There’s a version of the gut health conversation that goes like this: yes, there are things you can do, but after fifty, with decades of medication and processed food behind you, the damage is largely done. You manage it. You don’t reverse it.
I believed that. For years.
Then in April 2025 my calprotectin result came back under five. That’s essentially no measurable gut inflammation. Not for a twenty-five-year-old. For me, at fifty-three, after twenty-four years on gout medication, eleven years on statins, and a diet that looked very much like what most people in the UK eat.
The “it’s too late” story is one of the most damaging things you can believe about your body over fifty. I want to show you what my data actually said — and more importantly, why I think the gut responds faster than most of us have been led to expect.
The Advice That Made Complete Sense (Until I Looked More Closely)
The “manage it, don’t reverse it” framing isn’t invented by people who want you to suffer. There’s a version of it that makes complete sense.
Here’s how it goes. The gut microbiome is complex. It takes decades to build. By the time you’re in your fifties, you’ve had antibiotics, processed food, chronic stress, long courses of medication — all of which affect the gut ecosystem. And there’s no drug for microbiome diversity. There’s nothing on an NHS prescription pad that says “take this and your gut bacteria will recover.” So the clinical advice, broadly, is: manage your symptoms. Take a probiotic if you want. Avoid the foods that cause you trouble. Eat a bit more fibre. That’s the guidance, and it’s reasonable as far as it goes.
Will Bulsiewicz — gut doctor, wrote a book I couldn’t put down — made a point that stopped me in my tracks. He said food intolerances, in the vast majority of cases, aren’t fixed by avoiding the trigger food. They’re fixed by healing the gut microbiome that was struggling to handle it in the first place. Avoidance manages the symptom. Feeding the gut addresses the cause.
That’s a different framing entirely. And it’s the one my data seems to support.
What My Gut Looked Like Before — And What I Wasn’t Testing For
Let me be honest about what the before period actually looked like. This isn’t a few months. This is decades.
From my late twenties through to December 2023, I was eating what most people in the UK eat. Not dramatically badly, by normal standards. Ready meals, supermarket bread, takeaways, snacks that came in packaging. The kind of diet that just happens when you’re busy running a business and nobody’s really told you there’s a reason to think differently.
On top of that: gout medication for twenty-four years. Allopurinol, 300mg, daily. Statins for eleven years. Asthma inhalers since 1978. I’m not anti-medication — every prescription was on my record — but certain medications over long periods can affect the gut environment. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s pharmacology.
Here’s what my liver was telling me during that period, which I now think was partly a gut story. December 2023: ALT — alanine aminotransferase, a liver stress marker — sitting at 69 iu/L. The upper limit of normal is 40. Nearly one hundred and seventy-three per cent of the upper limit. Not crisis levels. But elevated. Had been for years, on and off.
Was I tracking gut health specifically? No. Calprotectin — the gut inflammation marker that later came back under five — wasn’t on any NHS blood panel I’d ever had. I didn’t even know it existed.
That’s part of the problem. If you don’t test for something, you either assume it’s fine or assume it’s unfixable. I’d managed, somehow, to assume both simultaneously — which in retrospect doesn’t even make sense.
What I did know: bloating was just normal. Energy crashes were just part of life after fifty. The kind of digestive unpredictability you stop noticing because it’s always been there.
Think of a diverse, well-tended gut microbiome like a garden in full bloom — hundreds of different plants, rich soil, species supporting each other, barely any room for weeds because every patch is occupied by something useful. A depleted microbiome is the opposite: the cracked council flowerbeds at the end of a dry August. A few tough weeds that can survive anything, bare compacted soil, nothing flowering, no resilience. It doesn’t look dramatic from a distance. It just doesn’t do much. That was me. Council flowerbeds. Getting by. Not thriving.
What Changed — And How Gradually It Actually Happened
December 2023. Boxing Day. That’s when I decided something had to change, and the fasting and non-UPF approach started in earnest from January 2024.
The gut-specific piece came a bit later, and honestly more gradually than it might sound.
Mid-2024 — about six months in — I started adding fermented foods. Not dramatically. I bought a jar of kimchi from the supermarket. Then some sauerkraut. Just tried them. What surprised me: they taste far better than I expected. Particularly with salads, mixed into coleslaw, as a side with pretty much anything. It’s not a sacrifice. It actually improves the meal.
Then January 2025, I went further. Made twenty of my own fermented food recipes. Started using them regularly. That period overlaps directly with the blood test data that followed.
Alongside that, plant diversity. I started paying attention to how many different plant types I was getting in my eating windows. This was the bit I wasn’t expecting — you can hit twenty-six, twenty-eight, thirty different plants in a four to six hour eating window if you plan it even slightly. Soups work brilliantly for this. Herbs and spices count. A curry with a proper spice mix adds five or six plants just in the seasoning.
There was no dramatic intervention. No single thing I stopped or started on a specific date. What happened was a gradual accumulation of inputs that, three months later, showed up in a blood test I wasn’t especially watching for.
Here’s how I came to think about what these changes were actually doing. People ask how to get rid of the bad bacteria in a depleted gut. The honest answer is: you don’t really get rid of them. You outcompete them. You plant enough of the right things and tend to them properly, and there’s no room left for the weeds. They don’t disappear because you targeted them. They disappear because they’ve been crowded out. You don’t need a chemical. You need ground cover. Feed the good stuff well enough and the bad stuff runs out of space.
The Numbers That Changed My Mind About “Too Late”
January 2025. Blood panel. CRP — C-reactive protein, systemic inflammation marker — sitting at 6.2 mg/L. Technically within the normal range, but upper end. The kind of reading that doesn’t trigger a letter but shouldn’t be celebrated.
