Creative Eating for a Healthy Gut

We’re all in possession of some basic tools that can help us achieve our goals for gut health. Good planning, organization, and discipline are all very good skills to help you meet your dietary targets.

What about creativity?

Organizational skills might be missing from my toolbox at times. Just look at my desk at my office sometime. But I can usually make up for it with some good old-fashioned creativity.

Being left-handed, we tend to be a little more on the creative side. I recall being creative from an early age but it was unchained during my high school art days.

A citywide art show was coming up and we had to submit our pieces to compete to represent our school. Winning pieces would be showcased in a building lobby in downtown Cincinnati.

I wasn’t the most talented guy in art class so I had to be creative.

The theme for the show was things specific to Cincinnati. One of the food staples in Cincinnati is Skyline Chili. They also happened to be the primary sponsor for the art show.

I knew Skyline Chili would be overrepresented in the art pieces so I needed to take an angle no one else might think of. And since we were a catholic high school, why not have a painting of Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, eating Skyline Chili?

Creativity would require sacrilege to take a brief hiatus.

It worked. My piece was selected to compete citywide and thankfully, I also managed to avoid being struck by lightning at the same time.

Creativity has also really helped me meet my goals concerning how I fuel my body. Knowing what to eat and how much is only the beginning. The best plan in the world is no good if the food doesn’t make it into your body.

I make some paradigm shifts when it comes to eating, namely timing, method, ingredients, and temperatures.

Let me explain.

By now, we know what we need to eat every day to ensure we fuel our gut microbiomes properly. We need a diet full of plenty of whole foods, polyphenol-rich, fiber-filled fruits and vegetables, and of course fermented foods, chocked full of microbes.

The more consistent you get at this, the easier it becomes. But it really gets easy if you forget about everything you’ve learned about which foods are typically associated with a given time of day.

Sure everyone has probably had breakfast for dinner out of pure necessity, after a long day that began without taking something out of the freezer for dinner.

But how many of you have eaten standard fare dinner foods for breakfast, or a mid-morning snack?

A baked potato with morning coffee is not something I ever envisioned pairing together but I get loads of resistant starch (RS) daily, precisely because of this.

Every morning, shortly after waking I eat a decent amount of protein with either a protein shake, bar, or omelet. I have boiled and cooled potatoes readily available for RS and since I like to prioritize carbs after protein or fiber, I routinely munch on a baked potato as I drive to work sipping on coffee.

Another frequent flyer in my diet is leafy greens. I would only eat a fraction of the amount of leafy greens if I waited to enjoy them prepared in a salad.

So what was perhaps only once or twice a week in a salad is now daily because I snack on a couple handfuls of greens as I commute to and from the office. No dressing, no croutons, no added vegetables, just a couple of handfuls of greens stuffed in a sandwich bag and I’m off to the races.

These are just a couple of examples of foods that I eat regularly and the only reason I get the quantities with consistency is because I could care less about the clock.

Hopefully, you’re still with me and might even ask for a boiled and cooled potato from your barista tomorrow morning.

But hold on for more creativity.

There is some chatter in the nutrition circles that trying to get 30 different plants in your body every week will go a long way to meeting health goals. The rationale is the diversity in plants, nuts, and seeds will equate to a commensurate amount of microbial diversity as your gut bacteria feast on the wide variety of nutrients.

While I’m not a hardcore disciple of this practice, I do find myself seeing how many different fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds I can work into my week.

I do this by mixing up traditional methods of cooking, working in elusive vegetables and fruits as mystery ingredients, and trying alternate temps for consumption.

On the method front, let’s take beans and legumes for example. As an Army guy in a previous life, I can eat stuff right out of a can. Some hot sauce is an added bonus but straight out of a can is no problem.

But since I’ve become a tad more civilized, I now empty the can of beans or legumes (split peas) into a food processor and make hummus.

I love beans and legumes prepared as a side dish, in a soup or chili, but adding a different method like hummus ensures an additional iteration of beans or legumes to get the protein and fiber these powerhouses are known for.

Let’s stay with hummus and talk about ingredients.

Sure, I’ve worked the beans and legumes in, but boy I’d like to incorporate something else I might not eat as much, like beets.

By using a different method of cooking to make an item like hummus, and adding an interesting ingredient like beets, I’ve also added some diversity and upped my total on my 30-plant checklist.

Beet hummus is quite interesting and very good. This is just one example of sneaking an ingredient in and diversifying your food.

Lastly, the temperature you’re used to eating a particular food at can be altered too. We can stay with hummus in this example as well.

Cooking baked beans, making split pea soup, or simmering a pot of chili with 3 or 4-bean offerings is what most of us are used to.

But chilled, refrigerated beans or split peas in a hummus concoction may not be something you’re familiar with.

If gut diversiiy is the goal, I suggest you try it! In the dead of summer, I don’t like your chances of making much soup or chili.

Here's one more example of temperature variations.

I recently made a barley soup with chicken, beans, and a few other ingredients. It ended up with a thicker, chili consistency though.

I packed it for lunch and decided to try it without reheating it and it reminded me of a summertime chicken salad/ salsa dish.

Surprisingly, it was very tasty.

So mix up the temperatures and throw caution to the wind.

Your gut will thank you in advance for adding some variety to the buffet line.

I like to use the expression “get started, get educated, and get good”.

A big part of “getting good” is creativity. When you start seeing results and are enjoying the successes from your hard work, that’s precisely the time to redouble your efforts.

Add that extra serving of fermented food.

Try to improve on a 30-plant goal for the week.

Adding a few more grams of fiber will fuel your gut bacteria just a little bit more.

Getting creative when you eat a particular food, finding different ways you can prepare the same item, adding different ingredients, and even varying the temperature of the dish you eat will have you on your way to a more diverse gut microbiome.

I will venture into the world of video creation. I will show you how easy it is to make the potent, fermented, and universally rated “man this stuff is awesome” water kefir.

This stuff is undefeated in taste tests.

Every new person I have sampled it with gives it a thumbs up.

And no, you won’t find this in a store.

It’s the equivalent of asking the guy at the fireworks stand to see what’s in the “back room”.

Thanks for reading,

Jeff