Are there things I can do to better support my microbiome? YES, there are some simple principles that you can follow to improve the quality of your microbiome - the collective name for the trillions of microorganisms that have such a huge impact on our overall health and wellbeing:
- eat prebiotics – insoluble fibre - such as dark, leafy greens - provides food for beneficial bacteria and is conducive to good gut health. It’s especially important if you also consume ultra-processed food, which is normally devoid of fibre.
- think of Grandma – in his brilliant book “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual”, Michael Pollan recommends that we avoid eating anything your grandmother would not recognise and whose name is not in plain English. And if your grandmother wouldn’t recognise some new molecule conjured up in a food lab it is unlikely to be recognisable by the organisms that you want to sustain. Since we have evolved in lockstep with our microbiome we need to feed our little friends stuff that they have evolved to love – stuff that our grandmothers and earlier ancestors had been eating.
- avoid toxins – any chemical, such as glyphosate, will influence your biome. We can never fully eliminate toxins, but we can read labels and try to maintain a constant, slow and deliberate process of replacing toxin-heavy products with cleaner versions.
- eat live foods – make or buy fermented foods that are still alive. Options are kefir or live yoghurt (which usually have the highest number of microorganisms per gram), kimchi, sauerkraut, beetroot or any other fermented vegetables, kombucha, aged cheeses, salami and similar sausages as well as miso (although always make sure you eat miso at room temperature or dissolve it in lukewarm, as opposed to boiling, water to keep the microorganisms alive).
- live means live – avoid ferments sold at room temperature as these have been pasteurised, killing the beneficial bacteria. Cooked products of fermentation, like sourdough bread, are better for you because the bacteria did some of the digestion, but they won’t contribute directly to the microbiome because the cooking kills microorganisms.
- mix products and producers - each product will have a different organism profile, and you can never tell whether the product you consume is high in the specific microorganism you need.
Wylde has a growing selection of fermented products, and we’re hard at work to add more. Noam PS - the market reopens in September. Sourceshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9530890/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S222541102100122Xhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950244/#:~:text=Traditional%2C%20empirical%20and%20in%20vitro,with%20an%20improved%20bread%20digestibility.