Your Gut May Not Need Another Probiotic. It Might Just Want a Break.

Whether the aim is to optimise gut health or to address gut health issues, we often think of what to add:

· Probiotics.

· Prebiotics.

· Digestive enzymes.

· Greens powders.

· Fermented foods.

· Fibre supplements.

And yet, sometimes the most useful thing you can give your digestive system is not another input. It is instead time to rest.

That rest time, during which the gut is able to reset, repair and renew, is being disrupted by our modern tendency to graze from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed.

Your gut is not a machine that needs to be constantly fed, stimulated and optimised through a myriad of different gut support products. It is a living system and, like all biological processes, it works according to a cyclical rhythm, a rhythm that evolved around periods of eating and periods of not eating.

Your digestive system works to a clock

We tend to think of digestion as something that happens whenever we eat: food arrives, the stomach processes it, the small intestine absorbs it, and eventually what is left is eliminated.

However, these are all coordinated processes that happen in a regulated sequence and the constant input of food interrupts the subsequent phases of a previous input.

The moment you eat something, you are activating this cycle of events, which coordinates digestion, absorption, gut motility (movement through the intestine) and elimination. A series of clocks set off each process at the required time in a cascade initiated by the first input of something landing in your stomach.

We rarely give each process the time it requires.

Consider the average modern eating habits of an ordinary day:

7am: Breakfast

9.30am: Coffee and a biscuit/Green smoothie/Protein smoothie

12.30pm: Lunch

3pm: Coffee and a biscuit to ward off the afternoon slump/A handful of nuts

7pm: Dinner

9pm: Wine or tea with a snack in front of the television

For many people, the digestive tract barely gets a meaningful rest.

This does not mean that everyone needs to fast, skip meals or follow a rigid eating window. It means something much simpler:

There should be a rhythm to eating and not eating.

The gut changes its behaviour between meals. During the fed state, the digestive tract is busy responding to nutrients. During fasting, a different pattern of activity emerges, including the migrating motor complex (MMC), a cyclical pattern of contractions in the stomach and small intestine, which is a part of the gut’s housekeeping system.

The MMC occurs during fasting and is interrupted by feeding. One human study of healthy volunteers found that the phase of the MMC present when food arrives can influence subsequent intestinal motor activity and gastric emptying. So when we continually graze, we are not simply adding another small amount of fuel. We are potentially interrupting phases of the gut and their accompanying states.

Your gut likes predictability

Food timing provides a signal to the gut. If it is a predictable rhythm, the gut is able to anticipate it and schedule its phases of digestion, absorption, motility and elimination accordingly.

Food timing also affects the microbiome, which also changes its composition and activity cyclically. The relationship between the microbial community and gut activity is beautifully reciprocal when in balance with the microbiome producing metabolites that influence the host and the host’s circadian rhythm producing the environment in which those microbes thrive. It is an ecosystem with a schedule that when respected produces balance and optimum gut health and when not respected can produce a long list of gut issues.

So how can we facilitate the perfect rhythm?

By giving your digestive system something predictable to work with:

· You eat around the same time.

· You leave reasonable spaces between meals.

· You stop eating well before sleep.

· You go to sleep at around the same time.

· You wake, get daylight and become active.

· Then the cycle begins again.

The point is not to find the perfect eight-hour eating window or obsess over the exact number of hours between meals. The point is to give the body a pattern it can anticipate.

Because when the body knows roughly when food is coming, it can organise each phase around that expectation and each phase can be optimised, that is, optimum digestion, optimum absorption of nutrients, optimum motility and optimum elimination.

The microbiome has a rhythm too

We often talk about the microbiome as though it were a jar of bacteria that we need to keep topped up with more of the same, but the microbiome is far more dynamic than that. Gut microbes fluctuate over the course of the day, and feeding time is one of the factors that shapes these rhythms. This is why the idea of simply adding more bacteria can sometimes miss the bigger picture.

Sometimes optimisation means removing interference rather than adding intervention.

So maybe first try:

· Eating nourishing food.
· Eating at reasonably predictable times.
· Giving meals time to be digested.
· Allowing periods between meals when the digestive tract is not processing another influx of nutrients.
· Not eating at night.

The body thrives on a rhythm. It is how everything works in the body and it is how the body has always worked. So maybe we do not always need to improve the system. Maybe sometimes we just need to stop interrupting it long enough for it to work.

Your gut may not need another probiotic. It may just want a break.

At FIREBIRD, we believe optimisation does not always mean adding more. Our aim is to support how the body already optimises functions given the right conditions.

Find out more about the importance of sleep for gut health in our eBook Unlocking Deep Sleep https://firebird.health/products/unlocking-deep-sleep

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