Dietary Patterns Can Impact Weight Gain and Loss

While the microbiome of someone in good health is relatively stable, gut microbial dynamics are certainly influenced by the individual's lifestyle and dietary choices. Dietary patterns that include eating a balance of specific foods can influence the abundance of different types of bacteria in the gut, which in turn can affect your weight and wellness. Your diet has a major influence on your microbiota composition, which determines your body's glucose response to foods and human energy metabolism. Since only small amounts of dietary fat can be digested and absorbed, the over-eating of high-fat foods can cause changes to the gut microbiota in the GI tract.

Tips for better digestion after dietary intake

By relying on various biomarkers, dietitians may be able to customize diets with personalized menus specifically for each person's microbiota. Tips for better digestion after eating a meal include:

• Drink hot herbal tea
• Eat freshly cooked foods
• Chew your food well
• Eat at a moderate pace
• Eat simply
• Eat in a relaxed environment
• Eat fruit between meals (not with meals)
• Avoid overeating
• Relax a few minutes after a meal
• Seek professional help

What you eat can affect your gut bacteria for better and for worse, and changes to your gut microbiome can cause unwanted weight gain.

Gut health changes based on your menu choices

The human body harbors more microbes than body cells, which are collectively known as the microbiota. The microbiome includes the encoding individual genes that form the microbiota. It is possible that much of our country's obesity epidemic, higher rates of diabetes, increased occurrences of cancer and heart disease will be linked to changes in American's gut microbiome. Although scientists have long known that your health can change based on the foods your eat, new research suggests that your gut microbiome changes very rapidly based on your menu choices. The expedient shift in how quickly the gut microbiome changes to influence your health and wellness is exciting news about how indispensable good gut health can be.