When we think of caring for our gut, expensive probiotics or intestinal support formulas may come to mind. These can be helpful in restoring digestive capability and reinoculating an intestinal lining that has been damaged. However, I often talk to my patients about a simple yet effective way to help the probiotics you already have dwelling in your gut: beans.

Yes, I recommend a variety of beans. Interestingly enough, you don’t need many. A tablespoon is enough to help a family of microbiota healthy. Variety is important because each bean has a different fiber type that helps different microbiota thrive. This creates the balancing act we are trying to achieve in the gut.

Achieving a healthy gut is hugely important. Studies show that people who live a long time tend to have a huge variety in the microbiome world in their bodies. And, in fact, those studies show that centenarians tend to eat beans!

As a side note, another common trait among long-living people is their tendency to have regular doctor screenings, which can detect and correct intestinal imbalances that lead to bigger issues. Many studies are starting to show that the lack of diversity in the intestinal world can contribute to opportunistic infections and even diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. Prevention is everything.

Now, how can beans help? One particular study investigated the effect of 1 cup of navy beans daily on a population with a previous history of colorectal cancer.  The study did baseline testing and considered the typical diet of the individual.  Stool and blood were assessed every four weeks.  Within eight weeks, the microbial diversity had expanded in those eating beans by 20% compared to the control sample of participants.

The study also found increased fibroblast activity (connective tissue repair in the muscles, tendons, and other soft tissues), and many markers showed immune-balancing effects.

If you need more reasons to eat beans, try these: Beans are a fabulous form of fiber, protein, and some hidden gems such as lysine, which has anti-viral properties.

Take home message: Small amounts of beans added to your diet can greatly impact your future health! I like yellow-eyed beans, but I also love morado beans.

Speaking of clinical health studies, one came out this week that I thought I would mention. If you are already lean, don’t lose weight. Don’t diet just to pursue some Instagram ideal with your body.

Why? There are three reasons. First, as we have discussed here many times, dieting reduces muscle mass, and muscle mass burns calories. If you are losing muscle, you are losing your ability to burn calories down the road. In other words, the weight will come back even faster if you stop dieting.

Second, it is important to understand that your body adjusts to a lower calorie count when you are dieting. Specifically, it tends to slow down the metabolism. While not necessarily permanent, that slower metabolism may not speed up down the road when you stop dieting, leading to fewer calories being burned, and thus, faster weight gain.

And last, the study found a slight increase in diabetes risk for those that diet while already lean.

There was another interesting but predictable takeaway from the study. Those that diet with exercise and healthy eating have a better chance of keeping weight off than those that use other methods such as diet pills and fad diets. That is why you do not hear us talking much about diet products that we sell. Those products can be helpful but should be only one piece of the solution. Exercise and diet are far more important.

Dieting should not be extreme. Don’t take shortcuts. Just make healthy eating and exercise part of your life and you should be just fine. We really did not need another study to tell us that 🙂

If you get confused by the deluge of clinical trials and studies that hit your Google or Facebook feed, you are not alone. Those studies seem to contradict each other constantly. One says that eggs are good for you while another says they aren’t. Some take aim at supplements and classify them as useless while others show clear benefits.

So how should you view clinical studies? Here are a few tips:

1) Understand that the actual takeaways will be very limited.

Clinical trials are designed to answer one specific question in a fairly limited way. For example, they are generally not going to answer questions like “Are eggs good for you?” Rather, they will answer questions like “What is the impact on blood sugar levels when men between 20 and 30 years old eat two eggs a day?”

In other words, from 10,000 feet, contradictions seem obvious, but when you really dig in, contradictions may not exist at all. That leads us to the second point.

2) Pretty much ignore the headlines/stories in popular online sources. Read credible summaries or the study results themselves.

Imagine the headline on a popular news site if a study did find that men between 20-30 saw a slight increase in blood sugar levels when eating eggs. There would be little nuance, and you would see something like this: “Study shows that men should not eat eggs.”

If you want to actually know the results of a study, you have to get into the weeds and read the study, or at least, a solid, unbiased summary of the study results.

3) Look at the funding.

This is obvious. Companies fund studies to support their products. Often, these studies are fairly credible but still slanted. Furthermore, it is reasonable to believe that unfavorable studies will be quashed while favorable studies will be elevated in the media.

4) Watch your bias.

If you love coffee, it might be easy to discount studies that show negative results about coffee while eagerly posting studies that tout coffee benefits on your Facebook profile. We humans are wired that way.

Be careful about letting your bias control what you will accept as truth. Be willing to change your mind.

5) Trust legitimate studies, but accept that they may be wrong.

Unless you are a medical professional that specializes in the area that a study is focused on, you probably do not have the capacity to prove that study results are wrong. Armchair quarterbacks are not real quarterbacks.

That is not to say you cannot head to the internet and find people that agree with you that the study is wrong; of course you can! But why should you accept those opinions any more than the study results themselves? “Trust but verify” is a very flawed concept in general in 2022 because the sources you use to verify have to be verified too. It is a very tangled web indeed.

