Obviously, we here at 360 Cookware are passionate about how our product contributes to healthy cooking and eating. Our surgical-grade stainless steel pots and pans not only deliver superior kitchen performance, but also have no “forever chemical” coatings to leach into your food as it cooks. They’re a great place to start when it comes to enhancing the healthful qualities of your family’s diet.
Gut Health: Essential to Healthy Living
But let’s consider the food that you’re cooking on those pans, as well! While we all know that the least-processed foods are usually the healthiest choices, it’s become a lot more complicated than that. All you have to do is visit any social media platform to be bombarded with the latest healthy food fad. Ten years ago, it was low-carb, high-fat foods on the keto diet, and now many food influencers focus on maxing out protein content. Neither of these diets, however, will do much to improve one of the keys to healthy living: gut health.
Gut health isn’t as sexy-sounding as building up muscle mass or dropping pounds quickly, but it’s absolutely essential for maintaining a healthy body. When your gastrointestinal (GI) tract is functioning properly, you’ll digest food and absorb nutrients more efficiently, and maintain the GI microbiota that can improve your immunity to common ailments. And yet most Americans get nowhere near as much fiber as is needed to enhance and maintain optimum gut health.
Fiber: The Key Component of Gut Health
In fact, a Stanford study shows that a mere 5% of Americans eat the recommended minimum daily intake of dietary fiber, 25 grams for women and 38 grams for men under fifty. And when you consider that an adequate fiber intake can help protect against type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and colorectal cancer, it becomes clear that the United States needs to do much better in this respect.
The good news is that adding fiber to your diet isn’t difficult at all, whether you do it through adding high-fiber foods or using supplements in your favorite recipes to boost the fiber content without even knowing it’s there. Let’s look at the available options.
Adding Fiber to Your Diet
One of the true powerhouses of the fiber world is the humble bean. Whether it’s chickpeas whipped into a silky smooth hummus dip, black beans added to a beef taco mixture, or the classic white navy bean baked in a sweet and savory sauce, these dried legumes can deliver a substantial portion of your daily fiber needs. Two-thirds of a cup of cooked black beans has 8.7 grams of fiber.
You can also add more fiber by eating more fruits and vegetables. A cup of raspberries has 8 grams of fiber, while an avocado has 9 grams. A cup of green peas has 9 grams, and a cup of broccoli has 5 grams.
However, sometimes you just don’t have time to sit down and calculate the grams of fiber in all your ingredients, and that’s where fiber supplements can come in handy. Go Gut, for instance, is a flavorless prebiotic soluble fiber supplement that can be mixed into food or drinks. One scoop delivers 10 grams of fiber. Just think how easy it would be to add to our Garden Vegetable Soup or Skillet Lasagna, or one of your own favorite recipes to increase your fiber intake and improve your gut health!
Getting Started: Take it Slow
One warning: whichever way you decide to increase your fiber intake, don’t rush into it! If you add too much fiber too quickly, your body is going to have trouble handling it. Ironically, one of the most obvious benefits of eating more fiber is a healthier gut and improved bowel movements, but if you ramp it up too fast, you could end up in extreme GI discomfort, including diarrhea and painful gas.
So instead of quickly jumping into high-fiber mode, take a week or two to slowly increase the amount of fiber in your food. Throw some beans into a pot of soup, or a scoop of Go Gut to a smoothie, and as the days pass, add more and more of these gut-friendly ingredients. And remember- the recommended amounts are minimums. There’s nothing wrong with eating as many fiber-rich foods in a day as you are comfortable with!
Delicious High-Fiber Options
In the end, it’s best to keep a variety of high-fiber options in your diet. Stir a tablespoon of chia seeds (5 grams) into your morning yogurt topped with a cup of raspberries (8 grams), add a half cup of chickpeas (5 grams) in a lunchtime Cobb salad, enjoy an afternoon smoothie with a scoop of Go Gut (10 grams), and serve dinner with a cup of green peas (9 grams) with your main course. Finish it off with a serving of our Peach Crisp (5 grams), and you’ve already surpassed the RDA for fiber for a man under 50!
As you can see, adding fiber to your diet doesn’t mean eating tasteless food, and when it’s prepared using non-toxic cookware, you get even more benefit from these healthy diet choices. Improve your gut health while at the same time enjoying delicious meals!
