Stable blood sugar is a key part of gut healing.
But there is no universal blood-sugar diet, because people have different blood sugar reactions to different foods.
For years, I believed blood sugar stability came from eating more animal protein and fat and keeping carbs low. But there’s no standard formula.
After menopause, a protein-and-fat-heavy approach did not leave me feeling better. I was gaining weight, getting foggy and my gut became sensitive, despite my best efforts to stabilize my blood sugar.
Biomes change with age, so my old approach was not right for me anymore.
The Missing Variable: Your Gut Bacteria
There’s a growing body of research showing that your blood sugar response to a given food isn’t determined only by the food itself, but shaped significantly by the specific bacteria living in your gut.
Two people can eat the exact same meal and have completely different blood sugar spikes, based on how their individual microbiome processes it.
Multiple studies, including large-scale trials tracking thousands of meals across hundreds of people, have found that gut microbiome activity contributes significantly to how differently people respond to the same food, on top of the usual factors like age, weight, and the food’s nutrient makeup.
Specific microbial patterns have even been linked to how efficiently someone processes carbohydrates and where their baseline blood sugar tends to sit.
In other words: the glycemic index printed on a food label is never the whole story. Your bacteria are responsible for YOUR blood sugar response.
What This Meant for Me
When I finally looked at my own biome test, I learned my gut doesn’t do as well with a heavy saturated fat load like it used to.
Now that my body has shifted hormonally in menopause the same diet that healed me many years ago was now working against me. There was belly fat, brain fog and my energy wasn’t where it should be.
After shifting towards more resistant starch and fiber-rich carbohydrates, both my gut and my blood sugar responded better. I felt calmer, more regulated, and I started feeling better and losing water weight.
I did not do this with willpower, but information. My biome told me which foods work for me and which do not. Last year I did a GAPs diet and while I felt better at first my body did not respond like expected in the long term.
An Unexpected Confirmation
A few weeks ago, I had a small experience that reinforced this even further. I needed to take ibuprofen, a medication well known for being tough on the gut lining, and one that causes constipation in a lot of people. I braced for the usual digestive fallout.
It didn’t come. My gut barely noticed.
The plant-forward, fiber-rich way I’d been eating based on my biome results, supported bacterial diversity and mucosal resilience to buffer against the gut damage I feared.
A well-fed, diverse biome isn’t just about digestion. It’s about resilience.
While I know many people react to fiber, eating less of it does contribute to the problem. There is a way to micro feed the good bacteria so they start crowding out the bad ones.
Blood Sugar as a Nervous System Stressor
This blog post is not about eating more plants or fiber, it’s about knowing who lives inside your gut so that your diet supports your resilience, not your ideas of what’s healthy.
Stable blood sugar, a well fed biome and nervous system regulation are the three critical factors in healing gut when all else fails.
And they are all connected. Blood sugar swings aren’t just a metabolic event, they’re a nervous system event.
When blood sugar spikes and then crashes, your body treats that instability as a threat. It responds by releasing stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to bring glucose back into a safe range. That’s a sympathetic nervous system response, the same fight-or-flight activation that shows up under emotional stress.
Do this repeatedly, meal after meal, and you’re asking your nervous system to run a low-grade stress response multiple times a day, every day, often without realizing it.
This matters enormously for gut health specifically, because the nervous system and the gut are in constant conversation. A body that’s frequently tipped into fight-or-flight doesn’t digest well. Blood flow and stomach acid are deprioritized when the body senses a threat or blood sugar swing. So an unstable blood sugar pattern can become a quiet disruptor of the digestive processes you’re trying to support.
I no longer think about blood sugar and gut health as separate, they’re the same conversation.
Individualizing the Approach
There is no universal diet for blood sugar stability, because there’s no universal biome.
The framework that works brilliantly for one person’s gut bacteria can genuinely work against another’s, because the bacteria doing the metabolic labor are different from person to person. The diet must be personalized.
A biome test changes this from guesswork into information. Instead of assuming a popular framework should work and pushing through when it doesn’t, you can actually see what your own ecosystem is equipped to handle and build from there.
My Approach
I now offer low-cost biome testing and coaching in my health coaching practice.
I work with two systems together: the biome, and the nervous system.
The biome’s ability to process food and the nervous system’s stress load shapes how digestion and blood sugar function.
It’s not just in your head and it’s not just about food, it’s about addressing mind and body. Biome, blood sugar, and stress.
Often, the answer isn’t a stricter diet, it’s about rebuilding the ecosystem that supports food variety. The less variety we eat, the less variety we can tolerate.
Next week, I’ll share a recipe for boime-building, “medicinal” muffins that are as healthy as they are tasty. I am obsessed.
And I’m also taking clients who want to know what lives in their gut and how to shape a healing lifestyle around it.
