Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva Podcast. I'm your host Monica Reinagal.

It's great to be with you today.

One of the most effective ways to boost the population of beneficial bacteria in your gut is to eat more prebiotic foods and prebiotic foods is just a fancy way of describing foods that are high in fiber.

Although our bodies cannot extract any nutrition from fiber, the bugs in our gut can and when we supply more food for them

they thrive. There have been some interesting studies comparing the

intestinal population of Westerners with that of rural South Africans. the intestinal and a lot less animal protein and fat.

And the composition of their guts is strikingly different as well,

with much higher and more diverse populations of health-promoting bacteria.

Not surprisingly, these Africans have much lower risks of

colorectal cancer and other conditions that are thought to be influenced in part by

the population of your gut. But even more interestingly, adopting a diet that's lower in

animal fat and protein and higher in plant fiber can very quickly change the composition of your gut flora for the better.

And the same is also true in reverse.

Switching from a diet that's high in plant fiber to one that's high in animal fat and protein can quickly change the makeup of

your intestinal microbiome for the worse. Not ready to give up cheeseburgers just

yet. Well even without cutting down on animal protein and

fat simply adding more plant fiber to your diet can have beneficial effects as

well. So Donna is trying to upgrade her fiber intake from the recommended 25 grams per day

to something closer to 40 or 50 grams. However, she's finding it difficult to reach that target without eating too many calories as well.

What Donna needs is a way of ranking foods not just by their fiber content but by their fiber density or how

many grams of fiber they provide per calorie.

This approach is similar to ranking foods by their nutrient density or their energy density.

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