My oldest recently had to do two successive rounds of antibiotics. Now, given the choice between letting an infection run rampant or downing the antibiotics, there was no contest, but I still wrung my hands over the thought of her gut flora being decimated. Especially since she just graduated high school and spends most of her time and money eating out with friends, where I suspect she isn't eating fruits and vegetables.
She isn't the only one. I've been hearing several gut complaints lately, and if I had a nickel for every time I recommended this book, I think I'd be a dollar-aire by now:
Read me!
If you've had to do antibiotics, if you suffer from constipation, unruly gut--heck--even constipation, read this book. It might even help with depression, for Pete's sake. Our gut is a big, complicated, symbiotic organ that impacts just about everything, and it deserves better treatment from us.
As this Stanford Medicine blog post recounts, our gut and the flora it hosts impact our weight, brain, immune system, and overall health. And the best way to keep everything A-Okay is to provide all the little buggers with the best food possible: the fiber from a variety of fruits and vegetables.
Too much of any one type of fiber favors microbial strains that can digest it at the expense of the majority that can’t. The result would be reduced microbial diversity, the opposite of what’s desirable. Instead, eat lots of different fruits and vegetables. (Cooking them’s fine. We’ve been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years).
Do probiotics help? According to the book they don't do much to rebuild gut flora, since they largely pass through us. But they do provide spackle between intestinal wall cells, preventing leakage from the gut. As the Sonnenbergs put it, the intestinal wall is "a protective barrier that keeps microbes from getting out of the gut and into the bloodstream, where they emphatically don’t belong." Strong spackle is good.
Therefore, at the Market last week, I checked out one of the vendors of kombucha, otherwise known as fermented tea, otherwise known as a good source of probiotics, as are all fermented foods.
ShenZen Tea sells both loose tea leaves in many flavors and several varieties of kombucha.
Since I drink tea hot and iced year-round, I'll have to check out some of the many varieties on offer, but this time we got a 16-oz of the "most popular" kombucha, which I think was a lemongrass flavor...?
In any case, it was refreshing and delicious, like mildly carbonated, hardly-sweet-at-all soda. My other daughter and I would gladly have drunk the entire thing on our own, but since it was supposedly for the gut-depleted one, we refrained. But if you're walking through the Market on a warm day and don't want a big sugar rush from the other refreshments, give kombucha a try! Your gut will thank you.
