Do this one thing

The one thing that will improve your gut health above all else? Spoiler - it's not poop testing or blood sugar monitors.

So, what is the one thing we should all be doing to improve our health? I’ll get to it - bear with me a moment. If you don’t have time to read this, I also want to let you know that I am opening up my Build A Happy Gut course to students at the beginning of October and will be offering the 12 weeks of coaching through to mid January, with a break from mid December for Christmas. If you would like to benefit from my personalised insight, this is the only way I am working directly with clients/students at the moment.

I briefly explored the beguiling idea of adding one magical element to your diet in my last post (the 30+ sprinkle and my version of it). The fact that people are willing to pay almost one hundred pounds a kilo, is evidence that we are all looking for that magic bullet that will fix us inside, ensure future health and marvellous poops and insure us against the vicissitudes of modern diseases that plague the west. So much click bait urges us to, do this one thing! or never do this! to transform ourselves without effort. Who doesn’t want that? Even the most cynical of us must surely respond with a thrill of hope to the phrase, ‘scientists have found…’ when followed by something that you already like and promises to extend your life: ‘eating a cup of blueberries’ or ‘consuming 30 plants per week’. Nobody is immune, because to be human is to hope.

There is a tendency to expect things that are good for you to be hard work, gritty textured, brown coloured, tiring and expensive, so when offered an innocuous solution, backed by science - we leap on it, relieved. Our lives are already full of noise of all kinds, from all directions. The modern world is a busy and exhausting place where we are expected to churn out more of whatever it is we do than ever before and look younger, fitter and more polished while we do it. Therefore we are all susceptible to the lure of the quick fix that seems pleasant and easy and adjacent to what we are already doing. And to be clear - I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Food should be pleasurable and manageable, affordable and swiftly made - or at least swift to deliver to the table. Diets that promise to work because they deny you, heavily restrict something, demonise certain foods or require a high speed blender or hours of prep time - these are, without exception - horse crap. Modern tech biohacks that promise to manage blood sugar or craft your microbiome in a certain way - dog poops. Maybe one day we will all be microchipped and take in nutrients through a patch, but for now, the answer is much much simpler.

Bodies thrive on diversity, seasonality, the wholeness of produce, lack of processing, richness of colour, bitterness, flavour molecules and abundance of fibre. Modern humans have been making sure that they can thrive on what the earth provides for hundreds of thousands of years, with no group around the world eating exactly the same native diet. So am I saying there isn’t one thing that everyone should do to be healthy? Not exactly. You could survive on blood and milk, or only plants, or a diet rich in seafood, or dairy or completely without either and you would still find a way to get everything you need if you ate everything you were able to eat and stripped away only what was completely indigestible. After all, nobody thrives on coconut shell or wheat chaff.

Modern diets have smoothed all the rough edges off food to make it sweetly, softly and blandly palatable. Processed food rarely contains much in the way of herbs, bitterness, fibre, peel, seeds or chewiness - because those things are removed in service of standardisation and shelf life. So should you eat everything unhulled, unpeeled and part cooked, with a side of bitter leaves and seeds? No! The answer is to find a way to unprocess your diet without sacrificing yourself at the altar of food preparation. And to help your palate to grow up again, to appreciate bitterness and sweetness, tannic tang with something soothing, peppery with bland. To unprogramme yourself from the assumption that all veg need peeling, or that brown rice is ‘good for you’ and not fun. What about cooking your brown rice in chicken stock, or seasoning it with toasted sesame seeds that you keep in a jar for sprinkling?

The one thing you must do is shift away from thinking about batch cooking and food prep as optional extras because life is too busy and instead see them as options for the family to pitch in, to teach kids how to feed themselves well or for you to spend time with a partner. This is an opportunity for self care - line up podcasts or dance music or audio books and fill the fridge and freezer for the week. By slow cooking stuff - roasting, braising and stewing - we make fast food for future selves that need food NOW! When time is short, meals move insidiously towards processed food, because the cooking has been done in advance by a factory. This is when your fridge and freezer come into their own. A comforting bowl of nourishing wholefood can be conjured from a freezer that contains precooked quinoa, a cupboard that contains dukkah and eggs and a fridge that contains broccoli and butter. In the time it takes to boil eggs and steam broccoli, you’ve assembled something delicious, without any compromises. All it took was the switch in your head from, ‘cooking from scratch is effort’ to ‘I have everything I need for supper on hand’.

The switch doesn’t happen overnight, because food is intrinsically woven into the rhythm of our lives in a way that can make it like a juggernaut to turn in the road. These changes come slowly - but not so slowly as not to happen at all. They are incremental movements towards that ‘just one thing’ moment, which is to cook from scratch. Things might need to shift in other directions before you can see the way to make it happen. Maybe your mealtimes are stressful. Maybe the morning chaos means that you really would rather grab a breakfast bar than consider trying to swallow porridge. It doesn’t matter what your situation is, there is a way to move towards unprocessing your life. Bizarrely, it might involve more tins and jars in the larder. The grey area between convenience and ultraprocessed can be confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it, you will feel like you have a wealth of deliciousness at your fingertips.

I can’t give you the exact formula, because it’s as individual as you are. But I can tell you that what will make the biggest difference to your health and longevity is finding a place for cooking in your life. Not because unprocessed food is the be all and end all of health, but because the mental shift required, allows or necessitates other forms of self care being in place - movement, quiet, self reflection, community, connection, delight. There is no one thing that ensures good health, but there is a tipping point that moves the scales in a favourable direction and I reckon the decision not to peel a carrot could be it.

I would love to work with you directly to help you find what is needed to make that switch. There are many many ways to get there, so have faith - you don’t have to reinvent the wheel or take up extreme sports to make a lasting difference to your health.

Much love,

Naomi x