Building our Arsenal Against Disease ... Will Eating our Probiotics do the Trick?

I hope we are in agreement that It is critically important to find alternative and/or complementary approaches, not only to prevent or treat all diseases including Covid but also to reduce our growing societal and economic burden.

My previous blog opened the conversation around the ongoing clinical trials of supplemental probiotics including Lactobacillus and mixtures of Bifidobacteria and Lactobacillus, for treating COVID-19. The aim here is to shore up gut health to bolster immune system functioning.

To my way of thinking, there’s a mélange of bonuses that you’d gain by eating probiotic-rich foods versus taking a probiotic supplement.

Probiotic foods contain micronutrients that are essential for your body's daily functions, plant compounds that help protect your body from oxidative damage and stress, and fibre, one of the most important elements for gut health! Enjoying a bowl of kefir yoghurt with fermented bananas and berries or a salmon salad with fermented cashew pesto and kimchi is going to offer you a greater source of fibre that also acts as prebiotics (aka “food” to feed the probiotics in your gut.) Probiotics are live microorganisms needing food to function, just like we do. Whereas a strict probiotic supplement isn’t going to provide fibre or micronutrients.

A pill isn’t going to leave you feeling satisfied. Ingesting probiotic foods can be advantageous because you are consuming macro and micronutrients from the food that you choose. These nutritious foods modulate the human immune system as the result of the combined effects of compounds present in the starting ingredients and those formed during fermentation as well as of living and dead or inactivated microorganisms. My intuition is that the precise molecular stimuli in fermented foods responsible for immunomodulation probably are somewhat dependent on the composition of the total food rather than an isolated probiotic in a supplement.

In a recent article in Bostonia (Winter-Spring 2018), Gut Check, researchers tested the probiotics in food and supplements. The bacteria from the probiotic pills colonised tidy white circles, while the fermented food dishes bloomed in colourful, disorderly splotches! This is suggestive of the potential for the pill forms of probiotics to stay in uniform composition, whilst the fermented food probiotic strains were diverse in character and interacted collectively. So, fermented foods may have an advantageous edge over the more homogeneous probiotics due to their diversity. Given that current science promotes gut microbe diversity as a sign of health, this feels plausible to me.

🍏 Caveat; there are always exceptions and if the topic of probiotic supplements , particularly spore-based probiotics interest you, please book a free 15- minute “Discovery Call” with me. And let’s chat 👏

Food fermentations can also enhance food safety and nutritional quality by removing toxic or anti-nutritive compounds from the raw ingredients. For example, the removal of toxic compounds is a prominent feature of cereal, legume, and tuber fermentations. During sourdough fermentation, some lactic acid bacteria facilitate the degradation of phytate, a cereal grain-associated compound that prevents the absorption of various minerals in our gastrointestinal tract. Reducing phytate results in enhanced calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc bioavailability from this bread!. Sourdough fermentation is also hypothesised to reduce the concentration of other immune-reactive proteins, including the amylase-trypsin inhibitor in wheat, potentially making it better tolerated than conventional bread by individuals with non-celiac wheat intolerance or irritable bowel syndrome 🍞

I hope this gives you a little more clarity so you’re able to make a more informed decision about whether or not to use probiotics supplements or to onboard more probiotic nutrition 🥗