Program: Love ya guts! What to eat to feel your best

Yumi
Spend five minutes on social media and you'll get completely contradictory and confusing advice on diet and nutrition.

@SteakandButterGal
I'm a high fat carnivore. Watch me eat over 2000 calories in one sitting.

@Sweetfruitness
I have eaten only fruit for more than two weeks.

@Julialoggins2
Blood type O's, there are specific things for you to do and not do.

@ablack_fitness
Weight loss, menopause diet.

@nedarahnama
The 72 hour water fast.

@paige_nicole_shay
For lunch, I'm having seven frozen bananas.

@aalie.l.martin
It's called the sugar diet.

Yumi
Eat more fiber, eat less carbs, eat more meat, go vegan. Cut out sugar. Sugar's bad. Fats are bad. Fats are good. Eat five chicken breasts a day or die. Take supplements or fail as a woman. Never read before your morning alkalized lemon water. Fast eight hours a day. It's exhausting and baffling. Life's tricky enough without being bamboozled about what we should and shouldn't be putting into our bodies. In this episode, we're turning the volume down on all of the inexpert voices telling us what to eat and we're speaking to an actual expert. Plus, we answer your questions about diet and gut health and how what we put into our mouths affects our brains and our mood. I'm Yumi Stynes, ladies we need to talk about how to have a happy gut.

Clare
I think when most people are thinking of gut health, they're actually thinking about the very last section of the huge, long gastrointestinal tract.

Yumi
This is Claire Collins. She's a Laureate Professor in nutrition and dietetics at the University of Newcastle. You may remember her from our episode on our fear of farting. That ep popped off. Go back in the feed after this and listen if you haven't already. Today, she'll be helping us to understand more simply what we should eat and why and how our lifestyles affect our gut health. But before we get too deep into that trough, a quick biology refresher.

Clare
Your gut actually starts in your mouth, then down the tube where you swallow, which is called your esophagus, then into the holding tank, which is the stomach, then into that action area for digestion, which is the small intestine.

Yumi
And from there, it does a couple of loop-de-loops.

Clare
And then down to the waiting room at the end. That's called the colon. And then from the colon, there's still one more section. It's got to go to the rectum, then out through the anus, which is a circular muscle and you pass the bowel motion. So when people say gut health, they mostly are referring to that colon, like the waiting room part of the gut. But really, you could have gut problems anywhere along that whole digestive tract.

Yumi
That is such a vivid picture of the mouth to bum hole connection. And that is our gut.

Clare
That's our gut. And it's trying to be our friend. And I think it's just challenging when it goes so wrong for so many people.

Yumi
OK, if you're regularly bloated or gassy, what is your body trying to tell you?

Clare
Yeah, well, your body's trying to tell you that it's not all well down there in the colon and maybe further up the colon.

Yumi
Most of our microbiome, the trillions of bugs, good and bad, that live and party in our bodies are found in the colon. But they're restless bastards, these bugs. Sometimes they take a road trip from the colon all the way up your gut.

Clare
So gases that were produced in the colon and then exiting out the anus, they're now trapped. They're now further up in your gut and causing bloating. So if you have bloating and pain, and especially if it's atypical, then go and see your doctor, because you'll need to sort out is that impacting on your health?

Yumi
One of the reasons these bugs might take a trip into your intestines is because the movement of food through the digestive tract, what's known as peristalsis, has been interrupted.

Clare
Sometimes this can occur after antibiotics, which you've absolutely needed to take. But somehow the bugs have gotten out of whack. You might have had a devastating food poisoning and then had to have lots of treatment to help your gut recover. And then the right bugs haven't gotten back or the ratio of the good to the bad. Or you might have chronic malabsorption from further up in your gut, from your duodenum. So lots of food that's not fully digested is actually like leaking its way all through your gut. And again, the community of bugs in your colon are going, well, not much happening here, but wow, I know where the smorgasbord is and then follows that trail of undigested food.

Yumi
Let's chat about what we should try to eat, as well as what you just suggested. If you're a woman of a certain age and you're online, protein will be being sold to you, shouted to you. This is what our listener Sasha wants to know.

Sasha
Hey, Yumi, my Instagram feed is just so full of midlife woman. Well, you need to eat a million grams of protein a day to like be a functional human. I need to know how much protein do I actually need? Is a bit of chicken at night enough? A bit of yoga in the morning? Thanks. Love your work.

Yumi
OK, so Clare Collins, how important is protein?

Clare
Protein's really important. It's like saying, can you build a house without having an engine room, you know, like a hot water service? No, you can't. So the muscles are like the powerhouse for your strength. And that's like your body's biggest amount of protein in it. But proteins are also enzymes. Proteins your hair, proteins your skin.

