Satire | How about a gut reset programme?

Reclaim gut health to combat stress, anxiety, and depression, improve overall well-being, and fight climate change.

Are you getting stressed out over climate change? Feeling anxious every time you walk under an airport canopy, or every time your child appears for a competitive exam conducted by the NTA? Do you get panic attacks when it rains in your city, or when your daughter says she wants to study medicine? Does endemic institutional decay fill you with despair? Does idiotic enthusiasm for tyranny make you ill? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above, then I have just the solution for you: reclaiming gut health.

As per the latest medical research, an unhealthy gut is the most important effect, and cause, of stress, anxiety and depression — regardless of whether or not there are objective external triggers that might make stress and anxiety a legitimate human response. The critical determinant of a healthy gut: the 1,000 species of ‘good’ bacteria you are supposed to host there. These little darlings produce the enzymes that help your body absorb the nutrients in your food. They destroy the bad bacteria in your gut. And they also reduce the risk of cancer, diabetes and sadomasochistic behaviours such as voting repeatedly for those who squeeze out your life blood and feed it to cronies.

Given these benefits, people all over the world — including ‘pure’ vegetarians — are gulping down millions of live organisms every day. Those who would never dream of adopting a puppy or kitten are adopting billion-strong colonies of fully-grown bacteria. Acquaintances who would constantly bemoan the degeneration of the nation are now in perpetual high spirits. Their secret: they underwent a gut reset programme.

Seeing their dramatic transformation, I also signed up for a gut reset programme with a celebrity gut microbiome specialist. It was a six-day course, and it didn’t come cheap. Full disclosure: I negotiated a 15% discount in exchange for writing a column raising awareness about gut health. But frankly, I would have written this anyway, given the public interest involved. Apart from immediate personal benefits, a healthy gut also improves air quality and combats climate change by reducing emissions of certain kinds of gases.

For the benefit of those who would like to try a gut reset without paying for a formal programme, here are the five key principles drawn from my experience:

I know that as Indians, we love antibiotics. We are so crazy about them we have them for breakfast with milk, eggs and honey. Our love for them has even rubbed off on germs (bad bacteria), which have begun to stick around in our bodies for the tasty antibiotics they know are sure to come their way. But no more of this. We live in a polarised society where everyone must pick a side — ‘pro’ or ‘anti’. You are a pro- from now on.

Each probiotic capsule has billions of CFUs (Colony-Forming Units) — the good guys who will start setting up homes, offices and enzyme-making factories as soon as they land in your gut. Are the CFUs in your pill alive or are half of them dead? Do any of them have freeloaders (germs) lurking around? You don’t want to pay good money to eat dead bacteria, or worse, bad bacteria. So make sure you get the right CFUs.