8 Foods That Actually Fix Your Gut (Not Probiotics)

[00:00] Most online advice for gut health involves expensive probiotics and detoxes and gut cleanses, and the truth is, you don't need any of that. I've spent my entire adult life studying medicine

[00:12] and nutrition, and when I sit down to eat, one thing I'm shooting for is top notch gut health. And I and my family achieve that with affordable foods that are easy to find,

[00:24] and yet they're super underutilized because most people just haven't been told about these benefits, or they just didn't develop the habit. So in this video, I'll share with you eight foods that I eat on a regular basis for gut health, and we'll cover which have the strongest evidence,

[00:41] and which are kind of overhyped online. And if you have a condition like IBS, irritable bowel, in the end, I'll refer you to an interview with a world-class expert. But first, let's start with

[00:53] the food that is famous for its effect on gut regularity. And that is prunes. Prunes contain some fiber, and they also contain sorbitol, which is a natural sweetener that pulls water into the intestine.

[01:07] So that helps make your stool softer and easier to pass. It's been shown in clinical trials that people with constipation that are given prunes, see an improvement in their stool frequency, and consistency. One trial even reported that prunes beat silly musk, which surprised me.

[01:25] Now in people who are not constipated who are generally healthy, prunes still seem to improve stool consistency, but the evidence there is not as strong. But there is a catch. These trials often use about 80 to 100 grams of prunes a day, which is about 200 calories. So I would use the

[01:43] prunes to replace a current snack or a dessert that you're eating rather than just adding them on top of your regular diet, because you risk putting it on weight. And if you're not used to eating prunes, especially if you have a lower fiber diet, you want to start with lower amounts and slowly ramp it

[02:00] up, because prunes can cause bloating and gas at first. And if you have a condition with diarrhea, so IBS with diarrhea instead of constipation, for example, then prunes might not be the best option

[02:13] for you. Because obviously you want to reduce the amount of water in your stool, and so prunes are going to go in the opposite direction. So silly musk might actually be more helpful to you in that situation. But if you are struggling with constipation, or if you have a low fiber diet, then prunes are a great

[02:29] option. Okay, the next food is one of the most underestimated on this list, and it's a shame, because we have some really interesting evidence behind it. A randomized trial conducted at Stanford University gave people fermented foods for a month, and they observed an increase in their

[02:47] microbiome diversity and also reduction in their inflammatory markers. The caveat with fermented foods is that there are many different kinds, and I'm more cautious with some fermented foods, like me, so, or kimchi, because they tend to be very high in salt. Whereas my two favorite fermented

[03:05] foods don't have that downside. This first food is fascinating, because it's very common for people to eat yogurt for its probiotic effects. But this food is also a version of fermented, dairy

[03:19] fermented milk, but it's a stronger probiotic than yogurt with stronger evidence behind it, and yet it's very underestimated by most westerners. Most people don't even know what this is, and that is

[03:32] kefir. If I go down the street in a major western city, and I asked 10 people about kefir, I'd be surprised if one or two know much about it. They'll probably think it's a singer and artist or something, but the scientific studies indicate that kefir is a stronger probiotic than yogurt,

[03:49] it contains more microbiome species, and it also contains more antioxidants. And that's not all. Randomized trials show that kefir can help lower blood sugar, and also inflammation when taken

[04:02] consistently over long periods of time. The most common type of kefir is made from dairy milk, but you can make it from any milk you want, cow milk, plant milk, depending on your preference. Now, there is a catch to kefir. Most of the brands you'll find commercially available,

[04:17] they add sugar to them, and quite a bit, just to make it more palatable, because people like to drink sweet things. I typically try to look for a version that doesn't have sugar added, so that's generally

[04:29] what I would recommend. Now, this next part is where a lot of gut health videos go wrong, because eating fermented foods to get more of these micro species, colonizing our gut is great,

[04:41] but if we don't feed them properly, they don't last in our body. And their food what our microbiome eats is what we call prebiotics. So probiotics contain the microbes themselves,

[04:54] prebiotics is what we eat to feed those microbes. One powerful prebiotic is viscous fiber. So this is a specific type of fiber that forms a gel with water inside our gut, and it nourishes

[05:08] your gut wall. And viscous fiber actually has a plethora of beneficial effects in your body. It's quite amazing. It helps promote satiety, and it also helps bring down cholesterol and blood sugar.