Yumi
OK, so we need protein. But how much do we need?

Clare
A woman, a mid-aged woman needs around 0.75 of a gram per kilo. So to make it an easy math, if you're 100 kilos, well, then that's 75 grams of protein.

Yumi
The average Aussie woman is around 70 kilos, so that's around 52 grams of protein. There are protein calculator apps that you can download if you love nerding out on metrics. But to give you a loose idea, 100 grams of lean meat will get you around 30 grams of protein. A handful of nuts around eight grams and there's about six grams of protein in a medium sized egg. Even though it's important, Claire reckons that we're focusing on protein too much. Downing protein shakes, eating steaks before a workout, gargling cottage cheese. But the thing about protein is that our bodies cannot store what we don't use.

Clare
So your body goes, oh, well, I'm not going to waste this. Can you use it right now? Oh, you can't. OK, it's not going to be glycogen. I'm going to shove it off to your adipose tissue.

Yumi
What Clare is saying in Fancy Science Talk is that excess protein is stored in our bodies as fat.

Clare
And when you need it later, you know, if there's a famine, I'll be here waiting.

Yumi
Protein powders, yes or no?

Clare
See, can I tell you everything that annoys me about protein powders? Yes, please. They're predominantly made from milk powder. You look at the price and I go, did you know that on the bottom shelf of the long life milk, you can buy powdered milk for just $10 a kilo. And now you want to pay 40, 50, 60 dollars a kilo for a century milk powder with a few vitamins in it. I personally think it's a marketing ploy. And if you knew that you just needed an extra 10 grams of protein, for example, then you could have a glass of milk or, you know, have a nice milky coffee.

Yumi
OK, so protein steals a lot of the headlines. But what about fibre? Fibre seems very unsexy to me, but I also know it's one of those things that people are always saying you need to eat more of.

Clare
Well, the obvious one that we notice most is that it does keep us regular. So it's actually keeping the traffic moving down along your gastrointestinal tract. And then the other thing is all the range of dietary fibres from all of those high fibre foods. They feed different bugs. And then when they feed the bugs, well, the bugs, they ferment them. You know, and everyone knows about like beer or cider fermenting and all the little bubbles popping up. That's exactly what's happening in your colon. So they ferment the fibres. They also have an effect on making your blood vessels feel a bit relaxed. And that lowers your blood pressure. And so, yeah, I think fibre is coming back into the spotlight. But for all of these other broader gut health and body health reasons. How much fibre should we be having? The target for adult men is 30 grams per day and for women, 25 grams per day. But, you know, if we lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, we probably would have 70, maybe even 100 grams of fibre per day. But the target of that 25 to 30 grams is probably realistic.

Yumi
As a rough guide, an apple with the skin on has about four and a half grams of fibre. A pear has around five and a half grams. Other foods high in fibre include lentils, beans, green veggies, oats, nuts and seeds. Yeah, no, it's the stuff we already know is good for us.

Clare
So wholemeal and whole grain bread. And it's also things like legumes. So, you know, you have good old baked beans and red kidney beans and lentils, as well as things like nuts.

Yumi
What about probiotics and prebiotics? First of all, can you explain the difference between the two and do they work or is it bullshit?

Clare
Okay, so a probiotic, that's the bugs. The bugs that ideally you want to take to make it down to your colon to get your microbiome back in balance or to keep it in balance. The food they like is the prebiotic. Foods high in fibre are naturally prebiotic.

Yumi
Forgive this question because it's a bit gross. But one of the things that has always bothered me is it is a long way from your mouth to your colon. And you're asking your body to not nuke via your digestive system any good things that you put into your body. Would it be easier to stick it up your bum?

Clare
Oh, visualise that one.

Yumi
And closer to the ground zero of gut.

Clare
I'm saying no, just because that's not a practical solution for everyone. But be reassured if they're allowed to have that label that this is a probiotic food or supplement, it has to have been demonstrated that that bug can make it all the way through the gastrointestinal tract and is able to stick to the colon wall. So that is going to be cheaper and less ouchy than doing it the other way.

Yumi
Clare, Kendall wants to know about the connection between sleep and gut health.

Kendall 
Hey, Yumi and Clare. I do rotational shift work and notice that my gut is all sorts of messed up when I'm waking up and going to sleep at odd hours and this affects everything from my mood, bloating, cognitive function, constipation, etc. Is there anything you can recommend to alleviate how I'm feeling from a gut point of view or what foods I should eat and what foods I should be avoiding, etc?

