Surprising Probiotic Foods For a Flat Stomach

Want to shrink your belly? Start eating bugs. This isn’t a Fear Factor flashback: Probiotics, the helpful good bacteria in your digestive tract, play an essential role in maintaining a healthy weight.

When your good gut bugs are depleted, bad bacteria take over, causing inflammation. That switches on your fat genes, leading you to gain more weight than someone eating the same amount of food and spending the same amount of time in the gym. In fact, overweight men and women were put on a calorie-restricted diet and given either a placebo or a probiotic supplement for 12 weeks, in a study published in the British Journal of Nutrition. Women who consumed the good bugs showed significantly higher weight loss. Twelve weeks later, the women kept losing weight, even if they’d stopped taking the supplements!

Probiotics are found largely in fermented foods, and the MVPs usually mentioned are yogurt, kefir and kimchi. But probiotic sources go way beyond breakfast and Korean BBQ; you can consume them as part of a wide variety of meals and snacks. Here are some of the best options for a flat stomach.

1

DARK
CHOCOLATE

Dark chocolate is a dietary white knight. Chocolate-loving microbes in the gut convert the candy into anti-inflammatory compounds, researchers at the American Chemical Society found. When the cocoa reaches your belly’s digestive juices and enzymes, it’s feasted on by your belly’s good gut bugs, which ferment it into anti-inflammatory compounds. Bingo: You lose belly bloat. (Dark chocolate also dilates blood vessels to lower blood pressure, which can lower your risk of stroke.) Look for a cacao content of 70 percent or above. The ACS researchers said the amount that seems to be beneficial is the equivalent of two tablespoons of cocoa powder a day, or three-quarters of an ounce of a chocolate (one square is about 1 ounce).

2

GREEN
PEAS

Spinach and kale have a bit of competition for green veg of the moment. But the dark horse of this drag race is the humble green pea. Japanese researchers found that green peas contain Leuconostoc mesenteroides, a potent probiotic that stimulates your immune system, in a 2014 study published in the Journal of Applied Microbiology. The peas produce lactic acid bacteria that protects the mucosal barrier, a.k.a. the body’s second skin, which runs through your digestive tract and is the first line of defense against bad bugs and toxins. Make sure to skip soggy, salty canned peas and add fresh ones to your salads and omelets, or snack on them fresh.

3

SPIRULINA

This blue-green alga, available in powders and supplements, is super-rich in protein: It contains all necessary amino acids. Research into its probiotic properties is preliminary but promising. A study published in World Journal of Dairy and Food Sciences found spirulina effective in growing cultures of the helpful bug Lactobacillus acidophilus while killing harmful gut bacteria. Separate Japanese research found that it reduced diabetic kidney disease in rats, and a 2015 study printed in the journal Phytomedicine found it protected mice from H1N1 flu infection. And the green stuff may be able to flatten your belly by burning fat during exercise. Nine moderately athletic men took either spirulina capsules or a placebo for four weeks in a study printed in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. Afterward, the men who had taken spirulina supplements were able to run 30 percent longer than the men who had taken a placebo and burned 11% more fat during a run!

4

SAUERKRAUT

Although sullied by its association with hot dogs, sauerkraut is fermented cabbage, and it contains natural compounds that have potent cancer-fighting and belly-slimming properties. Unpasteurized sauerkraut is rich in probiotic Lactobacillus bacteria — it even has more than yogurt! — which boosts the healthy flora in the intestinal tract and bolsters your immune system. But it will also boost your overall health: Mice fed this strain of bacteria isolated from Chinese sauerkraut had reduced cholesterol levels, in a study published in the World Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology. And one cup packs 34% of your daily recommended dose of vitamin C and a solid, satiating 4 grams of fiber. Sauerkraut on the shelf will have been pasteurized and is, therefore, less effective; look for “live and active cultures” on the label.

