You might know by now that I am a big advocate for eating fibre in its many shapes and forms. 🥦 The way you get that fibre is by eating a variety of plants. The fibre feeds your microbiome, which is hopefully full of suitable microbes to feed on the fibre and multiply.
But what happens if your gut microbiome is not varied and doesn't have lots of different microbial species to break down the fibre? 🤔 Sometimes that means the fibre gets passed through, so it's no use to you or your microbiome.
So what's Plan B?
🔬 Researchers at Stanford put healthy adults on one of two diets for ten weeks. One group ate high fibre. The other ate high fermented food - yoghurt, kefir, kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha.
I expected the fibre group to win, but they didn't: 📈 The fermented food group showed an increase in microbiome diversity and a drop in inflammatory markers.
The high-fibre group didn't gain microbial diversity over the same ten weeks. The people who did see less inflammation were the ones who already had a diverse microbiome when they started.
The distinction is that fermented foods seed your microbiome with new microbes. Fibre feeds whatever microbes are already there.
Which means if the microbes you need aren't present, feeding harder doesn't help. You're fertilising barren soil. 🌾
But don't drop the fibre. It would be easy to read that study and conclude that fermented food beats fibre, but that's not the case. Seeding without feeding doesn't work either, because new microbes arriving in a gut with nothing to eat won't stick around!
So, in practice
🥬 Feed. Aim to eat thirty different plant species a week. It sounds challenging until you remember nuts, seeds, beans, lentils, herbs and spices all count. Build up gradually; a sudden jump to a plate of beans without the microbes can leave you bloated and farting like a trooper! 😅
🫙 Seed. Eat fermented foods regularly: raw sauerkraut and kimchi (fridge versions, as often shelf versions have been heat treated, which kills the microbes), unsweetened yoghurt and kefir, fermented cottage cheese and cheeses like cheddar, gruyere, camembert and brie. 🧀
Where Zestt Gut+ Lozenges fit? "Eat more fermented food and hit 30 plants a week" is hard to sustain, especially when you're travelling, unwell, or have just had a course of antibiotics (or other medications). ✈️
Each Zestt Gut+ lozenge contains seed and feed
The feed: Yacon (600mg), high in fructooligosaccharides, and New Zealand gold kiwifruit (600mg), which brings prebiotic fibre plus actinidin, an enzyme that helps break down protein. 🥝
The seed: Three proven probiotic strains at 2.5 billion CFU each: HN019 (Bifidobacterium lactis), LA-14 (Lactobacillus acidophilus), and BLIS K12 (Streptococcus salivarius), which work at the very start of your digestive tract, your mouth. 🦠
Take one to two lozenges daily to ensure a healthy microbiome and support your digestion and immunity. ✅