Why You Shouldn’t Worry About Your Gut Health
The digestive system is an extremely important part of your body, and keeping it healthy is extremely important. Without good gut health, you could experience pain, unpleasant symptoms, or worse. But that doesn’t mean you need to eat more foods or foods that promise to improve your gut health.
Gut health, it turns out, is not a clearly defined concept. This means that you can’t always tell if the situation is improving or if you even have a problem with it. Two researchers from the Center for Food and Mood at Deakin University wrote in an article in the Lancet and the Conversation that gut health has become more of a marketing buzzword than a scientific or medical phenomenon.
What do we even mean when we talk about gut health? Often this is either the absence of unpleasant symptoms such as diarrhea, or the absence of diseases such as Crohn’s disease. These conditions and symptoms vary, so there is no single “gut health” state you can achieve to prevent all of them. Scientists are still trying to understand the details , and research is ongoing.
The microbiome is also important, but again, scientists have not been able to come up with a way to reliably tell the difference between a healthy and unhealthy microbiome. For example, the exact population of microbes in the guts of two healthy people may differ. And despite ongoing research, we still can’t test your gut microbes and tell you what’s wrong with you (except in a few specific cases, such as a Clostridium difficile infection).
On the other hand, sometimes the idea of “gut health” is just code for “being skinny.” If you convince your TikTok followers that they can have a flat stomach if they just get their gut health in order, you can sell them probiotics sold on an affiliate market.
Talk about gut health is often just marketing
Whatever the view, the idea that gut health is important to overall health has provided marketing impetus for a variety of products, foods, and practices that are supposed to be good for you. Probiotics, for example, are recommended for the treatment or prevention of gastrointestinal diseases. But many fermented foods, like yogurt and kombucha, don’t affect the composition of your gut microbiome, and even when they do, it’s not always clear whether they affect it for the better .
Essentially, if someone says that a certain food or diet must be good for gut health, they are usually making assumptions that they cannot back up. As scientists Amy Loughman and Heidi Staudacher write:
There is no conclusive human evidence yet that consumption of processed foods or refined sugar leads to negative effects on all of the above-mentioned parameters of gut health. Lists of the top ten most gut-healthy foods aren’t particularly helpful or informative either; instead, they simplify a complex diet into just a few high-fiber foods without considering important nuances.
They also note that there are many types of fiber, and they’re probably not all equally good for us; There is evidence that some fibers can be harmful if we eat too much of them.
In general, a varied diet that includes whole grains, fruits and vegetables is likely to be beneficial for gut health. The same goes for other healthy habits, such as exercising and quitting smoking. As they further discuss in The Conversation, gut health is not something that can be achieved by drinking kombucha or cutting out sugar; rather, “it’s dietary patterns and overall habits, rather than individual foods, that change the dial.”