GUT health
⚠️ Could Too Much Fibre Be Hurting You?
Sometimes the problem isn’t how much fiber you’re eating, it’s when you’re eating it.
Too much fibre in one meal can cause more problems than it solves:- bloating, gas, increased hunger.
Take the great British Roast Dinner as an example.
Eaten up and down the British Isles every Sunday lunchtime, a full Roast Dinner comprises roast meat (beef, chicken, turkey, pork), roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings (if you don’t know what they are, just Google them) and any combination of peas, carrots, broccoli, parsnips, brussel sprouts.
In terms of fiber, you can easily pack in 20g, which is great for a single meal.
Unless, that happens to be the first significant fiber of the day because breakfast was coffee and a muffin.
In that case, the sudden barrage of fiber might simply be too much for one gut to take.
On the other hand, distributing your fiber intake throughout the day will reduce the chances of gut issues, stabilise your hunger pangs and stop you feeling like a human airbag.
Here’s how to add fiber to each meal of the day
1️⃣ Breakfast
Choose wholegrain bread for your toast, add berries or nuts to your porridge or cereal, or eat beans (yes, I eat beans for breakfast every day)
2️⃣ Lunch/Dinner
Whether it’s lunch or dinner, the same rules apply: swap refined grains (white rice, pasta etc) for their wholegrain versions, eat more legumes (chickpeas, lentils), add a serving of vegetables to every meal. And eat more beans.
3️⃣ Snacks
Apples with skin on, berries, nuts, dark chocolate, hummus with carrot sticks. Or beans. Seriously, if you haven’t tried edamame beans as a snack (6g fiber & 12g protein per 100g), you’re missing out.
4️⃣ Water
Don’t forget to drink enough water. More fiber, less fluids = constipation
5️⃣ Diversity
Diversity is the key. Your gut microbes need a varied fiber diet and if you’re eating wholegrain rice for lunch every day, they’re simply not going to get the nourishment they need.
You (and I) could do a lot worse than go back through that list you’ve just read and tick off every food that’s mentioned that you’ve eaten in the last week.
What’s left?
Now you know what’s on the menu for tomorrow.
GENERAL HEALTH
🌿 Want To Live To 100? Start Here
A staggering 10% of the Swedish population - roughly 800,000 people - have donated blood samples to the AMORIS cohort.
These samples were taken between the mid 1980s and mid 1990s, meaning researchers have now had 30-40 years to track the lives of these individuals and correlate life outcomes with biomarkers.
Naturally, some of those people have passed away, many are still alive and some…are more than 100 years old.
More than 1,000 of them in fact.
Would you like to know what a centenarian’s blood sample looked like when they were 65?
Thanks to a 2024 paper (PMID 37726432), we can do just that.
Here are some of the commonalities among the centenarians
- Lower than average blood glucose levels
- Lower than average kidney markers, such as uric acid and creatinine
- Lower than average liver markers, such as gamma-glutamyl transferase (GGT) suggesting reduced liver stress
- Higher than average iron and total cholesterol
- Fewer extreme values overall across a wide range of markers
Wait…what? Higher cholesterol?
Yes. But bear in mind that’s total cholesterol - HDL-C, LDL-C, apoB.
Remember: LDL-C and apoB are numbers you may need to reduce (if a doctor tells you they're too high: TDLR get tested asap if you don't know).
If you need a refresher on what these all mean and which of them you should really focus on, you can find out everything here.
So, none of this means any one of these biomarkers leads to increased longevity. If I had to sum it all up in one sentence, it would be this:
People who lived to be centenarians showed remarkable consistency across a range of metabolic health markers.
As in so many areas of life, it’s consistency that wins the race.
With that in mind, here’s how to be consistent in anything - diet, exercise, sleep - to maximise your chances of living long and living well.
How To Make Consistency Inevitable
1️⃣ Lower the bar: commit to the smallest possible version of what you want to do e.g. “I will do 3 press ups as soon as I get up”. If you do more, great; if not, it’s still a win.
2️⃣ Track the process, not the outcome. You can control what you do, not how things turn out.
3️⃣ Leverage accountability: tell someone your objective. They’ll start to expect the behaviour from you and you’ll expect it from yourself.
4️⃣ Reduce the number of decisions you have to make: nothing kills motivation like cognitive load.
Whatever you want to do, you want to make sure it happens on your worst day.
And when it comes to upping your fiber game (a key strategy for controlling blood glucose), the only decision you need to make is to try LOAM. Its 6-in1 fiber formulation has been shown to have positive effects in hours and you won’t notice a thing when you take it: no flavour, no colour, no texture. You can get 10% off your purchase right now by clicking here.
In fact, like these two LOAM users, you might find taking LOAM every day is the only thing you need to do to lower your cholesterol.
REFLECTIONS
🫤 Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions
King Solomon - an ancient King of Israel, important for Jews, Christians and Muslims - was an extraordinary figure.
His most famous act was deciding which of two mothers a baby belonged to when both claimed the child and there was no evidence as to who was telling the truth.
By threatening to slice the child in two and hand a bloody half to each woman, the real mother begged him to hand the baby to the other women.
Knowing only the real mother would be prepared to give her child up rather than see him killed told Solomon everything he knew.
However, despite dishing out sage advice to other people, King Solomon was unable to follow his own advice. In later life, he squandered the state treasury and made decision that ultimately led to his nation being split in two after his death.
Funnily enough, a US Judge by the name of…Solomon Wachtler showed a similar inability to heed his own advice. Despite working in spousal abuse cases for years, in 1993 he pleaded guilty to harassing a former lover and threatening to kidnap her daughter.
Solomon’s Paradox is the observation that we often fail to follow the very good advice we’re able to offer other people.
One reason we might do this is to do with “psychological distance”.
When faced with a personal problem we use a first-person perspective that prevents us from seeing the big picture. But when the problem is someone else's, the extra “psychological distance” favours higher-level thinking that takes a wider context into account.
Therapists encourage clients to use third-person pronouns to refer to themselves to increase psychological distance.
So, these days, when I’m tearing my hair out at 2am with a child who won’t sleep, or receive a call telling me no-one’s picking up the latest shipment of LOAM from the warehouse, I pause.
And ask myself, “what should Karan do right now?”
As woo as it sounds, it works.
👋 Who are you again? I’m Karan Rajan - a doctor and curious explorer of all things health and wellness. I'm the founder of LOAM Science, a microbiome company aiming to create the best fiber product in the world! I host the Dr Karan Explores Podcast, where I talk to experts in science and medicine to cut through the BS of modern health advice. If you'd like an easy way to dig through the archive, you can ask me any questions about the podcast and talk to my digital librarian here. I've also written two books "This Book May Save Your Life" and "This Is Vital Information". I'm the Chief of Science of Throne, a smart gut health tracking device.
If you feel strongly about some health things or just want to say hi? Hit reply... I’d love to hear it and hear from you! (yes I read every reply!!!)
