Our digestive system is an extremely important part of our body, and we rightly care about its health. Without good gut health, we could be in pain, or have embarrassing symptoms, or worse. However, it does not follow from this that we need to load up on foods or products that promise to improve our intestinal health.
As it turns out, gut health is not a well-defined concept. That said, it is not always possible to tell if it is improving or if we have any problem with it at all. Two researchers from Deakin University’s Food & Mood Center wrote recently in an article in a lancet journal and on the conversation on the fact that gut health has become a marketing buzzword rather than a scientific or medical phenomenon.
After all, what do we mean when we talk about gut health? Often it is either the absence of uncomfortable symptoms such as diarrhea or the absence of conditions such as Crohn’s disease. These conditions and symptoms vary, so there is not a single “bowel health” state that we can achieve to prevent them all. Scientists are still trying to understand the detailsand research is ongoing.
The microbiome is also important, but here, too, scientists have not been able to reliably tell the difference between a healthy and an unhealthy microbiome. For example, the exact population of microbes in the gut of two healthy people may differ from one another. And despite ongoing research, we still can’t test your microbes or tell you what’s wrong with you (aside from a few specific cases like Clostridium difficile infection).
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But the idea that gut health must be important has provided a marketing boost for a wide variety of products, foods, and practices that are supposed to be good for us. For example, probiotics are recommended to treat or prevent gastrointestinal problems. But many fermented foods like yogurt and kombucha don’t affect the makeup of our gut microbiome, and even when they do, we don’t always know if they affect it for the better.
When someone says that a certain food or diet is supposed to be good for your gut health, they usually assume they can’t back it up. The scientists Amy Loughman and Heidi Staudacher write:
For example, there is as yet no solid human evidence that ingestion of processed foods or refined sugars has a negative impact on all of the above gut health parameters. Also, lists of the top ten gut health foods aren’t particularly helpful or insightful. Instead, they simplify the complexities of diet to a handful of high fiber foods without considering important nuances.
They also indicate that there are many types of fiber and that they are unlikely to be all equally good for us; There is evidence that some fibers can be harmful if we overeat them.
A generally varied diet of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables is likely to be good for our intestinal health. This also applies to other healthy habits such as exercising and avoiding smoking. As they discuss further in the conversation article, you cannot achieve intestinal health by drinking kombucha or avoiding sugar: “It is eating habits and general habits, not individual foods, that shift the dial.”
