Featured Image Credit: Alexander Spatari/Getty Images/PA
Topics: Health, Food and Drink
Jess Hardiman
Many people have their own ideas about the best way to start the day, with some of us preferring a healthy, balanced breakfast ,while others opting to avoid eating altogether until later in the day.
But according to one expert, there’s one thing in particular we should all be doing if we want to be healthier.
Sure, kicking things off with a trip to the gym is never going to be a bad thing, but not everyone has the means or time to do so.
Dr Tim Spector believes that the gut is ‘basically our second brain’, with rising awareness around the importance of the gut microbiome and its role in overall health.
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Spector, who has a new recipe book called The Food For Life Cookbook, explained: “The gut microbiome is the common term for the community of all the microscopic organisms living in the body.”
But it’s the lower gut, and the bacteria inside it, that’s particularly important for our wellbeing, with the vast majority of our gut bacteria hugely beneficial.
“They’re good for us because they’re like little chemical factories; they convert the energy they get from food and make them into thousands of different chemicals that are really good for us in a number of ways,” Spector said.
“They produce chemicals that we can’t produce in our body.”
Spector is a huge advocate for ‘time-restricted eating’, which is all about letting your gut ‘repair’ itself by allowing for a longer period of time without consuming anything.
He says the ideal timeframe is 16 hours overnight, eating within an eight-hour window in the day such as 10am and 6pm.
A 10am brekkie might seem like a surprisingly sluggish way to begin your day – and something that goes against everything you thought – although it makes sense when you realise any earlier would mean a bizarrely early dinner.
Obviously, it’s all about whatever works for you, but each time obviously has a knock-on effect on the other, so the later you want your tea, the later you’ll have to have breakfast – and vice versa.
“Leaving time overnight is good for your gut, and reduces inflammation and stress on the immune system,” Spector says, adding: “Doing it overnight feels doable.”
By contrast, eating dinner at 9pm and breakfast at 6am ‘means your gut lining hasn’t had a chance to be repaired properly, so that lining is uneven and a bit inflamed, a lot of the debris hasn’t been taken away by the microbes’.
Spector also pointed to a large study on intermittent fasting from ZOE, which found that, after three weeks, people had ‘less bloat, less constipation, less indigestion, and interestingly, less hunger’.