April 03, 2025
A 4-part meal plan for gut repair
Gut repair isn’t a war on sourdough or a race to out-supplement your symptoms. Most gut plans sound like punishment. But the gut doesn’t thrive on fear, rather the opposite. If your gut could write the menu for the day, it would look something like this (with recipes from breakfast to bedtime): Part 1: Seal the lining Your gut lining is delicate, yet capable of miraculous regeneration. It renews itself every 3–5 days, but only if you stop attacking it long enough for repair to begin. That starts the moment you wake up. Most people wake up and pour caffeine into an empty, inflamed gut. Not here. Enter: collagen-rich foods. A steaming mug of bone broth, slow-simmered from gelatinous cuts like oxtail, marrow bones or chicken feet, floods the gut with glycine and proline, the very amino acids your body uses to rebuild tight junctions and reinforce the intestinal wall. Glycine in particular calms inflammatory triggers like NF-κB, helping the gut shift out of fight mode and into repair mode. Then comes the fat. Add a spoonful of ghee or grass-fed butter and you’re not just making your breakfast richer, you’re delivering butyrate, the short-chain fatty acid your colon cells feed on. Butyrate energises the intestinal lining and boosts mucin production, that silky, slippery protective layer that prevents irritation, pathogens, and abrasion. In other words, you’re laying down a buffer. A balm. A biological layer of calm before anything else has a chance to aggravate it. Breakfast A mug of warm bone broth (see our Bone Broth Recipe) To start your day on a sweeter note try our Bone Broth Smoothie or Bone Broth Hot Chocolate, or our Bee Shield Smoothie if you want to skip the bones altogether but still get the benefits of collagen Soft-scrambled pastured eggs, cooked low and slow in ghee or butter Stewed fruit, simmered with Ceylon cinnamon and a pinch of sea salt Bone marrow on sourdough Part 2: Repopulate the flora By lunchtime, your digestive fire is roaring, and your microbes are ready to feast. But not on random fibre bars or synthetic prebiotics. They’re craving the tangy, fermented foods your ancestors thrived on, paired with bile-boosting organ meats. We start with the stars: fermented vegetables like sauerkraut or kimchi. These aren’t just crunchy condiments, they’re microbial seeding bombs, teeming with Lactobacillus, antimicrobial peptides, and acidifying compounds that rebalance your internal ecosystem. Here’s our step-by-step guide to making sauerkraut at home Then, we give those microbes their favourite food: fermentable fibres from root vegetables. Roasted carrots, mashed parsnips, or turnips, these dissolve into a gel and ferment beautifully in the colon, creating short-chain fatty acids like butyrate. (There it is again, the golden gut fuel!) Next come the unsung heroes: animal fats and organ meats. Because you can’t digest fats or absorb fat-soluble vitamins without bile, and you won’t get good bile flow unless you eat the foods that stimulate it. That means egg yolks, liver, and fattier cuts like lamb shoulder. Bile also has antimicrobial properties and keeps bacterial overgrowth at bay. Lunch Hearty + ancestral Lamb shoulder with kimchi and roasted carrots in tallow Oxtail stew with a spoon of fermented beetroot Shredded beef with mashed parsnips and a dollop of liver pâté Simple + quick Tinned mackerel or sardines with fermented carrot & avocado, or pickles Organ meat or oysters for a deep nutritional boost Part 3: Detox and digest Because the gut doesn’t regenerate in a stressed, stimulated state, it does its best work after sunset, while you’re resting, digesting, and detoxifying. Which is why dinner should do exactly that: support detox, ignite digestion, and soften the system into parasympathetic repair mode. This is where the liver steps in as the overnight ally. To run its Phase I and Phase II detox pathways, the liver needs an abundance of B vitamins, retinol, sulphur, magnesium, and antioxidants. So, we give it what it’s asking for. That might look like a few bites of beef liver sautéed in ghee with onions and lemon, an ancestral multivitamin loaded with preformed vitamin A, B₆, B₁₂, folate, copper, and zinc. Don’t forget the bitter greens. A small bowl of sautéed dandelion or rocket with a drizzle of vinegar can stimulate bile like nothing else. And when bile flows, toxins go, carried out through the stool instead of recirculating. Finish with a ginger or fennel tea, maybe a touch of raw honey. Dinner Grass-fed beef liver, sautéed with onions, garlic, and lemon (or any grass-fed meat of choice) Steamed bitter greens (rocket, chard, dandelion) Sweet potato mash with turmeric, black pepper, and grass-fed butter Herbal tea: ginger, peppermint, or fennel with a spoon of raw honey Part 4: No day should go by without a gut healing treat And the key to a gut healing treat are collagen or gelatine. Not sure what sets them apart? Here’s our quick guide on the difference But who cares about theory when there's sweet treats in store. Check out: Gut Healing Marshmallows (to pair with your Bone Broth Hot Chocolate) Raw Milk Panna Cotta Animal Based Fruit Gummies Rituals for resilience Food is medicine, yes, but if the rest of your life is wired, rushed, and screen-lit past midnight, no meal plan in the world is going to save your gut. Because the gut doesn’t operate in isolation. It’s hardwired into your nervous system, synced with your hormones, entrained to your circadian rhythm. So if you’re serious about healing, you need to think beyond the plate. Vague nerve relaxation: The vagus nerve is the long, wandering nerve that connects your brainstem to your gut, and when it’s activated, digestion flows, inflammation drops, and your gut lining gets the signal of safety. Simple practices like deep belly breathing, humming, cold exposure, and even gargling can tone the vagus. No expensive gadgets required. Fascia massage: Your gut isn't floating in space. It's wrapped in fascia, layered in nerves, and heavily impacted by physical tension. Slouched posture, emotional stress, a tight diaphragm, all of it compresses your core and slows digestion. That’s why a nightly ritual of belly massage, hip openers, or even rolling out the ribcage can do more than feel good, it can literally get things moving again. Magnesium: This is your gut’s favourite mineral, and most of us don’t get nearly enough. Magnesium calms the nervous system, relaxes the intestines, eases constipation, and deepens the quality of sleep (aka gut regeneration hours). Rub it on your belly, sip it in a warm tea, or soak in an Epsom bath, whatever your form, make it a little ritual. Live by the rhythms of the sun: Your gut, like the rest of your body, runs on circadian rhythms. Gut cells regenerate at night. Digestive enzymes spike in the morning. When you ignore these patterns: late-night meals, chaotic sleep, no morning light, you throw off everything from gut permeability to microbial diversity. So step outside at sunrise. Dim your lights after dinner. Eat with the sun. Sleep with the moon. In the mood (or need) to go down a gut health rabbit hole? We have some more articles for the curious You don't need another overpriced probiotic or gut shot (our gut health guidemap) Read here 5 foods you think are healthy (but are secretly ruining your gut Read here Colostrum, the ancient remedy for gut health Read here 6 mistakes you're making to worsen your IBS Read here 5 "healthy" exercise supplements that are ruining your gut Read here
