Happy Monday! One last Monday Morsels blog post. I will be retiring these blogs for the time being, with the idea of launching a new Online Community in the new year. These types of things will be available through that community.
Want first access to this resource in the new year? I’ll be announcing it via newsletter first. Sign up for that here.
Ok on to one last food to add to your grocery list, should you be looking to love up your guts.
REAL FOOD. aka Ancestral Wisdom.
I’ll give you three reasons why seeking to add in some Ancestral Wisdom to your day to day will bring you gut love, and in turn, help reduce that internal burden of stress.
BECAUSE OUR GENETICS
Give it a think - the way the people who came before you ate, is pretty steady throughout the last few hundred years. The way our grandparents and their parents and grand parents before them ate, we would call it ‘slow food’ in this day and age. Things didn’t change very much from one generation to the next. You wanted muffins? You’d have to have flour in the pantry, or grow your own grain, harvest, and mill it to grind down into a flour. Then you’d make muffins, and enjoy them before they went bad.
You want a muffin in 2021? You can stop at any drive through, or coffee shop and buy one pre-made for you. But compare the ingredients in the muffins your great-grandparents would have made versus the one you can pick up at any drive through, coffee shop or grocery store, and the ingredient list will be very different.
How did your genetics evolve over the last few hundred years? With the slow foods. Those foods provided your ancestors’ bodies (including how they moved through the world, and had babies and raised those babies) with the ingredients to make everything at the cellular level work. Changing those ingredients as we have done so swiftly in the last 50 years, changes the impact it has on your cells and the DNA found within.
Consider that. Your body today, is a result of many many generations before you that ate a slow food diet. Change the diet, and how does it change things for the generations coming after you? I for one, hope we can evolve with those changes and fast. And I’m game for it. But I’d also like to stack things in favour for how the body has worked for generations before me.
BECAUSE INGREDIENTS TO BUILD + REPAIR HUMANS
Why do we eat? For the macros - think protein, fats + carbs. We also eat for the micros - think minerals, vitamins, polyphenols. We also eat to provide the goods to support our all important microbiome - think fibre, plant foods, good fats.
Your body is always building and repairing tissues. Did you know that you have an entirely new liver every 6 to 12 months? That your intestinal lining is a brand new lining every 2-4 days? That you rebuild and repair about 10% of your bones every year? (Check this chart for other fun numbers.)
How does your body do this building + repair work? It needs ingredients to do this. Where are you getting your ingredients from?
Imagine your brand new liver, 8 months down the line. How well would it work if the ingredients you provided it were mostly from poor quality ingredients? How different would your liver be if it were rebuilt from good quality ingredients?
BECAUSE ADDITIVES + PRESERVATIVES WREAK HAVOC
Oh heck yes they do. Emulsifiers like carrageenan, guar gum, acacia gum and locust bean gum have all been studied and found to have a negative impact on the junctions between cells at the gut lining. Check this study out!
What does this mean? There are quite a few additives + emulsifiers used by the food industry to help with the texture of their products. What do these additives and emulsifiers do? They promote permeability at the gut lining - this is code for pushing cells apart. When you do this, you introduce permeability, aka leaky gut. This leaky gut now makes it easier to get all kinds of things across the gut barrier in to your body than we as humans have ever had to deal with. There is the suggestion here that this may be one of the big contributing factors to the rise in autoimmune conditions.
Looking for a deeper dive? I found this article to be quite a long, but good read, exploring the impact of certain additives and how they can potentially wreak havoc at the gut lining. Check it out here!
Real food. The way our Ancestors did it.
This is not about complicating things, my friend. This is about simplifying things, in fact.
Here’s how I propose we start heeding our Ancestors’ gathered wisdom over generations: eat similar to the ways they ate. Does it mean that because I don’t have any Ancestors hailing from Thailand, that I can’t eat Thai food? Heck no!
I’ll be looking to the wisdom of the Thai Ancestors and cooking more like they would have made their meals. Mmm. Thai slow food. Oh now I’m hungry.
Think to where you came from - what were those foods those people who came before you ate. In my case, there’s a whole lotta pie in my lineage. Some people would nay say pie - saying it’s terrible, loaded with inflammatory ingredients. Then let me ask you this - how are you making this pie?
What if you made your pie the way your great-grans would have made them? For me, this involves lots of lard, and organically grown wheat flour. (Everything USED to be organic by default, until we introduced loads of things to boost agricultural production.) Lard from pigs that were allowed to live the life they were designed to live (i.e. outdoors) is rich in important nutrients like Vitamin D3 and Vitamin E.
A pie was a delivery system of joy. A way to let the bounty of late summer season SING. Think about your Mom’s apple pie, come mid-September. In to the winter, the pies would shift to perhaps a raisin pie, like my Grand-Maman used to make. Raisins are how you stored the summer sun to consume in the winter. How is pie not a delivery system of joy and summer sun?
So where do you start? EAT REAL FOOD. Start with one meal. And build from there. I have loads of from-scratch programs to help you flex this muscle. Check them all out here.
Aiming to Keep Well? Looking to start working on gut health? Need some help in feeling real good?
Get in touch by clicking here. Let’s meet up to start drawing up your road map to support you in both quantity and quality of life.
*This is not medical advice.