Galia Melon and Blueberry Bircher Pots

• Mark’s Bircher muesli is perfect recipe for demonstrating how to include a wider variety of fruits, whole grains, and more fermented foods into your diet in a quick and easy way.
• The gut microbiome is something of a nutrition buzz phrase these days. The health of your biome and the diversity of the bacteria it contains is believed to be key to a stronger immune system and lower levels of chronic inflammation in the body, which in turn may help to reduce the risk of chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, some cancers, and even dementia.
• So, what can we do to help foster a healthy, more diverse, gut microbiome?
• Firstly, try to eat a wide and varied range of plant-based foods every day or at least over the course of a week. These foods – vegetables, fruit, whole grains, nuts, and seeds – are rich in fibre and ‘polyphenols’ on which the gut bacteria can feed. Different plants fuel different bacteria, encouraging a more diverse biome.
• Secondly, fermented foods such as yoghurt, kefir, most cheeses, including cottage cheese, sauerkraut, and the slightly more exotic kimchi and kombucha, also encourage a more diverse and healthier gut microbiome.
• So Mark’s recipe provides about one or two portions of your 5 A Day but most importantly, some fibre and different polyphenols from the apple, blueberries and melon, wholegrain fibre from the oats, and the fermented yoghurt. You could also experiment with using half Kefir or Kefir yoghurt and, for an extra plant portion, sprinkle on some pumpkin and sunflower seeds.

Dr Juliet Gray, Nutritionist