Desiree Nielsen - Good for Your Gut : A Plant-Based Digestive Health Guide and Nourishing Recipes for Living Well

E ven with the surge of awareness around our digestive well-being, gut talk still feels a bit taboo. We talk around it all the time, citing regularity and balance, marvelling at the microbiome or admitting to a bit of bloating. But, we cringe a bit when talk about gas, constipation, poop, and perhaps the most dreaded word of them all, diarrhea.

In Good for Your Gut, we are going to get real to gain a true understanding of what is going on with our gut and the ways we can find healing when it goes off the rails. Whether youre just curious about your gut health as part of your self-care or you have something that needs fixing, its time to set aside any hesitations that you might have about gut stuff. We are hardwired to think its kind of icky, but its natural and if we dont talk about it, we cant improve our well-being.

Not convinced its a major issue? It is estimated that 16 percent of adults in the United States struggle with constipation. If that doesnt seem like a big number, when we do the math its more than 50 million Americans who arent pooping regularly.

If youre picking up this book, you either recognize that gut health is important or something is going on in your gut right now. Perhaps you have not said a word to your doctor for fear of embarrassment. I get it. It is one thing to talk about digestive health in general and quite another to admit to having digestive issues yourself.

So why dont I start? Digestive health was not my first loveit was inflammation. When I started learning about anti-inflammatory nutrition, the fact that inflammation is intertwined with gut health wasnt really on the radar.

However, I could not ignore that the vast majority of clients I was talking to on a daily basis had questions about their gut health. Whether it was finding a dietitian who understood celiac disease, why they couldnt find a gluten-free trail mix, or looking for answers about their digestive issues when their medical tests came back clear, people needed help. Since they werent finding it elsewhere, I jumped into the void along with them.

As a dietitian, gaining a clear understanding of what was going on for my clients was tough at first. The microbiome wasnt a household term like it is now. Gut-brain connection? Way too out there. Even trickier, when I was starting out, I had just one clinical gold-standard diet at my disposalthe gluten- free diet for celiac disease. The only accepted evidence-based nutritional therapy for digestion at the time was meant just for those with celiac disease. Everyone else was left adrift in chat groups, blogs, andif they were luckythe office of an integrative practitioner looking for a path forward.

In the early days, even the low-FODMAP diet was considered controversial. It is now considered (close to) gold standard for those with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Well do plenty of talking about FODMAPs in Chapter 6.

Not having agreed-upon therapeutic diets is the first challenge of being a digestive health dietitian. Its up to me to piece together the latest research on food and digestion, to understand the ability of certain nutrients to alter digestive function or gut healing, and to navigate any issues my clients are having with actually digesting healthy foods.

To add another wrinkle, addressing digestive issues is tough because I cant see whats going on in your gut. You tell me youre bloated, but it might be difficult for me to determine if your belly is actually distended. Of course, just because I cant see it doesnt mean it isnt happening. A lot of digestive healthshort of having a doctor place a camera inside your gutis based on subjective experience. How do you feel? Where do you feel it? What does your poop look like to you?

Barriers like these are probably why it took so long for functional digestive issues like IBS to be taken seriously by the medical community. If you have IBS, on paper nothing is wrong with you except maybe you poop a lot and you feel pain or urgency. There is no lab test to diagnose your issue like there are for high cholesterol or blood sugars. We have diagnostic criteria, but IBS is also defined by subjective terms such as pain, which is tricky because we all have a different tolerance to pain. So, I did everything I could to understand what my clients were going through. Honestly, sometimes I was a bit skeptical of what I was hearing. I was still an outsider to their experience. And then I wasnt.

In my twenties, I never once thought about my gut health. I was lucky to be healthy and I took full advantage: eating veggie burgers and fries at 10 p.m. or dancing all night and going to school after four hours of sleep. I always felt pretty good, so other than generally eating wellI was studying to be a dietitian, after allI didnt take any other steps to protect my health.