Product Reviews

Heal your gut – live a longer and healthier life with good gut health

It’s not just a saying, Heal Your Gut, it’s now the subject of many books, articles and tv programs. There is even a ‘Heal your Gut’ powder!  Do you still have questions? Is the information that is being shared in the media confusing you? Then a Gut Health workshop may help answer those questions.

We all know how to use a nutri bullet, and we’re careful to blend to perfection, but did you know you should think of your stomach as a high quality, sophisticated blender too? Just one of the important takeaways from the informative and actionable workshop Heal Your Gut.

The workshop was led by certified integrative nutrition health coach Manpreet Pannu.  We heard all about what helps and doesn’t help maintain a balance in our gut health. Incomplete or poor digestion can be the root cause of all kinds of diseases and health issues from the obvious bloating right through to iron deficiency, lack of sleep, lethargy and even candida!

What’s your gut feeling

Ever heard of go by your gut feeling? Well you should quite literally do that, listen to what your body tells you and then act on it.

I never understood how bacteria behaved in the gut; it is fascinating to learn we have such a symbiotic relationship with them.  The workshop explained their role as well as the importance of the diversity and balance amongst them.  No one strain should become dominant. Did you know that bacteria actually out number human cells by a factor of ten to one, with a hundred trillion in the intestine alone!

The gut bacteria play an enormous role in so many different biological functions. Bacteria work hard to not only digest our food but regulate metabolism, create vitamins, manage our hormones, remove toxins and importantly create chemicals that help feed and protect the lining of the gut.

What’s not good for your gut

• Antibiotics! Antibiotics  don’t distinguish between the beneficial bacteria and those that cause disease, they disturb the healthy balance.  
• Processed food really doesn’t help your digestive system at all. Processed food is not digested properly which can lead to a weakening and even destruction of the precious micro villi in our guts whose role it is to stop any enemies getting to our blood stream.
• We know we can add smoking, alcohol, eating too fast etc to this list! All great things to reinforce to those children getting ready to go off to universtity this year!

Actionable points to help you heal your gut

We say eating starts with our eyes, but Manpreet thinks digestion starts even before this. Digestion starts when we think about what we’re going to have for a meal, then when we’re preparing for it, even if it’s buying it, then again when we see it. Digestion of that meal is happening from way before we put food in our mouths!

So Manpreet suggests

• We never eat on the go or at a desk working, if we can help it. It’s important to CHEW our food, ideally up to 20 or 30 times, as according to ayurvedic principles you should chew as many times as you have teeth!
• She also advocates the use of lighter, milder detergents and cleaning agents as these have less harmful chemicals we breathe in and absorb through our skin.
• So what can we do to improve our digestive health apart from chewing it? By thinking carefully about what we are to eat, avoiding processed foods and giving ourselves time to eat properly in a stress free environment.

In the video below Manpreet is teaching us how to make a simple Kimchi/Sourkraut with purple cabbage:

It’s all about adding beneficial bacteria into your gut.

Manpreet also suggests:

• Get some fresh ginger, make thin juliennes of it, no need to peel, cover with some lime juice, leave on the counter top for a day, then store in the fridge. Eat a little of it before your meals.
• Make a simple kimchi (a probiotic food) using thinly sliced purple cabbage. Add very salty water (not iodised salt) and leave for 2 to 3 days on the counter top, then store in the fridge. Add some red chilli powder if you like, then again eat as a pickle with a meal. It’s the fermenting that’s doing the digesting trick.

Fermented vegetables are filled with fiber, digestion enhancing enzymes and beneficial bacteria.

Turmeric is literally a Golden Food

A golden food for gut health seems to be fresh turmeric; a powerful anti-inflammatory food source, easy to get here in Dubai. Use Turmeric with the sliced ginger and make a simple pickle maybe by adding some lime juice and or some cold pressed oil, store in a glass jar in your fridge.

Manpreet even suggests maybe adding a tiny bit of raw turmeric to a juice or a blended drink. We have a whole jar of it at home, we get ours like this from Kenya, it’s bitter, but fine if you chop it up very small, we add to salads with toasted kale and sesame seeds.

These are just some of the ways you can incorporate tiny, practical changes into your diet to improve your gut health. Go and listen to Manpreet at one of her next workshops. We’ve been given 2 tickets as a competition prize.

Would you like to attend the one of her Gut Health workshops?

ENTER THE COMPETITION NOW in 3 Steps

THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED June 5th 2016. CONGRATULATIONS TO SHARNEEN AND MUFEEDA! Email with details of the next Gut Health workshop on their way to you now. 

DoinDubai will randomly choose 2 SUBSCRIBERS to win a FREE entry into her next workshops held in Dubai.

1 ) Type your answer to this question into the comment box at the end of the post.

Name 1 Indian spice that helps you maintains good gut health

2 ) PRESS the Click to WIN button. Pressing the pink button below WILL SUBSCRIBE you to future DoinDubai Newsletters at the same time.

DoinDubai SUBSCRIBERS who are already registered STILL have to go through the process to enter the competition. Don’t worry you will not have multiple subscriptions, it just helps us to have all the entries for this competition in one file.

3) Once you click on the ‘WIN’ button below, please complete your entry by opening the confirmation email to confirm your subscription has been added to the WIN FREE entry into the workshop.

Want to DOUBLE your chances of winning a Free entry into the workshop on Gut Health?

In addition:

to the above workshop I have been motivated into resourcing more information and I am probably being lead into many directions, raw, vegetarian, vegan?

One book I have been guided to is Eat Dirt by Dr Josh Axe.
Published this year, so all the studies and revelations that have been exploding into public awareness in the last 5 years are up to date. A Kindle version is £6.99 (May 2016)

I am also looking at  prebiotic foods to feed the intestinal microbial.

A friend has been listening to the Food Revolution Summit recordings the last few days, they have been free to listen to for a limited number of hours. (April 30th – May 8th 2016)

Initially she felt paralysed by all the information being shared, like a rabbit in the headlights. What do you eat ! What is safe to eat?  What benefits health? Until Dr Joel Fuhruman, amongst many of the speakers, gave her a tool. In the  form of an acronym   ‘Gbombs’.  It represents the nutrient dense foods we should eat to flood our cells with protective substances and naturally guide our bodies to ideal weight and great gut health. Without gut health at its optimum we are plagued with options to develop any disease it seems.

So what are Gbombs?  They are Greens / Beans /Onions /Mushrooms / Berries /Seeds. Its a great tool. Especially if you sat and made a list of all the foods under those headings, pinned it to the fridge door and strived to eat from each list every day. It’s a start!

How can you add to this post for our readers?

Thanks Monica