We tried just about every diet. What stayed was variety.

If you sat the people of Monáda down at one table and asked who hadn’t eaten what, and when, it would be a long evening. We’ve been vegans. We’ve been vegetarians — some of us for several years. Others among us were committed meat-eaters for a long time. We tested keto, fasting, intermittent fasting. Pretty much everything you can try on your own body without your family no longer inviting you to Sunday lunch.

It wasn’t a pose or a chase after trends. Each of us, at the time, was genuinely looking for a way of eating that would make us feel good. And each of those diets worked for a while. That’s exactly what’s so treacherous about them.

Every diet works for a while

When you start a new diet, you change ten things at once. You start cooking at home. You stop eating mindlessly. You read labels, ditch sugary drinks, eat more regularly. The first few weeks are almost always great — and you credit that one thing you took off your plate, not the ten others you changed along the way.

Then comes phase two. The menu narrows. Thirty ingredients shrink to twelve “allowed” ones, they go round and round, food stops being a joy and becomes a discipline. The energy that showed up at the start slowly fades. And you start looking for the next diet to fix it.

We went around that loop more than once, and from different directions. And gradually we noticed something we couldn’t ignore: we didn’t feel best when we were eating “right.” We felt best when we were eating a wide variety. When the table held lots of fresh vegetables, legumes, grains, herbs, spices — and, why not, a piece of good meat, some fish or an honest cheese alongside. No label, no list of forbidden foods.

For a long time that was just our experience. Then we came across a study that describes it surprisingly well.

The American Gut Project: the guts of 11,336 people

In 2012, Rob Knight, Jeff Leach and Jack Gilbert launched a project that was unusually open for science. Anyone could join, send in a sample and fill out a detailed questionnaire about how they live and what they eat. In return, they got an analysis of their own gut microbiome. It was called the American Gut Project, and it became the largest citizen-science project of its kind.

The results were published in May 2018 in the journal mSystems (McDonald et al., American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research). At the time of publication, the researchers had 15,096 samples from 11,336 people in more than forty countries — most of them from the United States, the UK and Australia.

One of the questions on the survey was simple: how many different kinds of plants do you eat in a typical week?

Thirty versus ten

The researchers compared the two ends of the spectrum: people who reported more than thirty kinds of plants a week, and people who ate fewer than ten.

The first group had a markedly more diverse gut microbiome. It held more bacteria that ferment fiber into short-chain fatty acids — for example Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, a species that microbiome research repeatedly links to a healthy gut. When they then looked more closely at a smaller group, they also found that the “thirty-plus” people had a different chemical makeup in their samples and fewer antibiotic-resistance genes.

For us, though, the most interesting finding is a different one, and it gets quoted far less often. Participants also stated on the survey how they eat — vegan, vegetarian, omnivore. And that label said almost nothing about their microbiome. It couldn’t explain the differences between the samples. The number of plants on their plates could.

Read that again through the eyes of someone who has been through veganism, vegetarianism and a meat phase. For years we wrestled with which camp to belong to. And data from eleven thousand people says the camp hardly matters — what matters is how many different things make it into your pot over a week.

For years we worked out what to take off the plate. The right question was what else to put on it.

Why it should make sense

The gut microbiome isn’t a single organism; it’s an ecosystem. Different bacteria feed on different kinds of fiber and plant compounds. Onions feed different species than lentils, oats different ones than cabbage, caraway different ones than blueberries. When you keep eating the same ten things, you keep feeding the same narrow group — and the rest slowly starves.

A varied plate means a varied population. And a varied population is what we want from our gut: a large part of the immune system lives right there and is in constant contact with gut bacteria. Research on the so-called gut–brain axis, in turn, suggests that what happens in the gut is connected to how we feel in our heads. The American Gut Project itself found shared microbiome patterns among people with mental-health struggles that healthy people in the control group didn’t have.

We need to be careful here — this is a correlation, not proof of cause, and we’ll get to that. But it fits our experience. On a varied diet we felt fresher, got sick less and thought more clearly than in any “clean” phase.

So we don’t gloss over it

It would be easy to write “science has proven us right” and stop there. That wouldn’t be fair, so here are a few things, plainly.

It’s an observation, not an experiment. Nobody split the participants into groups and prescribed them thirty plants. People who eat a varied diet probably live differently in other ways too — they move more, cook more, smoke less. The study shows that variety and a diverse microbiome go together. It doesn’t prove that one causes the other.

Participants selected themselves. They paid for the analysis, so they were more educated, better off and healthier than average. The authors say so openly in the study.

People estimated their own plant count. It was a single question on a survey, not a weighed food diary. And the deeper analyses — chemical makeup and resistance genes — were done on only a few dozen people from both ends of the spectrum.

Thirty isn’t a magic threshold. It’s the number the researchers used to separate the most varied eaters from the least varied. Nowhere does it say that nothing happens at twenty-nine and heaven opens at thirty-one. Read it as a direction: more kinds are better than fewer.

And finally, Rob Knight himself pointed out when the results were released that we can’t yet reliably “steer” the microbiome — a short-term change in diet won’t permanently rebuild it. Variety isn’t a two-week cure. It’s a way of eating for years.

If you’re curious what newer and larger studies say about the same question — including one with 21,561 people — we went through them in the article There is no universal best diet. It also has a practical guide to what counts toward your thirty.

That’s why every dish here is different

When you look at our daily menu, you won’t find the philosophy of a single diet. You’ll find exactly what we arrived at after all those years.

One day there’s green curry with edamame, the next bhuna curry with roasted catfish. Next to paneer masala with cheese from the Jersey cows of Unín stands sviečková with braised beef. Mung bean kitchari takes turns with whole roasted trout. It isn’t indecision, and it isn’t an effort to please everyone. It’s intentional.

Those dishes have one thing in common: their foundation is fresh vegetables, legumes, grains, herbs and spices. Meat, fish or dairy come in where they make sense — as part of a varied plate, not as a replacement for it. And the dishes don’t repeat in a short rotation, because that rotation is exactly what we learned the hard way to avoid.

We don’t take anyone’s path away from them. If veganism, vegetarianism or anything else has worked well for you long-term, that’s fine — and you’ll eat well with us too. It’s just that after all those experiments, we stopped believing there’s one right diet for everyone. We believe in a varied plate. And it’s nice to know that eleven thousand people who sent scientists their samples point in the same direction.

One more thing, so there’s no confusion: we’re not doctors or nutritionists, and this article isn’t medical advice. It’s our experience and one honestly read study. If you’re dealing with a specific health issue, that belongs with a doctor. We’ll happily cook for you alongside — something different every time.

What you can cook from this

Seven dishes from our kitchen where that variety shows best. There’s no diet in them — just lots of different plants in one pot, sometimes with meat, sometimes without.