5

GREEN
OLIVES

These little green buggers have come a long way from their days as an unsung bar food: Lactobacillus plantarum and Lactobacillus pentosus have been isolated in olives, fed by the brine in which they’re soaked. And L. plantarumshows great potential for getting you that flat stomach you’re after: This strain can balance your gut bugs and decrease bloating, particularly in people with irritable bowel syndrome, according to the American Society for Clinical Nutrition.

Comment below what you think! I love hearing your feedback!




Source
http://www.eatthis.com/surprising-probiotic-foods-for-flat-stomach

8 Reasons to Eat Fermented Foods

1. Fermented foods improve digestion.

Fermenting our foods before we eat them is like partially digesting them before we consume them. According to Joanne Slavin, a professor in the Department of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Minnesota, “…sometimes people who cannot tolerate milk can eat yogurt. That’s because the lactose (which is usually the part people can’t tolerate) in milk is broken down as the milk is fermented and turns into yogurt.”

2. Fermented foods restore the proper balance of bacteria in the gut.

Do you suffer from lactose intolerance? Gluten intolerance? Constipation? Irritable bowel syndrome? Yeast infections? Allergies? Asthma? All of these conditions have been linked to a lack of good bacteria in the gut.

3. Raw, fermented foods are rich in enzymes.

According to the Food Renegade blog, “Your body needs [enzymes] to properly digest, absorb, and make full use of your food. As you age, your body’s supply of enzymes decreases. This has caused many scientists to hypothesize that if you could guard against enzyme depletion, you could live a longer, healthier life.”

4. Fermenting food actually increases the vitamin content.

According to the Nourished Kitchen blog, “Fermented dairy products consistently reveal an increased level of folic acid which is critical to producing healthy babies as well as pyroxidine, B vitamins, riboflavin and biotin depending on the strains of bacteria present. [1. Vitamin Profiles of Kefirs Made from Milk of Different Species. International Journal of Food Science & Technology. 1991. Kneifel et al]“

5. Eating fermented food helps us to absorb the nutrients we’re consuming.

You can ingest huge amounts of nutrients, but unless you actually absorb them, they’re useless to you. When you improve digestion, you improve absorption.

6. Fermenting food helps to preserve it for longer periods of time.

Milk will go bad in the fridge but kefir and yogurt last a lot longer. Sauerkraut, pickles and salsa will keep for months. And if you’ve got a huge batch of produce in your garden that you don’t know how to use up — ferment it!

7. Fermenting food is inexpensive.

There’s nothing fancy required for this hobby. And many of the foods required to make these recipes are very cheap. You can use inexpensive cabbage to make sauerkraut, or get yourself a kombucha scoby and with just pennies’ worth of water, sugar and tea, you’ve got a health elixir slash soda pop.

8. Fermenting food increases the flavor.

There’s a reason humans enjoy drinking wine and eating stinky cheese. There’s a reason we like sauerkraut on our hot dogs and salsa on our tortilla chips. It tastes good!

I hope you found this helpful! Comment below what you thought!


Source
http://misshealthgeek.tumblr.com/post/52383826755/8-reasons-to-eat-fermented-foods-1-fermented

Boost Your Immune System With Fermented Vegetables

Want to boost your immune system, increase the nutrient content in your food, improve your mental health and detox your body? Fermented vegetables are for you!

If you are looking for a good place to start, cabbage is easy to process, and makes a great ferment. Raddishes, carrots, turnips, apples and beets also make good ferments.

Fermentation is the process that occurs when the natural bacteria in a vegetable break down the food’s complex elements into more digestible forms. When fermentation occurs, vegetables become easier to digest, allowing your body to work less, while reaping more benefits. And those benefits include higher levels of available nutrients, and live cultures of pro-biotic bacteria (kind of like the good stuff in yogurt). These pro-biotic bacteria can improve yourdigestion, boost your immune system, improve your mental health and detox your body.

Worried that fermenting is risky? No need! Fermented veggies are actually safer than raw vegetables, because the fermentation process actually kills off any unwanted or dangerous bacteria that may exist on the food prior to fermentation. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there has “never been a single case of food poisoning reported from fermented vegetables.”

