Question: How would you best restore the health of your gut

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 17 Nov 2014:

It’s a tricky question, and most of the scientists I know are still working on the question. 🙂 It’s actually very hard to restore the health of someone’s gut once damage has been done. this is mostly because we still don’t fully understand how all the different bacteria live together and interact with eachother. In fairness, there are trillions of them so it’ll take some time to figure that out…

Eating healthy foods is a good start. Lots of fruit and vegetables, and lots of different types of each, plenty of water, and not too much fat. That will make sure that the good bacteria in your gut have all the right foods they need to grow. Probiotics like yoghurts and those drinks you see on TV aren’t much use to anyone who’s already pretty healthy, but they can be very helpful to anyone who’s had a lot of antibiotics that kill off a lot of gut bacteria. The bacteia in them don’t stick around for long, but they do some good while they’re there and they take up space that bad bacteria might have settled on and caused problems.

There is a medical treatment starting to become popular called a faecal microbiota transplant. That’s where doctors take the poop of a healthy person, and put it in someone else who has an unhealthy gut. It sounds disgusting, I know, but it works really well for getting rid of Clostridium infections. Clostridium difficile is a nasty little bug that can move into the gut of unhealthy people and produce really nasty toxins that can poison you in a few days. It’s resistant to most antibiotics so it’s really hard to get rid of. But faecal microbiota transplants seem to completely get rid of it, by pushing the bacteria out with good bacteria that then take up all the space in your gut and stop bad ones getting back in.