via Why you need to ditch the diet if you want to lose weight
Wired: What foods should we consume – and why – to maintain a healthy microbiome?
Tim Spector: Everybody has a different set of microbes – like a unique microbial fingerprint. At present, we don’t know how to personalise in order to help our own microbes. Our studies have shown that you can make animals sick by reducing the diversity of their microbes. So you need to have a diet that increases the diversity of your microbes: that involves avoiding antibiotics, pesticides and chemicals in food and increases your fibre intake as well as its diversity, because for each little change in fruit or vegetable, you’ve got a whole community of different microbes that will feed off it.Nuts, seeds, dark chocolate, red wine, olive oil and vegetables like leeks, onions, garlic and artichokes are really packed with chemicals that microbes love. This is probably why the Mediterranean diet is the only one that has proven to be beneficial for health. We also need to be regularly consuming more fermented foods such as live yoghurt, kefir, sauerkraut or kimchi as a source of natural microbes.
Wired: Which principles are backed up by scientific evidence?
Tim Spector: I favour ones that don’t interfere with the diversity of what you’re eating. So how can you lose weight while keeping your gut microbes healthy? The only diet that does that is intermittent fasting. You can maintain the same things that you eat, but intermittently change the total amount so that a few days out of seven you’re consuming only 500 calories. That’s the diet that most people stick to – 80 per cent of those who took part in a six-month trial maintained it.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/145201437607
