Sugar Busting, Feeding Your Microbiome and More: LifeOmic Health Roundup
This Halloween week 2018, we’ve been infected by a sugar bug, so to speak. We started the week out learning as much as we could about added sugars and connections to insulin resistance. We are ending the week with a 24-hour “Fast of Ghouls” to scare away our sugar demons, in large part with the help of dietary fiber.
When you were young, your parents might have told you things like, “If you keep eating that Halloween candy, you’ll get a cavity!” Cavities, and dentist visits for that matter, are scary enough to make us think twice about chewing on gummy bears. But added sugars can do a lot more than feed harmful bacteria in your mouth that contribute to tooth decay. For starters, added sugars also feed potentially harmful bacteria in your gut. Eating too many added sugars, other than causing harmful blood glucose spikes if you eat too many at a time, can lead to weight gain, inflammation and insulin resistance, putting you at higher risk for diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases and even cancer.
Insulin resistant cells and tissues don’t respond well to insulin and are inefficient in taking up glucose from your blood, with many harmful consequences. The good news is that there are lifestyle changes you can make to decrease your sugar intake and improve your insulin sensitivity.
You can avoid added sugars by cutting soda, juices and processed foods from your diet, and replacing these sweets with naturally sweet treats like raw fruit, unsweetened yogurt and milk. You can also increase your insulin sensitivity by getting recommended amounts of physical activity and structured exercise, getting adequate sleep and eating when the sun is up — we are more insulin resistant at night and after a night of poor sleep, due to disrupted circadian rhythms that help regulate our metabolic state). Reducing your stress and stress-related inflammation, maintaining a healthy weight, upping your plant fiber intake and practicing intermittent fasting can also help improve your insulin sensitivity.
Fasting can improve your insulin sensitivity by depleting your glycogen stores and promoting a metabolic switch to fat burning. If you practice intermittent fasting regularly, your body should get more metabolically flexible (switching easily from sugar burning to fat burning and back) and require less insulin to take up glucose when you eat. Overnight fasting can also help you maintain a healthy cycling of gut microbes that reduce inflammation and protect you against infection by pathogenic strains of microbes. Your gut microbiome or the mix of microbes in your gut can also impact your insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance, and the best way to “feed” a healthy microbiome is through a balanced diet with plenty of plant fibers.
Learn more about added sugars, insulin resistance and intermittent fasting:
Feed Your Microbiome
Speaking of fiber — dietary fiber is recognized as the preferred food source for a healthy, diverse microbiota. A diverse microbiota in turn protects the integrity of your gut wall and protects you against inflammation and infections by pathogenic bacteria that may enter your gut.
When fiber is absent from the diet, gut bacteria are forced to switch to an alternative energy source — the glycoprotein-rich mucus layer of the gut wall. This is a problem, because this layer functions as the gut’s first line of defense against invasive pathogens. The diminishment of this layer of the gut wall increases the host’s susceptibility to infection and can lead to chronic inflammation. A high-fiber diet is beneficial in the management and prevention of numerous diseases, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and inflammatory diseases.
Again, there’s good news! We know from recent studies that diet can fairly quickly modify the gut microbiome. Lifestyle choices such as maintaining a balanced, high fiber diet, avoiding highly refined foods and eating in tune with the light-dark cycle (avoiding late eating) can help you maintain a healthy and diverse ecosystem of microbes in your gut. Remember the magic number for your daily dietary fiber intake: 25g per day!
Learn more about how to feed your gut microbes with dietary fiber and common sources of dietary fiber with Jordan Pennells at LIFE Apps:
More reading: Just Months of American Life Change the Microbiome, via The Atlantic
