The Wellness Diet

Be your healthiest self by looking after your microbiome

Feeling bloated? Suffer from food intolerances? Worried about your immunity? When it comes to getting the lowdown on your personal digestive health, short of booking an appointment at her Wimpole Street clinic, gut expert Dr Megan Rossi’s new book, Eat Yourself Healthy: An Easy-to-digest Guide to Health and Happiness from the Inside Out (Penguin Life, £16.99), is pretty much the next best thing. The registered dietician with a Ph.D. in gut health believes the gut isn’t an isolated organ but is central to our overall health and happiness. However, it needs an individual approach to diet and care to if it’s to function at its best. ‘There is a growing, and concerning, the trend towards generic, over-simplified, one-size-fits-all, gut-health recommendations,’ says Dr. Rossi.

‘In Eat yourself healthy, we go through several assessments to help you determine where your gut health is at, and then, explore a range of tools and strategies so that you can formulate your own gut-health action plan.’

The book covers everything from how digestion works, to what your gut microbiota actually do, optimum nutrition (macro and micronutrients), common complaints (including IBS and food intolerances), a gut-directed yoga sequence, and delicious recipes to bring you to a state of optimum gut health.

Once you’re armed with all the information you need, there’s an 11-step action plan you can tailor to your specific needs by following the links to a range of gut-related questionnaires devised by Dr. Rossi. And it’s not all about piling on the fiber, either – although, clearly, that’s important too – her recipe for Prebiotic chocolate bark with pistachio will keep more than your gut microbiota happy!