Your gut health might suffer
Your gut loves good food, and it loves a wide variety of the stuff. And unfortunately, if you’re sticking to the same old meals every single day, your gut’s health can pay the price. Your normally diverse microbiome, which is essential for a healthy immune system and the proper breakdown of food (per Harvard Health Publishing), can become a little less well-populated. This was found in an observational study published in Nature, which looked at the effect of monotonous diets on gut microbiota in elderly populations. The study found that when a more monotonous diet was present in the people observed, their microbiome became less diverse overall.
Given that gut bacteria is pretty vital for maintaining good health, keeping your microbiome diverse and balanced is pretty crucial. As well as eating a diverse range of foods to supply your diet with a wealth of nutrients, making sure you consume plenty of fruits, vegetables, and beans is also a great idea, says Healthline. Fermented foods, like yogurt, sauerkraut, and kimchi can also supply your gut with good bacteria like different varieties of lactobacillus. This bacterial strain can act as a probiotic that bolsters your health and helps to break down food into more easily-absorbed nutrients.
You could have less energy
Have you started to feel like your regular daily lunch just isn’t getting you through the afternoon like it used to? Turns out, there’s a very solid reason for that. Consuming the same food every day can actually result in less energy over time. This is down to the occurrence of ‘food habituation,’ the acclimatizing of the body to eating the same food, again and again, which can lead to you eating less overall, as found by a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. And if you’re eating less, and therefore taking on less energy? Well, that simply means that you have less energy to burn.
The solution? If you’re finding you’re lacking in energy, then try to mix up your diet. As Harvard Health Publishing notes, eating a varied and balanced diet with a range of healthy carbohydrates, fats, and proteins should help to keep your body well-stocked on different nutrients and energy sources. It’s also advisable to veer towards foods that will give you sustained energy, like the complex carbohydrates found in whole grains, beans, and oats (via Healthline) or iron-rich foods. Meanwhile, you should steer away from those that give you a quick boost and then a subsequent crash, like simple carbs.
Source: Healthdigest