April 2025. Same panel. CRP: 1.0 mg/L.
That’s an eighty-four per cent drop. In three months.
And on the same panel: calprotectin. Under five micrograms per gram. The reference range for gut inflammation essentially starts above that threshold. Mine was below it. Essentially no measurable gut inflammation.
I want to be honest about how I found this out. The letter said “satisfactory.” That was it. I wasn’t sitting there watching for it in real time. I went back through the results later and properly read what had changed. Understanding came after the doing, not before it.
What also moved: ALT. December 2023 at 69 iu/L. By November 2025, it was 10 iu/L. The lowest reading in blood tests going back to 2012. During the statin years — when a drug was supposedly managing my cardiovascular risk — my liver was under stress the whole time. Off the statins, eating real food, adding fermented foods and plant diversity, and the liver came back to optimal. I wasn’t tracking ALT as a gut story at the time. Looking at the numbers together now, it may well have been.
Now. Here’s the mechanism that might explain why. Tim Spector’s research — the American Gut Project, the largest citizen science microbiome study ever run — found that people eating thirty or more different plant types per week had significantly more diverse microbiomes than those eating ten or fewer. That held regardless of dietary label. Vegan, meat-eater, anything in between. It wasn’t the label. It was the diversity.
The gut doesn’t care what you call your diet. It asks one question: did I get variety today, or didn’t I?
I was hitting thirty plants in a four-hour eating window. Not through virtue. Because I’d figured out that soups, salads, and a decent spice rack make it almost accidental.
Chronic low-grade inflammation doesn’t announce itself, by the way. Imagine having a cold so mild you never notice it — no blocked nose, no fever, no day off work. Just a faint, persistent background hum of not-quite-right that you’ve had so long you’ve forgotten what normal feels like. That’s what CRP at 6.2 feels like when it’s been there for years. You adapt to it. You stop realising it’s not normal. That’s why testing matters — because the absence of dramatic symptoms is not the same as the absence of a problem.
Who This Video Isn’t For — And Where to Go If That’s You
I want to be straightforward about something before I go further.
If you have a diagnosed inflammatory bowel disease, coeliac disease, or a serious gut condition with a clinical diagnosis — please don’t take this post as a reason to step away from your gastroenterologist’s advice. The data I’m describing is from someone without those diagnoses. My calprotectin result ruled out serious gut inflammation. If yours comes back elevated, that’s a conversation to have with your GP — not a YouTube video to implement around.
The “manage it” advice exists for good reasons in serious clinical situations. This post isn’t speaking to those situations.
The Bit That Matters Most — If You Haven’t Had a Diagnosis Yet
Here’s what I think is the most important thing in this video, and it’s for people who haven’t been diagnosed with anything yet.
The mechanism that produced those results — feeding the gut diverse inputs, reducing inflammatory load — doesn’t start the day you get a diagnosis. It’s been developing, or declining, for years beforehand. The garden doesn’t go from thriving to cracked council flowerbeds overnight. It just quietly gets less interesting, season by season, without you noticing.
If you’re noticing things that feel off — digestion, energy, something that’s hard to name — and you haven’t had any testing done, the question worth raising with your GP isn’t “what’s wrong with me.” It might be: “Can we look at some of these markers before something becomes a problem?” Calprotectin isn’t a standard NHS panel. CRP often isn’t requested routinely either. But both are available, and both tell you something about what’s happening now — before a diagnosis, not after one.
And I’ll be honest about something else. The fermented food habit I described? January 2025, twenty recipes, using them regularly. I haven’t kept it up as consistently as I should since. The data in this post is real. The habits that produced it aren’t things I’ve nailed permanently. That’s the actual challenge — not the knowledge, not the taste (they genuinely taste better than you’d expect). It’s the consistency over time. Worth saying. Because if I only showed you the results without the honest reality of maintaining them, that wouldn’t be a particularly useful post.
The gut isn’t broken. It’s just responding to what it’s being fed. At fifty-three, with decades of the wrong inputs behind me, the data suggests that’s still a changeable thing.
I’ll leave that with you.
🎯 Key Takeaways
- The “too late” belief may be costing you years: My calprotectin came back under five at fifty-three, after decades of medication and a standard UK diet. The gut responded to different inputs.
- CRP dropped eighty-four per cent in three months: From 6.2 mg/L to 1.0 mg/L. That’s a systemic inflammation marker moving significantly in a short window.
- Diversity is the lever, not the label: Thirty or more different plant types per week was the target, regardless of what dietary pattern you follow.
- Fermented foods were easier than I expected: Not a sacrifice — genuinely improved the meals. The barrier was habit, not taste.
- Testing matters before symptoms do: Calprotectin and CRP aren’t standard NHS panels, but they’re available. The absence of obvious symptoms isn’t the same as the absence of a problem.
- The consistency is the hard part: Not the knowledge, not the food. Knowing and doing are two different things — and I’m not immune to that gap either.
Curious About Your Own Gut Markers?
The eating approach that underpins everything I’ve described — the food and fasting framework, the plant diversity strategy, what to eat and when — is covered in the 14-Day Rhythm Reset Guide. It’s free, and it’s the right starting point if this has made you think about your own numbers.
👉 Get the 14-Day Rhythm Reset Guide (free)
💪 Want ongoing support? Join Rhythm Club for £30/month (includes FREE app access, community, and weekly accountability calls)
⚠️ Important: This is educational content based on evidence and personal experience. It is not medical advice. Speak to your GP before making changes to your fasting pattern, diet, or medication.
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