Fermented foods have been around for eons. Fermentation is an ancient art that pre-dates writing and agriculture.  It’s often considered to be the practice that first ushered our ancient relatives from the natural world, into a culturally driven world. In fact, the word ‘culture’ is another word for fermentation. Sandor Katz, who has written several books on the subject, calls it “a health regimen, a gourmet art, a multicultural adventure, a form of activism, and a spiritual path, all rolled into one.”

And the good news is that it’s a simple process that even the most novice cook can accomplish.

To get started, you’ll want to choose vegetables that are fresh, local, and organic, as your ferment will be only as good as the ingredients you start with. You can ferment any vegetable, but some work better than others. It’s best if you experiment and find a mix of vegetables that you enjoy. Here at the Organic Consumers Association office, we like to mix as many fresh organic veggies together as possible. Not only does this create a variety of textures and flavors, but it also creates a wider variety of beneficial bacteria in the end product.

If you are looking for a good place to start, cabbage is easy to process, and makes a great ferment. Raddishes, carrots, turnips, apples and beets also make good ferments. The fermentation process creates a wonderful flavor that is often refered to as “sour.” But you can add more or different flavors in any way you want. Onions and garlic are great additions, and you can use fresh or dry herbs, and spices, too. The best approach is to experiment until you discover what combination of flavors you like most.

Here’s how to get started.

What you need
•    Fresh vegetables
•    A knife or grater
•    A glass or ceramic jar for fermentation (quart sized, wide-mouth canning jars work well)
•    A smaller jar that fits inside the fermentation jar (small jelly jars work great)
•    Salt
•    Clean water
•    A clean towel
•    Rubber band to fit over the mouth of the fermentation jar
•    Herbs and spices (optional)

What to do

• Chop/shred/grate vegetables, salting lightly as you go. You want to get all of the vegetables as uniform in size as possible. This way, they ferment at the same rate. Vegetables like carrots and radishes do well grated, while it’s best to slice up that cabbage or onion. As you chop or grate the vegetables, add small pinches of salt. But not too much—fermentation only needs a little. Try tasting as you go. The vegetables should taste onlyslightly salty.

• Mix the veggies well. You want to make sure that the salt is spread out evenly throughout all the vegetables. Taste the veggies, and add more salt to taste if needed. If you are going to add any herbs or spices, add them now.

• Let the vegetables sit for 5 to 10 minutes. As they sit the salt will start to draw the liquid out of the vegetables.

• Squeeze the vegetables to release their juices. Take handfuls of vegetables and squeeze as hard as you can, keeping the juice that comes out. You want to get as much juice out of them as possible.

• Tightly pack the vegetables into the fermenting jar and cover with collected juice. As you fill the jar with the vegetables, be sure to pack them down tightly to the bottom of the jar. This will help release more juice, and remove any air bubbles that get stuck in the vegetables. Add any remaining juice once the jar is filled. Be sure there is enough liquid to completely cover the vegetables. If you need to, use a mixture of salt and water to bring the juice level up over the vegetables. You don’t need too much salt for the water, just enough to make it taste like seawater.

• Fill the smaller jar with salt water, then place it on top of the vegetables in the fermenting jar. The purpose of the second jar is to hold the vegetables under the liquid in the jar. This will help the fermentation process by preventing “scum” from forming on the top of the ferment.

• Cover the fermenting jar with a clean towel, and secure it with the rubber band. Using a towel to cover the jar ensures that gases can escape, without letting any dirt or bugs get in.

• Let it ferment! Put the jar in an easily accessible area, and keep an eye on it. In about 24 hours you will begin to see air bubbles in the vegetables. This is how you know it’s working. After a few days, the ferment will start to smell sour. Taste it at every stage. This will help you determine how fermented you like your vegetables. Some people like “young” ferments that have only fermented a few days, while others like “mature” ferments that have been fermenting for months. If there is a white layer of “scum” that forms just scrape it off. It’s ok if you don’t get it all. When you like the flavor, remove the towel and smaller jar, put a lid on the fermentation jar and put it in your refrigerator. When the ferment cools down, the fermentation process rapidly slows, and you will be able to enjoy your fermented foods for several weeks or longer.