Clare
Yeah, I think shift work is the most challenging of all. And so I think when you're tired you eat whatever's in front of you or you can use food to try and keep you awake, caffeine to try and keep you awake. The key is really trying to plan ahead so that what you take to work is actually food that will get you through your shift and be healthier.

Yumi
This advice applies whether you're working a night shift or you're a regular nine-to-fiver. But there is extra stress on the body when you're a shift worker.

Clare
It's true that poor sleep does disrupt the gut microbiome and one part of that is this irregular sort of food supply. But if you can still try and have your usual foods but at different times, that's likely to be the best way to improve your gut health and making sure you're having those range of fibers so you're feeding the healthy bugs in your gut. And, you know, if you like some of those fermented foods, I would include them as well.

Yumi
That's things like kimchi, sauerkraut, kefir, miso.

Clare
Again, if you're not really sure you might want to write down a food diary for your night shift days versus your day shift days or when you feel like your gut is back regulated and just see what you can put in. It may be that you end up deciding, you know what, when I'm doing those horrible shifts, that's when I'm going to use the prebiotic, probiotic type foods. And then go back to usual, hopefully, when you're on day shift.

Yumi
Okay, Clare, we have another question. This one's from Lucy.

Lucy
I know my gut and mental health are connected, but I want to know does my mind affect my gut or is it my gut affecting my mind?

Clare
It actually can be both of those things. When your bug ratio is out of line, it can specifically be adversely affecting your mind. And then there are other people who describe themselves, they say they have a nervous tummy.

Yumi
Oh, I think we've all had a nervous tummy from time to time. For some

Clare
people, the functional parts of their gut can get speeded up in response to emotions. And let's say, you know, they've got to give a talk. Well, they know they're going to get diarrhea because their whole gastrointestinal tract speeds up and the stress manifests that way.

Yumi
Going back to the mind-gut connection, Alex has a question.

Alex
My question regarding gut health is my mother has cognitive decline and likely dementia. So my question is, what foods should we be eating to make sure that our brain stays healthy? Thanks. Bye.

Clare
Yeah, I love that question. I think it's super interesting too. And that's why I recently talked to the research team in the USA who did the first studies on this dietary intervention for cognitive decline called the MIND diet.

Yumi
So the MIND diet is a mash-up of the Mediterranean diet, you know, all the good stuff like lots of green veggies, healthy fats like oily fish and avocados, and something called the DASH diet, which is basically the same but with less emphasis on the fats in order to bring down your blood pressure.

Clare
In this big study they did in America, they followed people for the whole of their life and a small group of them actually volunteered to donate their brains to science, to their research team.

Yumi
Beyond diet, there's another aspect to brain health that starts in the mouth, chewing.

Clare
What's actually happening when you're chewing is you're boosting the blood flow to your brain. Now as you age, and certainly historically, many people have dentures or they don't have all of their teeth. And so it's hard to chew meat, it's hard to chew nuts, and then people start giving them all soft food. And then you don't chew and then you're going to speed up cognitive decline because you're not getting that boost from like your face muscles chewing. And there was this really cool experiment and they went, could that affect your ability, your short-term cognition?

Yumi
In this study, researchers from two universities in Turkey looked at a bunch of nursing students studying for their exams and got some of them to chew gum and others not to. Those who chewed gum the most, well guess what, they did the best in the exams.

Clare
And what they think is that when you're chewing and you're trying to learn, you're getting more blood flow to your brain.

Yumi
How good's that? Kylie Mole, keep going sis! Everybody under 30, look it up. So there's a lot of things we can do in terms of diet to improve our brains and our tummies, but what about things that aren't so good for us?

Louisa
So I know that obviously no alcohol is best. This is Louisa. But are there some things that you can do to reduce the effects of alcohol on your gut bacteria? Asking for a friend.

Yumi
What is alcohol doing to our insides, Clare?

Clare
Yeah, so I've got another visualization for you. You know, I think when you think about your gut, you think about the garden hose. If you broke open your garden hose, it'd be nice and smooth inside. Oh, yeah. But it's actually not. If you broke open your gut and put it under a microscope, it actually looks more like bristles of a hairbrush. And those little bristles, inside them, there's an artery, there's a vein, there's all digestive enzymes sit all along the top. When you drink alcohol, it starts getting absorbed from the stomach. So you can imagine the blood vessels and the teeny weeny area of the villi. High blood alcohol actually destroys or flattens some of those villi.

Yumi
That's why when someone's had a big night on the booze, they might have diarrhea or what's commonly known in Australia as a grog bog. Because they've sheared off the top of their villi and things are passing through the pipes too quickly.

