Love Your Gut Week 2018

Here at Bowel & Cancer Research we’ve always been passionate advocates for maintaining a balanced diet. Taking a more active approach to your diet will not only improve your gut health, but will have a positive impact on your overall well-being including your mental health. If you suffer from a gut condition like IBD or IBS, through management of your diet, you can work to diminish the symptoms of your condition, but there is also a strong link between diet and bowel cancer.

The number 1 cause of cancer in the UK remains smoking however the ratio of the smoking related cancers is going down, with diagnoses related to being overweight and obese increasing. Obesity has now become the 2nd biggest cause of cancers, responsible for 6.5% of all diagnoses. Up to 2,500 diagnoses would be avoidable if individuals changed their lifestyle. In a blog entry on our website, we covered how more than 25% of the population are now considered obese. Experts speculate that this figure will continue to rise, with Millennials becoming the ‘most overweight generation since records began’.

Diet

When we suggest a balanced diet, this doesn’t mean cutting out foods like red meat and alcohol completely, but moderating your intake. It is recommended that an average adult should eat no more than 70g of red or processed meat a day. This is equivalent to 3 thin cut slices of ham, pork or beef, such as in a typical Sunday roast. A quarter-pounder beef burger is 78g. And with alcohol a study of 500,000 people in 10 European countries established that every two units drunk a day, increased lifetime risk of developing bowel cancer by 8%.

Foods & recipes

But what are the foods we should be using more of? Recent studies have shown that there is a direct link between eating cruciferous vegetables (such as broccoli; kale; cabbage) and production of anti-cancerous chemicals being produced in the gut. Also fermented food like sauerkraut and kimchi can give your body a dose of healthy probiotics, which are live microorganisms crucial to healthy digestion.

Love Your Gut shares our passion for promoting a healthy diet and their gut friendly recipes have been developed to encourage more a thoughtful approach to your diet, with alternatives to suit the who have bowel conditions, including FODMAP friendly versions or gluten free recipes. See here for their new recipes released especially for Love Your Gut Week 2018 https://bit.ly/2OuYPqs 

 

Bowel and Cancer Research is a Love Your Gut partner. This is  Love Your Gut Week 2018 – download your Love Your Gut Information Pack here:  https://bit.ly/2xcT3lN