Start your gut-friendly breakfast today

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What is a gut-friendly breakfast?

Gut-friendly breakfast = Breakfast that improves and maintains the health of your intestines

Previously, the chief function of the intestines was thought to be the absorption of nutrients and excretion. However, recent research has revealed that the intestines are closely related to not only constipation, rough skin, and immune strength, but also various other symptoms and illnesses such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, cognitive disorder, and depression, and have a significant influence on our overall physical health.

This means that, by properly conditioning your intestines, you can energize and beautify your entire body! We therefore suggest eating a gut-friendly breakfast. This concept centers on eating a combination of fermented food, dietary fiber, and oligosaccharides for breakfast. By practicing this gut-friendly dietary habit each and every morning, you’ll soon be noticing many healthy changes occurring to your body.

Have gut-friendly foods for breakfast!

They will stabilize the autonomic nervous system inside your body.

Autonomous nerves are responsible for regulating the vital functions of your body, such as breathing and blood circulation. They can be classified into sympathetic nerves that become dominant when you are excited, and parasympathetic nerves that become dominant when you are relaxed. They work like a seesaw, in that when one of the two nervous systems kicks in, the other one reduces its activity, and vice versa.The sympathetic nervous system, which becomes dominant when excited, is typically active from morning until noon. In the afternoon, the parasympathetic nervous system that has the relaxing influence becomes activated and takes over. As you can see, our entire autonomous nervous system is functioning constantly like clockwork, throughout the day. When you are having a meal, the sympathetic nerves are activated, but the parasympathetic nerves become dominant and take over when the meal is over. So, breakfast is like the switch that turns on the sympathetic nervous system at the start of each day. By eating breakfast and awakening the gastrointestinal tract and the brain, you can start your day in a positive frame of mind and perform at your best for the remainder of the day.

Reset your internal clock.

Each of us has an internal clock that adjusts the time schedule of the body’s various activities, such as secretion of hormones, and replacement of old cells with new ones. Although it was previously thought that this internal clock existed in the brain, recent research has shown that actually the cells throughout the body contain genes that help manage our entire body’s circadian rhythm.

And our morning activity is key to making sure that those clock genes function properly. When you are exposed to sunlight in the morning, the clock genes in the center of your brain are reset. And when you eat breakfast, the clock genes located in the periphery of your intestines are also recalibrated, which allows them to maintain the precise rhythm for the rest of the day.

Intestinal activities become more robust, and stool regularity improves.

If you were to straighten out all the large and small intestines, they would actually be more than six meters in length. This intestinal tract expands and contracts, much like how the inchworm moves, in order to transport ingested food. This movement is called peristalsis. If peristalsis becomes weak, the ingested food inside the intestines passes through very slowly, causing the body to absorb more water than necessary, resulting in constipation. When food remains in the intestines for too long, it decays and deteriorates the intestinal environment.
By eating breakfast properly every morning, you are activating this peristalsis, enabling your stool to move along smoothly and improving your regularity.

Supervision: Dr. Hiroyuki Kobayashi, Professor, Department of Hospital Administration, Department of General Medicine, Juntendo University Hospital

  • The functions of the intestines, and the three key nutrients to include in your gut-friendly breakfast