Clare
I wish I could tell you good news about alcohol and I'm sorry, I actually can't and I think that's a real problem for many of us who enjoy a glass of wine. But, you know, like for me as a health professional, knowing that it's doing all these nasty things, it does take a little bit of the shine off enjoying alcohol.

Yumi
That's really interesting. Okay. I remember reading, it was probably a year ago, ultra-processed foods are the absolute devil for our health, but also for our guts. What impact do those super-processed foods have on our gut health?

Clare
Well, it's kind of like all of the above. They tend to be lower in fibre, they tend to be higher in nutrients and by definition of being an ultra-processed food, they contain a lot of food additives.

Yumi
There's been some recent research out of France into how the combination of different food additives in ultra-processed foods impact human cells.

Clare
And there were very many that were, fancy words now, genotoxic or cytotoxic. So cytotoxic means they killed those human cells, these combinations, and genotoxic means and they damaged the DNA. So what that means is if new cells were trying to replicate, well, they already have carried some damage. So they're being replicated with damage.

Yumi
Yeah, and as a parent, I kind of don't want those things going into my children's bodies as well as my own body.

Clare
Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think that's why some of the concern and they think well, could this be a factor contributing to increased prevalence of food allergy in kids because their little teeny weeny baby guts are getting exposed to these additive combinations that just simply did not exist, you know, last century.

Yumi
Okay, pay attention to this because you might be about to learn something crucial. One of the worst things for the human body when it comes to food additives are emulsifiers.

Clare
So an emulsifier would be added to a food in order to keep the fat and the liquid together. So you think mayonnaise, like if you pour oil into water, they separate out. So how they get them to stick together is they put in an emulsifier.

Yumi
Emulsifiers are everywhere. They are what makes ice cream silky, chocolate smooth and supermarket bread long lasting and soft. There's plenty of evidence to show that they can make the gut lining more permeable, meaning bad microbes can make their way in like an unwanted house guest.

Clare
When they get to your colon wall, they just go, where's that mucus? I'm marching through it. And they trigger inflammation. They can create the leaky gut. And the problem when they create their leaky gut, they can go, come on, anybody want to come on through? I'll give you a free pass into that person's lymphatic system, blood system or whatever.

Yumi
Wow. I know that I can get a bit stressed about what I eat and take it very seriously, especially what I feed my children. But I want food and that sort of sense of doing something together to be a source of joy, you know, to be lovely. So how do we try to have better habits without feeling like we're being trapped by rules and we'll be punished and we're sort of being naughty if we step out of the lines?

Clare
Yeah, I think it's about, you know, what are the basics? What are the basics at your place? For me personally, like as a dietitian, the healthier the food I eat, the more healthier food that I actually want, like, you know, your tastes actually change. But interestingly, the research suggests it's actually vegetables that make you feel happy. And if you've ever been on a health kick, it's kind of like a from within feeling of well-being that you get as opposed to that short-term, oh, that's my favourite chocolate and I'm in seventh heaven. So I think there's this separating it out. It is hard. You don't want to be, you know, it's a birthday party. You don't want to be the sort of parent who says, no, you cannot have party food. For most kids, parties are irregular. For most kids, even as teenagers, the majority of food that they eat comes from home. And so any time or effort that you invest in the kitchen, I think it's like an investment in your health and your future.

Yumi
Our gut is a complex and fascinating apparatus that goes all the way from our chewing motion to the stomach, intestines, microbiome, colon, and that trusty little gatekeeper, the anus. Good job, anus. You don't get many accolades, but on today's episode, you can be the MVP. I like to picture our gut like a big harp housed in our bodies. If you can strum the strings with love and care, you can make beautiful music that will vibrate you delightfully from head to toe. Lots of fibre, lots of pro and prebiotics, water, of course, and avoiding the things that wang the strings out of tune. Emulsifiers, alcohol, stress, and sleep deficit. And look, there's no food police about to raid your kitchen and arrest you for junk food offences. It's about balance. Have fun with food. Load up on the healthy stuff that your gut craves before you go for the snacks. Feed those cute little microbes and you will feel better and hopefully fart less, bloat less, and be utterly in harmony with your system. And hey, we're not finished looking inside our insides. On the next episode, you'll hear what it's like to live with Irritable Bowel Syndrome or IBS. And how to treat it. This podcast was produced on the lands of the Gundungurra and Gadigal peoples. Ladies We Need To Talk is mixed by Ann-Marie de Bettencor. It's produced by Elsa Silberstein. Supervising producer is Tamar Cranswick and our executive producer is Alex Lollback. This series was created by Claudine Ryan.