Your diet inflames or anti-inflames your body

Your microbial ecosystem and diet

Your gut is a microbial ecosystem that operates like an organ to promote health and prevent disease.

Researchers last year confirmed that this ecosystem responds to diet, creating an either pro- or anti-inflammatory response in your gut. This is important as most disease is associated with inflammation, especially modern and chronic ones like asthma, cancer, heart disease, diabetes and more.

Diet correlates to microbes

How this happens is that certain dietary patterns correlate with groups of bacteria that play roles in either your health or illness.

Processed foods and animal foods (I would add a proviso here and say that in general our body responses more positively to organic and wild/pastured animal products than to commonly consumed factory farmed ones filled with antibiotics and fed unnatural foods), were consistently associated with higher levels of bacteria in the Firmicutes kingdom.

While we need these bacteria too, some of them are involved in the creation of endotoxins, a toxic byproduct of certain bacteria that are inflammatory and can cause serious disease.

The long and short of it is that certain foods are protective of our gut lining and have anti-inflammatory, health-giving benefits, while others do the opposite.

Fibre is protective

Fibre is found in vegetables, fruits, legumes and whole grains (if you can tolerate the last two groups as legumes followed by grains are the hardest for the body to digest) promotes beneficial bacteria.

Your gut also needs good fats, and seafood is a good source of these.