Our modernist society puts trust in science for a reason; when done correctly, science follows a rigorous process for deriving truth. Therefore, if a legitimate study is done by a legitimate group, it is reasonable to trust the results.

On the flip side, those legitimate results may be wrong and often will be. That is just the way it works; truth is hard to ascertain sometimes.

However, just because clinical studies are sometimes wrong does not mean that they are not the best way we know of in 2022 to try to answer questions about health. Clinical studies are a great tool that we have all benefited from.

So, feel free to accept the results of studies while understanding that you may have to change your mind down the road. Hold that knowledge loosely, but pay attention to it. Our life expectancy has almost doubled over the past few centuries, largely because of the scientific process.

Air fryers are the rage right now, and in our opinion, justifiably so. We bought one in early 2021 when several of us were on a diet. We were eating a lot of raw vegetables and getting tired of it. So, bought an air fryer mostly for the purpose of quickly cooking great-tasting vegetables.

Today, we are still fans.

If you live in the south (as we do), you know that the south loves fried foods in spite of the health risks. While the idea of making foods with a “fried” taste without frying them in cooking oil seems almost too good to be true, an air fryer pulls off this feat. How? I am not exactly sure, but try it if you don’t believe me.

If you think about it, it is very rare to find situations where you can make a particular food healthier without giving up taste. That is where the air fryer shines; the most obvious example is french fries, which taste just as good when made in an air fryer and contain a fraction of the calories and fat.

If you are looking for a brand/model recommendation, this is ours. (Your family size or other variables may lead you in a different direction; check out legitimate review sites for more help.)

Up front, I should say that the concept of getting 10,000 steps a day is not entirely a myth. It is just a bit of an oversimplification. Read on to learn more about how to maximize the health benefits of walking.

1) 10,000 steps is not always feasible.

If you are wondering, 10,000 steps is roughly five miles. Don’t beat yourself up too much if you simply can’t get in 10,000 steps/per day. Even if you are in good shape, it takes 1.5 hours to walk 10,000 steps. I don’t always have that long to walk either.

2) Any amount of steps is helpful.

If you can’t get in 10,000 steps/day, try for 5,000. Recent studies show that you get health benefits (including reduced cancer, heart disease, and dementia risk) from as little as a few thousand steps/day.

For example, one study showed that you lower your risk of dementia by 50% if you walk 10,000 steps/day but can still lower your risk by 25% with just 3,800 steps/day.

3) The speed at which you walk is important.

You would probably be better off walking fewer steps at a faster pace rather than ambling a lot of steps at a slow pace. Studies show that you get a far greater benefit if you walk faster. If you want to measure yourself, try to be in the range of 80-120 steps/minute.

4) There is nothing magical about steps at all really.

If you want to maximize your time, forget about steps and just find a way to get a bit breathless for thirty minutes each day. By that, I mean you should be exercising at a level where you would have some difficulty having a conversation.

5) You do not have to get all the steps at once.

If you are moving constantly throughout the day, it can be hard to keep track of your steps, but those steps count too. In fact, there is no real evidence that they are not just as beneficial as the benefit you would get from doing all your walking at once.

6) Remember that none of this is a magic bullet.

I recently overheard a conversation where someone claimed that she walked 30,000 steps per day because of her job. Yet, she clearly was not in great physical shape.

I don’t really doubt her because here is something I know to be true: you can’t overcome other bad health habits and a bad diet with some magical number of steps. It does not work that way.

Even so, tracking steps is a great way to get started on the road to better health. You can get free apps for your phone that will do this for you quite easily and record your progress over time. It can be fun to watch the miles add up. According to my app, I have walked enough to almost cross the Saraha Desert in the past year (1200 miles)!

One of the weapons in our arsenal for healthy eating is a Traeger smoker, which uses wood pellets to cook/smoke food. They are unbelievably easy to use and the food tastes incredible. There are other similar brands of wood pellet smokers on the market and I am sure some of them are just as good.

Let’s talk price. I will tell you upfront that Traeger smokers are not cheap. In general, eating well is not cheap. But on the flip side, a Traeger allows you to quite easily cook better-tasting food than you can get in almost any restaurant. And once you figure that out and start replacing dining out with food you cook at home, a Traeger will pay for itself quickly.

The Traeger almost magically simplifies and demystifies the whole smoking experience. Suddenly, with almost no effort, you can make foods that are unbelievably good. For example, over the weekend, we smoked chicken, and it was probably the best smoked chicken any of us had ever eaten. Here is what all we did:

* Brined (soaked in salt water) the chicken overnight.

* Lightly coated with Meat Church Gospel and Meat Church Honey Hog seasonings (you can buy these online).

* Smoked at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes to an internal temperature of 162 degrees. (You should cook chicken at a relatively high heat so it does not dry out.)

You don’t need a Traeger to eat healthy of course. It is just a thought for those of you that like to eat as much as we do. You can buy Traegers about anywhere online or in your local hardware store. There are many websites where you can research the various models as well. We don’t really think the high-end ones are necessary, but we do recommend you consider one that has the WIFI app capability. It is nice to be able to control your cooking without having to walk out to the smoker so much.