Nov 7, 2025: How to keep our gut bugs happy

Welcome to this month’s edition of Boost Gut Health. Our 2026 theme will be healthy gut habits and we’re getting started early.  

Two Gut Healthy Habits

Eat fruit & vegetables every day. An easy way to support our gut is to eat fruit and vegetables. They are great sources of vitamins and minerals, which we need for life, and dietary fiber for a healthy gut.

Most of us don’t eat the recommended two-to-three cups of vegetables a day and two cups of fruit. That’s the minimum! And ketchup doesn’t count.

Keep a food diary. How do I know what foods my body likes?

One easy way to spot patterns is to keep a food diary for a few weeks. Write down everything you eat. Then, see if you can spot a pattern between what you eat and how you feel.

Two common foods that many of us react to negatively are dairy products and gluten, which is usually found in bread.

One Lesson

Keeping our gut bugs happy. We each have about 30 trillion human cells and about 39 trillion microbial cells. So there are more of them than us. It used to be thought that there were 10 times as many microbes as human cells, but those numbers have recently been updated.

Anyway, the key point is that it’s wise to keep our microbiome happy and healthy, so they remain on our side and not working against us.

Most of our microbiome lives in our gut, and one way we can keep those microbes happy is to give them something to eat.

What we feed our microbiome determines their make-up. Too many processed foods and the balance can tip from friendly to angry.

Our microbiome eats the same food that we do so one of the easiest ways to promote a healthy microbiome is to eat plants. The good bugs love them.

Plants are full of fiber, which is what gives plants support. So when you’re thinking of plants, you’re thinking of fiber.

The Institute of Medicine recommends 38 grams of fiber a day for men and 25 grams a day for women. You could think of that as the minimum. If you eat more than that, so much the better.

Here are some ideas of what fiber looks like in real life.

One Quote

“All disease begins in the gut.”

Hippocrates, father of modern medicine