[05:21] It's kind of amazing when you think about it. Most people think that all fiber, all it does is just bulk goes through your body, comes out the same way that it went in, no sort of physiological effects,

[05:33] and nothing could be further from the truth. One example of viscous fiber is something called beta glucan. And beta glucan can shift your microbiome toward beneficial species of microbes, and it can also

[05:46] help improve stool frequency. This is one reason that I eat some oats on most days. They're one of my favorite gut foods because they're a good source of beta glucan, a viscous fiber, and they're dirt

[06:00] cheap. Also randomized trials with oats show many other benefits beyond gut health. We see a reduction of blood sugar in diabetic patients, a reduction of blood pressure in pre-hypertensive patients,

[06:14] and for people who are overweight, oats can help lower body weight and body fat. So they're good for the gut, but they also hit all these other targets, which is one reason I like to include them. Now there is a caveat with oats as well. There are many different types of oats for sale, and one of

[06:30] the most common and most popular are instant oats. But I'm pretty cautious with those because they're chopped up, and they have a lot of sugar added to them. So I usually look for either still cut

[06:42] or rolled oats, which are a whole grain, and there's no sugar added. One of my favorite ways to eat oats is together with another food that's a great source of viscous fiber for a gut health cocktail,

[06:54] and that's berries. And I usually just buy frozen berries, they're cheap, they don't go bad, they last longer, and the nutrition is very well preserved by the freezing process. Whichever one you like, blueberries, blackberry, strawberries, raspberries, they're all delicious. I usually get a mixed bag

[07:10] of frozen berries. It's cheap, and the diversity is already built in. And berries also contain a lot of polyphenols, which are these amazing compounds that also feed your gut bacteria. And berries have been

[07:23] shown to help improve healthy types of microbiome species like bifidobacterium and lactobacillus. You've probably heard of short-chain fatty acids, right? They've become kind of household names now,

[07:37] it's pretty common to talk about them. These are compounds that your microbiome produces when they break down viscous fiber. So you feed your gut bugs viscous fiber among other things, and they pay

[07:49] you back by producing some of these short-chain fatty acids like butyrate, for example, which fuel your gut lining, and they also help improve multiple parameters like insulin sensitivity,

[08:02] blood sugar, and cholesterol level. So when you eat berries, you're not just getting antioxidants, you're also fueling your microbiome, and then you're profiting from their output as well. It's really a

[08:14] beautiful bi-directional symbiotic system. Okay, but viscous fiber is not the only prebiotic, it's not the only microbiome fuel. One important one is resistance starch. Resistance starch is a type of

[08:30] carbohydrate that is not digested in a small intestine, and it reaches your large intestine, your colon, where your microbiome can feast on it. So one food I eat regularly that contains a good amount

[08:44] of resistance starch is pulses like lentils. When I tell you these foods are cheap, lentils are dirt cheap, and the health effects are overwhelmingly beneficial a minute across the board, and yet

[08:57] most Westerners barely eat lentils. It's crazy, really, and trials show that pulses like lentils or beans can help lower insulin resistance, inflammation, blood sugar, and cholesterol. A lot of people

[09:11] have this view that lentils or pulses are boring. That's really a lack of creativity because you can have in a thousand different ways. You can have lentil doll, lentil burgers, lentil soup, lentils stew,

[09:24] lentil curry, lentil salads, lentil pie, lentil pancakes. I mean, it's endless, but there is also a caveat to lentils and other pulses. As we've said before, if you don't currently eat pulses, if you have a

[09:38] low fiber diet, you want to start slow and you want to ramp them up very gradually. Some people go from a low fiber diet to eating a large bowl of lentils or beans overnight, then they get all

[09:50] bloated and gassy, and they conclude, okay, these foods are not for me, and they don't agree with me. I mean, that's like maybe a couch potato for 10 years, and then going to the gym and lifting

[10:03] every weight in the gym on day one, I'm just going to get hurt. That doesn't mean exercise is bad for my body. It just means you need to let your body adapt to the healthy activity. And this is especially true if you have a gut condition like IBS and others, you might be more sensitive to these foods

[10:20] at least at first. I would say this is one of the most important takeaways from this whole video. Even the best gut food out there is useless if we don't introduce them properly. If we too much

[10:32] too fast and your body just revolts, baby step it, and one way to do this is from that Stanford trial that we talked about, if you have trouble with some of these foods, some of these fiber foods,

[10:44] start with the fermented foods. Those can be a little easier at first. Okay, what about canned beans or canned lentils? Absolutely use them. If they're more convenient, or if they're cheaper, or you can get them done faster, use them. They're perfectly fine. There's even options on the market

[11:01] that are BPA-free and salt-free, so all these concerns, people have a canned food. You can get around that. One way I sometimes have lentils is in lentil pasta. We hear so many stories about processed foods. We

[11:13] almost get allergic, even hearing it, and most ultra-processed foods are not good choices. That's true, but processed doesn't necessarily mean unhealthy. Caffeer is processed. Yogurt is processed. Olive oil is

[11:26] processed. Some processed foods are perfectly healthy for us, so we want to use our noggins to make these decisions and not just go by these rigid rules. Lentil pasta is a great replacement for regular

[11:40] refined white pasta. It's higher in protein. It's higher in fiber. It's a great option. Okay, the next food is one of the most delicious, in my opinion, but before that, just one quick last point on resistance starch. There's different types of resistance starch. Resistance starch, one through four,

