Seamus Mullen – The Gut-Health Fix

The delicate balance of your microbiome – the bacteria, yeast, viruses and fungi that live in your gut and on your skin – just might be calling the shots when it comes to your overall health, digestion, weight and even your mood. But surprisingly, it doesn’t take long to make meaningful changes. Six years ago, chef and cookbook author of Real Food Heals Seamus Mullen learned this lesson when he healed himself from a severe and painful autoimmune disease by overhauling his diet in favor of delicious clean, whole foods. This topic is near and dear to his heart and he is on a mission to educate others on the life-changing power of real food for gut healing and disease prevention.

Much of our health – good or bad – starts in the gut. Research is revealing a surprising source for the recent influx of allergies, autoimmune diseases, inflammatory conditions and even neurodegenerative diseases that plague our population. It turns out that your gastrointestinal system and, by extension, the nearly immeasurable number of bacteria contained within it are in the business of far more than just ensuring your latest meal is properly digested. In fact, they can make us sick, or they can help keep us healthy.

And that’s the good news. Whether you’re looking to prevent illness or you suspect you have an imbalance or perhaps suffer from an inflammatory or autoimmune disease like rheumatoid arthritis, Inflammatory Bowel Disease (Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis), lupus, Hashimoto’s or a neurodegenerative disease, there are things you can do to take control of your health and fix your gut starting right now.

In The Gut-Health Fix, Seamus Mullen is going to show you how to heal your gut with food and how to maintain a thriving microbiota long-term.

You’ll learn:

• How to treat your gut like a garden: readying the soil, planting the seeds and maintaining a flourishing garden
• The connection between the gut and a host of diseases and imbalances
• How to do a hard reset on your gut with a 7-week healing reboot
• The gut-brain connection
• The power of probiotics and prebiotics
• Foods to embrace, foods to avoid
• Leaky gut syndrome and nutrients that treat the gut lining
• Recipes and cooking techniques to nourish a health microbiome
• Gut specific and whole-health supplementation guidance
• Easy, customizable fermentation workshop
• Principles for building balanced meals the gut loves
• Sample meal plans to learn how to pull all your gut-health recipes together
• Beyond food: Lifestyle changes that matter deeply
• The reintroduction of certain foods after the healing period
• How to make your new gut-healthy lifestyle sustainable long time

Curriculum:

The Path to Ultimate Gut-Health? Treating Your Gut like a Garden!

WEEK 1: Surveying Your Garden

• Overview of the microbiome: what constitutes a healthy gut, signs of an imbalance/unhealthy gut, how an unhealthy gut puts us at risk for illness.
• Explore correlation between gut health and inflammatory diseases, mental health and more.
• Cleaning Up the Gut: What You Can Do About It

Cooking Component: Easy, homemade gut-healing accoutrements you can keep on hand to instantly add excitement to weeknight meals. These versatile recipes can be used on vegetables, proteins, salads, eggs and more!

• Recipes: Make-ahead sauces, dressings, vinaigrettes, pesto, chimichurri, the perfect whole chicken recipe, not-your-average kale caesar salad and more!

WEEK 2: Weeding Your Garden & Removing Invasive Species

• Pantry guide: Set yourself up for success by removing refined sugars, oxidative oils, stabilizers, fillers and other insidious inflammatory elements from your diet and what to replace them with.
• The beauty of healthy fats
• Organic VS conventional farming: Everything you need to know.
• Importance of pastured-raised proteins and dairy and organic produce
• Shopping small farms, which vegetables to focus on and which to avoid
• Fruit: How much, how often, what kind and is there any benefit to giving most fruit up?
• The best-gut-health food pyramids for the healing phase and later, long-term maintenance
• What controls your cravings? Does anyone really have a sweet tooth?

Cooking component: Veg-forward recipes with a focus on bitter greens and easy tactics for reducing carbs without deprivation.

• Recipes: Breakfasts, sides and vegetable dishes with healing greens unlike you’ve ever seen.

