<div class="block">Dr. Rabia De Latour, gastroenterologist, joined Cheddar News to talk about gut health. She shared tips on foods that help promote a healthy gut and dispelled a few myths. </div>

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Be Well: How to Improve Your Gut Health

The gut plays a key role in our overall health. And judging from tiktok, a lot of people are paying attention. The hashtag gut health now has over 5 billion views on the app. That's billion with A B Yeah. Users post all kinds of solutions promising to help improve your digestion. But when it comes to the actual science, it's hard to sometimes tell fact from fiction. So we want to break it down for you all. You need to know about your gut, how to keep it healthy. So we have Doctor Robbia Dela with us. She's a gastroenterologist at NYU Lago and an assistant professor at NY US, Grossman School of Medicine. So thanks so much for being here. So we can, you know, get all of the fiction out of the way and stick with the facts. So what is the first thing that we really know or need to know when it comes to our gut health? I think the first thing you need to know is that the gut plays a major role in your overall health. That's something we're still kind of unfolding as the years go on. And so it was only in the last few decades, that we realized that the actual bugs within our gut, determine some of our long term health outcomes. And so the follow up question to that is how do you eventually manipulate that to live longer, to live a healthier life and a happier life free from gut problems and gut pain. So, is that where like the prebiotics and the probiotics come in? Right? Because the, what is it doing in there? Precisely? So those bugs are champion, right? We need to keep them happy in order to have the best health outcomes possible. And so what you can do is feed them the foods that they like and those foods are called prebiotics. So these are foods that the body, your body doesn't necessarily digest. So they kind of go all the way to your colon or your gut in their true form and then the microbes just go crazy and they are very happy with these foods. You're essentially feeding them, making them happy. It's happy for a child. What are some of those foods? So those are the foods that are basically a lot of fermented foods like um you know, a lot of different um what's uh the Korean food? Kimchi, Kimchi is a great option to fermented foods. They love to eat those foods. And fiber, fiber is one of the best foods that you can give these microbes. So you've all eaten corn, right? And then next thing you see is in the toilet, our bodies don't necessarily digest some of these fibers, but the microbes can digest them for us. So feeding these microbes different types of foods with lots of fiber in them is like one of the best gifts you can give to your body. OK? Just remember things that are easily digested by the microbes, not you. OK? Got you, got it. OK. Now what about something like a pickle or something like that? Is that good? It's good, you know, everything within moderation, but anything that has a high fiber content is probably the best thing you can do for your body and then eventually you move on to some probiotics, right? People love to talk about probiotics. So, probiotics are the food that you feed those microbes, probiotics is basically artificially putting those microbes into your body in the form of different pills that people sell. And there's also certain foods like yogurt that have these live cultures in them that you can just essentially eat and then hope that they kind of take, take place in your gut. Now is one better than the other, whether it's a pill or it's in the food form because I hear that some of those yogurts don't have as much as you actually need in them. You're right. I think any time you're taking a pill, you're essentially taking a shortcut for better health outcomes and short cuts as we all know, don't necessarily work. Right. You can't lose £10 in a day. It's not real. And so I think that the best thing you can do is eat natural foods to try to supplement the good microbes into your gut. And these are the foods I talked about like fermented foods trying to eat fiber to keep those other microbes happy. Because what we found is that the probiotics that are available on the market and the reason why we hear about the, the most is because there's an opportunity to make money, right. But they need to be kept at extremely strict temperature and like different parameters to just be alive by the time the pill hits your mouth. And so since the FDA isn't really regulating these, there's no way for me to tell you that this probiotic definitely works. You know, you might take one and you might feel better, but it's really hard to tell. Now, what about magnesium? I feel as though I, all of a sudden I'm hearing so much about magnesium. Magnesium is a medication that we've used for years and years and years to help make people poop. Essentially, it's a great medication and it's, you know, magnesium helps people. It makes you go. That's how you learn it in medical school. Mg makes you go. Right. And so for people who suffer from chronic constipation, they're not having regular bowel movements, perhaps it's from dehydration or, you know, improper diet or other medical problems, magnesium can help those people poop. And so I think that for certain people, especially on Tik Tok who love to talk about magnesium and gut health, it's just them poop. Ok. So if people, how do you know if there you have gut health issues and what's the first step you should do to make it better? The best thing you can do is look inside the toilet after you've pooped. I know that people don't like to talk about this. It's not the most glamorous thing, but it's what I do for a living and I love it. So you need to look at your poop and look and actually in investigate it and make sure your poop should be a nice, solid, soft movement. Shouldn't be flaky, shouldn't be watery. Shouldn't be rabbit pellets. Like looking at your poop will tell you so much about your health and specifically your gut health, right? And it's important to have these conversations so that we know that we're healthy. And thanks so much for joining us, Dr Rob De Tour.