegetables, and a helping of brown rice or quinoa on the side topped with pomegranate seeds, roasted cashew nuts, and coriander or parsley, that can easily reach up to 15 different plants – half of what you need for a week just in one meal!

Consider veggie-packed meals such as curries, stir-fries, fajitas, burritos, vegetable chilli con carne, soups and salads. Beans like lentils and chickpeas are also great to help pad out curries and soups by packing in some extra fibre and protein.

Different toppings on your breakfast, such as fruits on your oatmeal or nuts and seeds on your granola or yoghurt also help bring in different fibres. Pro tip* If you’re looking to increase your resistant starch, overnight oats have more resistant starch than cooked oats! Check out The power of resistant starch: what it is and how to eat more!.

2. The dinner template

After a long day at work, you might not always have time to prepare meals from scratch, especially if you have to fit in going to the gym, or other social or family commitments. The thought of preparing an elaborate home-cooked meal might seem a little overwhelming – that’s where ‘the dinner template’ can help!

If your average dinner is a piece of meat or fish with three different vegetables such as potatoes, carrots and broccoli, use that same template but swap the vegetables for different ones every so often. For example, swap new potatoes for sweet potatoes, carrot for parsnips, and broccoli for cauliflower, etc.

This also works for the other meals mentioned above – if you always put the same vegetables in your curries or soups, try changing one of them each time you make it! Breaking it down to introduce new vegetables little by little helps make it more manageable and not such a big change.

When we meal prep, we tend to make better, healthier choices, rather than grabbing food on the go, so don’t be shy to try new ingredients and play around with different flavours!

3. Complete Prebiotic powder

So you know gut bugs eat fibre. But which type of fibre, exactly? Working with the Microbiome Test, we have learned that there are multiple types of exotic fibres required by your gut bugs. Many are contained in unfamiliar items like cassava root and tamarind seed. Who’s got the time – or energy – to find, cook, and eat all those exotic elements into their diet?

Good bugs eat different types of complex fibre, which can be difficult and complicated to source. The Complete Prebiotic is simple, easy to use and will feed the gut bugs with all of the naturally-occurring fibres they need. This product contains the largest variety of fibres of any commercially available prebiotic, anywhere in the world!

Our Complete Prebiotic Powder has 18 naturally occurring prebiotic fibres designed to give your gut bugs the food they need to thrive. This product enhances the effect of your kefir, and we recommend taking them together – our Gut Health Smoothie is the best way to take these! Pro tip* Mixing some berries like strawberries and raspberries into your smoothie can help increase your pectin levels!

4. Eat the rainbow

A fun way to include different foods into your diet is by ‘eating the rainbow’. Trying to eat as many different coloured foods as possible. The next time you go food shopping, have a think about new red coloured foods you could try, some examples are red berries – red currents, goji berries, or pomegranate seeds, red skinned apples, or red peppers. Orange foods could be butternut squash, sweet potato, or orange tomatoes, and so on. One colour per week can be an easy way to achieve this, and it’s fun for children to get involved too, which can help encourage them to eat more fruit and veggies!

A similar method can be eating your way through the alphabet, trying one new letter a week. It might be tricky towards the end, but a little xylooligosaccharide or zucchini helps ;)!

5. Save those leftovers

Food waste is a major problem, with over one-third of all food produced globally going to waste, and over 9 million tonnes of food waste being discarded every single year in the UK alone. This doesn’t hurt only your pockets, but the environment too. How can you help combat this? By saving your scraps and leftovers!

For example, when chopping vegetables for dinner, save the top and bottom cut offs to make vegetable stock, soups, pickles, salsa or other dips. Vegetable skin like potato peels can also be dried, seasoned and baked to make vegetable crisps. Fruit peels can also be used to make jams too.

Leftovers are also a great way to tackle waste. Leftover curry mix can be folded into puff pastry to make samosas and pasties. Any leftover veg in the back of the fridge can also be roasted and blended into a soup. Leftovers can come with a gut health bonus too. When certain starchy foods like potatoes, rice, or pasta are cooked and then cooled, they form resistant starch, which feeds your beneficial gut bacteria. So that leftover potato salad? It’s not just delicious, it’s prebiotic!

A lot of supermarkets also reduce their products towards the end of the day on days of expiry, so keep an eye out for any ‘yellow label’ deals in the reduced sections. Here are some more useful ways to battle food waste!

Need a deeper dive into prebiotics? Check out everything you need to know about prebiotics here! For more useful tips, read Shopping for plant diversity – 4 easy tips.

Any questions? Contact one of our Nutritional Therapists via live chat, Monday to Friday 8am to 8pm.