Today on Rumbles Paleo TV we have the totally spectacular Jacqui from Grateful Harvest…hooray!

And she is here to tell us all about:
Fermented Foods
Gut Health
Our digestive systems
And how food actaully turns into our bodies!

Our gut is full of bacteria…yep that’s right, bacteria! In fact there are over 2kg of bacteria in the colon alone. And did you know there is actually ten times more bacteria than there are cells in the human body? Holy Moly! Now some people say there’s approximately 37.2 trillion cells in our body. Multiply that by 10 and that’s how much bacteria we have in ourselves. Now never fear, because most of this is healthy bacteria and we need it thrive.

We need to take care of our guts and the good bacteria in there because it is the soil from which our bodies grow. You can think of your gut like the soil from which a plant grows.

Plants, like trees for example, take nutrients from the soil and grow into the beautiful things we see growing in our environment. We are like a tree, and we take our nutrients from the gut, our gut is our soil!

When the soil is healthy the tree is healthy. When our guts are healthy (everything else neutral) we are healthy too

If the soil however, is not healthy, it will be dead of nutrients and the tree will not receive the food (in the form of nutrients) that it needs. If our guts are unhealthy, then we can’t get the correct nurients we need either.

Instead, both the tree and us, will suffer like this sick tree you see to the right.

So we need to take care of our digestive systems, which our gut forms a large part of. Our guts are the section below where you see the large and small intestines. When we eat real foods that are free from preservatives, additives, refined sugars and refined grains, we provide our guts with the nutrients we need to grow both thriving bodies and minds and we grow to be as beautiful as that bright green tree you saw in the picture above (although we won’t be green, we’ll just be skin colour, but a glowing radiant skin colour!).

My favourite tip from Jacqui in this video was about CHEWING and SALIVA!!!
Jacquie advised us to chew our food thirty times for each mouthful! This breaks down the food so it’s easier for your intestines to draw out the nutrients. It also gets a lot of saliva going which has chemicals in it that help break down the food. And, when you chew for longer, it gives your brain time to register that it’s full, so you won’t eat as much.

Here’s what you can do to create a healthy gut!

• Eat as many real foods as possible, i.e. fruit and vegetables.
• Try eating fermented foods such a saurkrau and kimchi and fermented drinks like keffir and kombucha (from Grateful Harvest of course) as these are full of living, healthy bacteria.
• Chew your food 30 times per mouthful so the guts can more eaily extract the nutrients Where possible, and if you can afford to, buy organic fruit and veg that have been grown in healthy soil.
• Drink bone broth as it’s full of gelatin which helps heal your guts.

If you’d like to find out more about Jacqui and her gut healthy products, you can click here to be directed to her Grateful Harvest website.

If you’d like more info on gut health check out our other posts:
Gut Health tips and tricks with Rumbles nutritionist Bec Nasr
Bone Broth – it’s benefits, recipe and You Tube instructions

Our Rumbles Paleo nutritionist, Bec Nasr, also wrote us an awesome article on gut health which you can read here.