When should you add prebiotics & probiotics to your nutrition plan?
TL;DR: You can heal your guts and enjoy your food by building your meals around protein and fiber first. This will help your gut microbes and reduce GI distress more than taking probiotic or prebiotic supplements. (about 5 min read)
Metabolic tips for a healthy gut microbiome:
Use the “get to 25g of fiber guide” to get enough fiber to support a healthy gut microbiome!
Add some fermented foods to increase diversity in your guts microbiome and reduce inflammation!
Avoid simple carbohydrates when you’re not going to be moving - simple carbs increase bloating and GI distress when we don’t absorb them fast enough.
What are “probiotics” and “prebiotics”? Probiotics are foods with live (“active”) microbial cultures. And prebiotics are nutrients that support the growth of those microbial cultures.
Okay, so what are “microbes”? Microbes are organisms that are very small; these are all of the bacteria and fungi that live in our guts to help us digest food and absorb nutrients, live on our skin to help us fight infections, and help us make foods like cheese, yogurt, bread, kimchi, sauerkraut, and all other fermented foods. The microbes that help us be healthier and should live with us are called “commensal microbes” and those that cause disease are all called “pathogenic microbes”.*
Your gut needs a diverse set of microbes that eat fiber and produce short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) to be healthy. Many different types of microbes can live in your guts, but not all of them help promote good gut health. And some of them can increase inflammation (this causes leaky gut syndrome) or cause food poisoning (like too much E. coli.*). There’s still a lot we need to learn about which microbes do what and how they interact together, but what is clear is that we need DIVERSITY in our gut microbiomes and we need those gut microbes to produce short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs). SCFAs can then interact with the immune cells that line our guts to reduce inflammation and bloating, as well as increase vitamin absorption. How do feed our gut microbes so that they are diverse and make SCFAs for us? We eat prebiotics.
Your gut wants prebiotics and probiotics from YOUR FOOD. Probiotics are foods that contain living microbes (bacteria and yeast) that should live in your gut. Your gut naturally has a mixture of microbes that you’ve ingested from different sources - coming out of the vaginal canal when we’re born, eating dirt when we’re kids, on the surface of fruits/veggies, from the surface of our own hands as we touch/prepare our food (yes, even after we wash our food and our hands; no this isn’t gross and if the skin microbes were missing, we’d get sick). You can also intentionally add prebiotics into your diet with fermented foods. Or supplements.
Prebiotics are biologically active compounds that stimulate and support the growth of “good bacteria”. That’s marketing talk for fiber. You can buy a month’s worth of prebiotic supplements for anywhere from $25 - $150. You can also buy probiotic supplements for about the same price. If someone did both, they could easily spend $50 a month to help their gut. We can also eat 25g of fiber per day with some fermented foods, and since we have to eat anyway, we can choose fiber + fermented foods instead of processed foods that lack fiber or are sterile and save ourselves the supplement money.
Can we take probiotics alone and skip the 25g of fiber from food? No. There’s a misconception that we got bloated, or constipated, or have other types of gastrointestinal (GI) distress because we don’t have enough microbes. And that taking probiotics can solve the problem. If this was true, we wouldn’t have to keep taking probiotics if we all felt better once we got those “good bacteria” into our systems. “Of course not,” some of you may be thinking, “if you want those probiotic bacteria to stay, you have to also take pre-biotic supplements.” Pre-biotics = fiber. We may benefit from adding probiotics to our diet, but if we don’t also get sufficient fiber, the microbes we ingested will just pass through us.
Does a fiber supplement work just as well as fiber from your food? It doesn’t seem like it, but even if it did, a fiber supplement ONLY has fiber it in. A fiber-rich food has other essential vitamins and minerals in it. You could take supplements for both probiotics to get a more diverse microbiome, and then take a prebiotic supplement to get fiber. Or you could eat a roasted squash (fiber, potassium, vitamin C, vitamin B6, magnesium) with Greek yogurt (protein, vitamin A, vitamin Bs (B2, B5, B12), potassium, calcium), and spiced, crushed walnuts (fiber, protein, essential omega-3 fatty acids). You know, a regular meal.
So what’s the best way to avoid bloating and GI distress? You can enjoy your food AND heal your gut. Build your plate with protein and fiber first. Add some fermented foods to help increase gut diversity. Contrary to popular belief, we get bloated when we eat more simple carbohydrates than we can absorb at a fast enough rate, so the best way to avoid bloating is to reduce simple carb intake when we’re not moving. Remember that “carbohydrates” refers to fiber (aka “slow carbs”) and sugar (aka “fast carbs”) - any carb that isn’t fiber is seen as sugar by our bodies. More about when we need simple carbs to fuel our movement here. And stay hydrated so that you can actually absorb the food you’re eating!
Metabolic tips for a healthy gut microbiome:
Use the “get to 25g of fiber guide” to get enough fiber to support a healthy gut microbiome!
Add some fermented foods to increase diversity in your guts microbiome and reduce inflammation!
Avoid simple carbohydrates when you’re not going to be moving - simple carbs increase bloating and GI distress when we don’t absorb them fast enough.
E. coli and other “pathogenic” bacteria that often cause food poisoning make us sick because there’s too much of that one type of bacteria at once. Not because that particular bacteria produce a toxin or something that is guaranteed to make us sick. There’s a natural amount of E. coli found in all of our guts; the problem comes from the lack of diversity and the overgrowth of certain types of bacteria when we eat too much simple sugars and not enough fiber.
Shah, BR et al. (2020) Effects of prebiotic dietary fibers and probiotics on human health: with special focus on recent advancement in their encapsulated formulations. Trends in Food Science and Technology.