That’s it! Now you know the secret to unlocking the true potential of your vegetables. To learn more, check out Sandor Katz’s book “Wild Fermentation,” available through Chelsea Green Publishing. Good luck and happy fermenting!

Have you ever fermented food before? Do you want to try? Comment below and I can help you with any questions or anything you are unsure about.

Source
http://ecowatch.com/2015/01/23/boost-immune-system-fermented-vegetables/

Go with your gut: the secret to weight loss lies in our stomach's bacteria

It’s the variety of food you eat that dictates your health, writes Rosie King.

One decade, we’re told to cut fat from our diets to lose weight. The next, we’re told to count calories. Then it’s all about ditching carbs. But could it be that we’ve had it wrong all along and the secret is actually already within us? More specifically, within our gut?

Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology and author of The Diet Myth [Hachette], says yes. “The more diverse your gut microbes, the more likely you are to be healthy and lean, and the more sparse your microbes, the more likely you are to be overweight,” Spector says. “This is knowledge that didn’t exist five years ago.” 

Welcome to your microbiome

Each person has up to 2kg of microbes in their stomach and together these microbes make up their unique gut microbiome. The microbes, which include trillions of bacteria, fungi and viruses, help the body produce vitamins and amino acids. They also play an important role in the digestive and immune systems, blood pressure and mental health.

Scientists first discovered that an unbalanced microbiome could lead to obesity in animals. In 2006, researchers from Washington University in the US looked at genetically engineered obese mice and identified that a class of gut microbes called firmicutes were consistently over-represented. These particular microbes were found to be too efficient at extracting energy from food and breaking down fibre, and also increased the absorption of fat. 

To put their findings to the test, the team plucked firmicutes from the obese mice and tube-fed them to bacteria-free mice. The latter put on a significant amount of weight over two weeks, even though they ate less. Now there are numerous studies showing that not only are the microbiomes of obese humans lacking in diversity, they are swarming with firmicutes.

A recent study has taken it a step further with “faecal transfers” from humans to mice, which are both gross and fascinating. The study published in the journal Science in 2013 revealed that healthy mice could be made obese by transferring faecal matter, teeming with gut microbes, from obese humans. The research team also found that transferring faecal matter from lean humans prevented mice from putting on weight.

There’s only one report of a human-to-human faecal transfer that resulted in weight gain. A 32-year-old woman in the UK underwent a poo transplant in 2011 after recurrent clostridium difficile, an infection that causes inflammation of the colon. The donor microbes came from her 16-year-old daughter, who was overweight, and the mother weighed 62kg with a BMI of 26 at the time of the transfer. Just over a year later, the woman weighed 76kg and had a BMI of 33. She’s still obese today, despite an exercise program and supervised diet.

What are we doing wrong?

A seemingly timeless weight-loss mantra is that in order to shed unwanted kilograms we need to burn more calories than we eat. Spector, however, argues that this approach fails to take into account one crucial fact: “Each person’s microbiome is unique, which means each of us responds differently to carbohydrates and fats and sugar.” It isn’t just calorie-controlled diets that he claims are bogus. He says that any diet plan that excludes whole food groups damages your microbiome and increases your likelihood of putting on weight.

“Exclusion diets may help you lose weight for the first few weeks because you’re eating less and selecting carefully what you do eat,” he says. “But long-term, they’ll decimate your microbes by reducing their diversity and can end up making you fatter.”

Naturopath Savannah Daisley has been helping Sydneysiders lose weight by targeting their gut flora for 15 years, and she agrees with Spector. “An imbalance of gut flora stops our digestive system from working properly so our use of calories isn’t as efficient and our energy levels drop,” Daisley says. “The increased fatigue means the fat-storing stress hormone cortisol kicks in, leading to heightened blood sugar and insulin levels. Basically, weight gain is inevitable when there’s an imbalance of good and bad bacteria in our guts.”

