If you want to improve your gut health or at least take care of it, what you eat daily will be important. Some foods feed the gut and help good bacteria grow, while others can make you feel sick and mess with the health of your microbiome, which is the environment of bacteria in the gut.
Here, experts tell you what foods you might want to avoid or eat less of if you want to lower your risk of gut problems.
7. Fried Foods
“Fried foods are bad for gut health on many levels,” says Elena A. Ivanina, DO, a gastroenterologist.
First of all, Dr. Ivanina says that fried foods are one of the most common things that cause gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) when stomach acid flows back into the esophagus (the tube that connects your mouth and stomach). High amounts of saturated fat are also found in fried foods. Not only do saturated fats contribute to heart disease, but too many of them are harder to digest and take longer to break down. This could be a problem for people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), says Bonnie Taub-Dix, RDN, author of Read It Before You Eat It: Taking You from Label to Table.