WEEK 3: Tilling and Readying the Soil for New Plants 

• Discuss gut-healing L-Glutamine, ways to introduce it into your diet to help patch up holes in the gut
• The importance of collagen and other gut-beneficial ingredients
• Overview of gut nourishing supplements

Cooking component: Soup for the Gut: Seamus’ number one tip to begin your gut-healing journey? More soups! In this lesson, we’ll explore the gut-friendly nutrients to tuck into your soups and how to make perfect pots of nutritive soups every time.

• Recipes: Bone broth, Little pharma soup, meatball soup in bone broth, lamb meatball stew, chicken soup with leeks and ginger and more!

WEEK 4: Planting Healthy Seeds: Introducing Probiotic Foods with Healthy Living Bacteria

• What are probiotics?
• Understanding strains, strengths, diversity over amount and debunking common myths
• Natural probiotic foods compared to probiotic supplements, and how to incorporate either/both into your diet
• A brief introduction to prebiotic foods and how they relate to probiotics

Cooking component: Many of us know the importance of taking a probiotic, but to achieve your healthiest gut ever, getting the most diverse amount of strains is optimal. One of the easiest way to do that is to incorporate probiotic foods into daily cooking.

• Recipes: Delicious snacks, sides and main dish recipes that weave in probiotic foods kefir, yogurt, miso and even kombucha.

WEEK 5: Planting Healthy Seeds 2.0: Your Fermentation Workshop

• Why fermented foods are natural probiotics
• History of fermented foods and the different cultures that use them
• What does fermentation mean?
• What happens during fermentation?
• Fermentation Workshop, how to ferment various ways with different kinds of ingredients

Cooking component: Fermenting at home can seem intimidating at first, but Seamus is going to show you how simple it really is. The results are delicious, and it’s an affordable way of getting probiotics into your diet! We’ll look at how fermentation works, different types of ferments as well as safety notes.

• Recipes: From kombucha and tonics to lacto-fermented vegetables (such as kimchi), Seamus will show you simple fermentation techniques that you can adjust and use with virtually any fruit or vegetable you desire for a lifetime of easy DIY ferments.

WEEK 6: Nurturing Your Healthy New Garden: Maintaining and Caring For Your Gut

• What are prebiotics and why are they important to the overall picture?
• Prebiotic foods: Best sources and how much daily?
• How to continue feeding the new, good bacteria in your gut so that they thrive long term
• Principles for building balanced, gut-protective meals
• The best ratio of vegetables: proteins: starches
• What to know about prebiotic supplements

Cooking component: Bacteria need prebiotics to flourish and one of the best ways to get them is through delicious whole foods. Seamus’ recipes are teeming with beneficial prebiotics and in this lesson he’ll show you all the delicious ways to get them in daily.

• Recipes: From asparagus, sunchokes, dandelion greens, onions, garlic, leeks and even herb stems, prebiotics are intensely flavored and incredibly healing. In this lesson you’ll make salads, breakfast, perfect pan-roasted fish and a to-die-for curry

WEEK 7: Make Your Garden Self-Sustainable: Lifestyle Changes to Support Long-Term Gut & Overall Health

• Lifestyle changes for the long term
• Supplementation as a whole outside of gut nutrients
• The importance of stress management, fitness, mindfulness and nature to overall health
• The danger of NSAIDs and natural alternatives
• The stress, cortisol and gut inflammation connection
• Movement recommendations for any level of fitness

Cooking component: A lot of people assume they can’t have foods like granola or hummus while keeping grains and legumes out of their diet. This lesson will cover the many ways to still enjoy your favorite foods with a few minor tweaks, plus take-to-go recipes to have in your toolkit to ensure you’re honoring your healthy new gut, even in the most vulnerable scenarios: outside the safety of your home.

• Recipes: Make-and-take meals for on the go and snacks that tick all the gut-health boxes, plus several daily meal plans to show you how to pull all of your gut-nutritive meals together.