[11:57] and so different foods have different types. Lentils, for example, in pulses, have type one, green bananas, have type two, etc. And there's some exciting, emerging evidence telling us that they have

[12:09] slight physiological effects. They're not all exactly the same. And this is kind of like fiber. Fiber isn't one thing. There's many, many different types of fiber with different physiological effects as well. So I think the best strategy is diversity. Have you a variety of these foods with different

[12:26] components on different days and mix them up? And that way you cover your bases. Okay, the next food is also massively underrated when it comes to gut health. Nuts are famous food for being healthy

[12:39] fats or being good for the heart, but most people don't realize they also play an important role in gut health. Trials have found that about one and a half ounces of walnuts daily. So one ounce is about

[12:52] the palm of your hand. So one and a half times that can enhance probiotic species in your gut that produce butaturate that short-chain fatty acid we talked about. And those same trials find that walnuts

[13:04] also have some other effects outside of the gut, like reducing cholesterol, for example. So as we saw before, multiple benefits. But again, some caveats, nuts are pretty calorie dens. So you don't want to

[13:17] eat a whole bag while you're watching TV. It's easy to do that, but it's also going to lead to some weight gain. Just because the food is healthy doesn't mean the calories don't matter. Eating too much of something health-promoting is still not a good idea. Just like we said before, ideally,

[13:32] use nuts to replace a snack or a dessert instead of just adding them on top of all the calories you already eat. If you replace, for example, a sugary snack like chocolate or something like that, I mean, that's a fantastic swap. And obviously, if you have nut allergies, then adapt accordingly.

[13:49] Sometimes what I'll do is I'll have a bunch of these foods together. So for breakfast, I might have some oats, with some kefir in it, and berries, and add some walnuts, crushed walnuts in there as well. So it's kind of a gut health powerhouse. There's one other fruit that I eat regularly

[14:06] that's also great for viscous fiber, and that's kiwis. Kiwis are also underrated and under-consumed. One randomized trial showed the two gold kiwis eaten daily, improved bowel movement, frequency,

[14:20] and symptoms of constipation. And it was actually similar to psyllium. They were both equally effective when matched fiber content. So pretty impressive. So this is another good example of why gut health advice needs to be specific. If your issue is constipation, for example, kiwis and prunes,

[14:38] probably much better for you than some random probiotic pill, whereas if your issue is more diarrhea and different types of IBS, then the approach is different. Syllium might help you more, etc. But now

[14:50] we get to the food where the internet tends to get ahead of the science and kind of overhypid. And that's kombucha. Kombucha is a fermented drink. It has kind of a fizzy feel and a light tartness

[15:03] and a light sweetness. I think kombucha can be a great replacement for soda. I have kombucha all the time. But I've seen some crazy claims on the internet that kombucha reverses all kinds of diseases that

[15:16] accuse cancer. I mean, we have zero compelling scientific evidence of that. And there's also a caveat for kombucha. So they usually add some sugar during the fermentation process. That's to feed the microbes.

[15:28] But that gets used up. That gets broken down by those microbes. And by the end, there's little to no sugar left. But most brands will add more sugar in the very end for the consumer, right, for the drink

[15:41] to be sweeter. Because that's how most people like to drink everything. But there are some brands of kombucha that don't do that. So that's usually what I go for. Actually, I just had some today. I'll look for a picture. I'll put it down here. I don't have any connection to the company or the brand.

[15:56] So no conflict of interest. So I drink kombucha because I like it because it gives you that refreshing feeling similar to soda, but without the calories, without the sugar. So it's probably much better for you than drinking soda. And it's a probiotic. I imagine future evidence will show benefits for the

[16:13] gut. That's very likely. But we got to be careful before we go crazy. We need a lot more scientific evidence. If you drink kombucha, let me know which one is your favorite. And if you've discovered other tricks, other products out there that I'm not aware of. I would rank some of the other foods,

[16:28] confere, prunes, kiwis, oats, above kombucha. We have more evidence for those right now. The bottom line here is that gut health is not about one magic food, one super food. You're building

[16:40] an ecosystem inside of you literally. And so that's done with diversity. So here's an actionable way to get started. Add one fiber food and one fermented food in small amounts. For example, a little bit of

[16:54] oats at breakfast with some confere or a bean burger or a lentil burger with some 10 pay on the side. You want to start small so your gut can adapt. The whole idea here is to build a pattern and a habit

[17:08] that works for you long term. Guys, this strategy beats any cleanse or detox or fad out there. Hands down. If you suffer from gut issues like constipation, diarrhea, IBS irritable bowel, check out my full

[17:23] interview with one of the leading experts on this topic. We cover exactly which gut health advice applies to you and which you should be cautious about. I'll see you in there.