Your gut craves variety

Spector wants us to forget thinking of our body as a temple and instead think of it as a microbe garden that requires a diverse diet of fibre-rich nutritious foods. “A garden with rich soil, plenty of species and change is always going to be fuller and healthier than a scant garden with weeds, few plants and packed with toxins,” he says.

Our much-slimmer ancestors 15,000 years ago enjoyed about 150 ingredients each week and no doubt had flourishing microbe gardens. Most people today have just 20 different foods in their weekly diet. Most worryingly, many are artificially refined and wreak havoc on the biodiversity of our microbiome.

What can we do?

For anyone looking to lose weight and restore gut health, Daisley says ditching sugar and alcohol is non-negotiable. “I’d usually put them on a strict 14-day detox to overhaul their microbiota, which can see them lose up to 5kg. For people who don’t want something so drastic, I’d encourage them to cut out sugar and alcohol for two weeks – they’re toxins that stop good bacteria from growing and feed bad bacteria, so getting rid of them will do a world of good for your gut, weight and energy levels,” she says.

Although fruit contains fructose, which is a type of sugar, it isn’t the enemy. Daisley says berries, in particular, are great for combating cravings, while Spector says whole fruit with the pulp is good for you and your microbes.

“For high-fibre fruits, the fibre and polyphenols can balance out the effects of the fructose,” he says. “Strawberries are good as they contain a relatively high amount of fibre and more than 95 polyphenols, which the microbes feed off and which act as antioxidants.”

Spector agrees that while everyone can benefit from better gut health, overweight people may need a kick-start, such as a detox or intermittent fast, as their microbiome may be over-run by toxic bacteria. However, he generally takes a more balanced approach.

“No-one can go wrong if they enjoy a diet with as much diversity as possible and cut out processed foods,” he says. While he’s not a fan of diets, he adds: “The Mediterranean diet meets most of the criteria for a balanced, gut-friendly diet. It has variety – olive oil, yoghurt, dairy, nuts, seeds, veg, fruit, grains, legumes, fish and meat occasionally.”

But he says the most important shift we need to make is how we define a good diet: “We need to change our concept from thinking that fat is bad and sugar is bad and carbohydrates are bad – diversity is key.”

The 5 golden food rules

1. Eat as many different wholefoods as possible. The average person only has 20 different foods a week, which is way too low, considering our ancient ancestors would have eaten about 150, Spector says. 

2. Eat fermented foods daily. Foods such as kimchi, kefir, sauerkraut and yoghurt have large amounts of good bacteria that our gut craves.  

3. Cut sugar and alcohol to reset your gut. Daisley says these are the two biggest culprits in preventing the growth of good bacteria in your gut. Avoiding these for two weeks will make a huge difference to your gut’s performance, and desired weight loss.

4. Eat fibre-rich food after a junk meal. Plenty of vegetables, fruit and wholegrains will help replenish the good bacteria that the junk food has wiped out. 

5. Spector says the Mediterranean diet is the best option for gut health – it  meets the most criteria for a gut-friendly diet as it has the most variety, and includes a lot of olive oil, yoghurt, onions and red wine – all top gut foods. 

Top gut friendly foods

These foods act like fertilisers for our microbe gardens by helping the growth of good bacteria and increasing the biodiversity of our microbiome, Spector says. Try to add fermented foods to your diet daily and make sure you incorporate the other foods on at least a weekly basis.

• Fermented foods, including sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir and yoghurt

• Leeks

• Artichokes

• Chicory root

• Onion

• Garlic

• Capsicum

• Extra virgin olive oil

• Coffee

• Green tea

• Dark chocolate

• Natural cheese

• Red wine

Comment below what you thought. I do believe that stomach bacteria has a HUGE impact on health and ultimately weight loss. What do you think? Do you agree/disagree? Please let me know, I love hearing what you lovelies have to say! 


Source
http://www.bodyandsoul.com.au/nutrition/nutrition+tips/go+with+your+gut+the+secret+to+weight+loss+lies+in+our+stomachs+bacteria,38401