I was kindly gifted The Clever Guts Diet by a colleague which I’m hoping was for educational purposes and not because she believes me to have a gut thats health needs improving. Either way, it’s one of the very few non-fiction books I’ve read so far this year but is a topic I’m actually really interested in.
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The Clever Guts Diet focuses on the importance of your gut and more specifically the microbiomes that live in. It discusses what the microbiomes are, how they work and what they do and then proceeds to give plenty of advice on how to ensure you’re keep these healthy, what’s good to feed them and what some of the bad foods out there can do to your microbiome.
As with other non-fiction reviews, I’m going to stick to “plot” and “character” using the “plot” portion to discuss the content and its viability and using the “character” section to discuss how it’s come across and how Mosley’s personality comes through.
The Clever Guts Diet plot – 4.25/5
I have quite an interest in personal health – not to a point where I do a lot about it but my particular focus is more on knowing what’s bad and bad for you and then having this knowledge if I ever feel I need a health kick. The Clever Guts Diet goes further into teaching me this and making me aware of what’s good for your microbiome.
One of the big learnings I took away from this is that essentially your microbiome plays a huge part towards how you feel – whether you get ill regularly or have trouble waking up or lack energy, these can all be dictated by what foods your microbiome is digesting and how it’s dealing with them. This was a really interesting learning and one that gave me a little more knowledge on the good and bad things to go inside your body. I also learned some new things such as how bad bread is.
The two most useful elements from the book are that whenevr Dr Mosley discusses negative things for your microbiome, he often then gives you healthy alternatives which makes this feel less preachy than it could. The other is that there are microbiome-healthy recipes in the back. These utilise ingredients that will boost your microbiome’s health and do look to be fairly easy to make too.
The Clever Guts Diet characters – 4.25/5
Dr Michael Mosley was a recognised figure across television and radio for quite some time and his passing in June of this year was incredibly saddening, epsecially to the slightly older british public who’d been following his work on BBC Radio 4 and many TV channels over the past couple of decades.
In The Clever Guts Diet his down-to-earth and incredibly intelligent personality absolutely shines through. Despite the vast amount of information dumped on you in this book, it never once felt like a dump because it always felt like it was just Mosley getting out his thoughts, learnings and rememberings. His personality shines through with honest opinions, recollections of events relating to the subject and tales of his own experiences.
This made it felt like you were reading a friend’s message to you on the subject and therefore never felt like I was being forced to read it but that I wanted to because he made it so down-to-earth and enjoyable to do so!
The Clever Guts Diet final rating – 4/.25/5
The Clever Guts Diet is a book about a subject that intrigued me, written by a man who wrote it in a way that, despite the vast amount of information involved, never made it dull to read about. If your health is something you care about and you’ve not yet read of the importance of keeping your microbiome healthy, I couldn’t suggest a better book to get started with. Using personal anecdotes, honest opinions and a bundle of genuinely useful and nonjudgmental information, Dr Michael Mosley has penned some great learnings to be had here in one sitting!
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