So glad to hear it! These microbial communities play a critical role in our health, so we should feed them accordingly. We're trying to help educate on the same behavior for the oral microbiome. There's a lot of focus on what not to eat (sugar, etc.), but not on what we can eat to improve our oral health. We wrote an article on it here [1].

[1] https://www.bristlehealth.com/post/improve-your-oral-microbi...

I found your article well intentioned and organised but frustrating, because it contains not enough examples for the non expert public it addresses. E.g. what are examples of "sticky and starchy foods"?

Thank you for this feedback, I appreciate it. We'll get the article updated to include more examples. If you have any other feedback on the article or site please let me know! Always trying to improve it.

Potatoes, tapioca, rice, beans...

Interesting how this article points out that foods like fish and eggs are high in sulfur contribute to gum inflammation, but that omega-3 fatty acids can help reduce this inflammation. I guess that piece of salmon may counterbalance itself.

What sort of foods do you recommend? I've heard good things about yogurt, cottage cheese, and kimchi; but don't know for certain.

It appears that probiotic foods are beneficial in isolation, but my recent reading (no singular source) indicates that it’s far more effective when combined with a varied and high fibre diet.

It seems like you can do great without the probiotics too, and only ensure you have a good quantity and diversity of high fibre foods in your diet. This seems to be the cornerstone of enriching and sustaining gut biodiversity.

A lot of people think they have the fibre part down, but the science suggests most of us are nowhere near adequate intake. Around 40 grams seems like the minimum, but if you can go higher, there doesn’t appear to be a disadvantage, but there could be more benefits.

A key factor here is that fibre from whole foods is far more beneficial to the gut flora. If it’s highly processed, it’ll move through the gut too quickly. It’ll help you move stool in the case of something like metamucil, but your gut won’t derive much benefit from it otherwise.

Off the top of my head, some excellent gut foods are:

- whole grains with the hull intact (oats are great)

- all legumes

- avocados

- berries

- many nuts and seeds, but especially chia, flax, sunflower, pistachio, walnut, coconut

I land somewhere around 65 grams per day, but I’d like to do better. In the USA, the average is around 16 grams. It’s nowhere near enough to support proper intestinal motility and robust, diverse flora.

Definitely eat probiotic foods, but include as many whole, high fibre foods as you can too.

These are pretty consistent with mine however I'm on keto so I avoid oats / carbs.

I like to add fermented foods such as pickled vegetables, sauerkraut, kimchi before meat and fat. Some insoluble fiber occasionally also such as psyllium husk. Quality of stool is a key gut health indicator so I keep a close eye on how my diet impacts that... but I don't keep a log! :-)

Avocados, walnuts, macadamias (amazing fat profile), pecans. Getting a variety of leafy greens each day.

I realize that this is a late comment, but what's your opinion of kefir (primarily homemade, not store bought) and its impact on gut health?

There is evidence that it provides some benefits, but I’m not aware of any research indicating why that is. The best guess is that certain microbes confer benefits, but I don’t believe they’re exclusive to kefir and the mechanism is unknown.

If it’s milk kefir, I’d say that there’s a wealth of research showing that dairy isn’t particularly beneficial to your health and my gut feeling is that you could replace milk kefir with other foods which are known to be health-promoting as well as flora-promoting and you’d be in a better place.

I’d also guess that sugar-free kefir would be ideal if you did decide to use it. Sugar seems like it quickly becomes harmful to gut flora and its diversity, so limiting it would be well aligned with the intent of building up better flora.

Overall it’s one of those things where you can ask: is it replacing something worse? i.e are you drinking kombucha which has very weak evidence of benefit, but some evidence of harm? Then it appears kefir is a good decision.

However, you can also ask if something better could take kefir’s place? This is a very individual thing. For some, they might be replacing Coca Cola with fruit juice, and if that’s the best they can manage than that’s fine - it’s still better.

If in your case it’s replacing milk with milk kefir, that’s also better. On the other hand, if you could replace milk with eating more greens for minerals, avocado for fat, and a blend of whole grains and legumes for protein, I suspect your baseline of health would increase and your gut flora would benefit more than from the kefir alone.

It’s all about “could I do something better?” because there are no silver bullets. Kefir, when added to a poor diet, will probably not provide a fraction of the benefit that simply improving the overall diet could.

Diluted vinegar; not a lot, not every meal, but a little bit once a day(I usually take it with canned seltzer water at dinnertime). It's the oldest recorded all-purpose tonic and it has a very clear purpose in digestive health by biasing the body's pH balance a little more acidic, which makes some foods easier to stomach, and also pushes the adaptive fitness of the gut.

While the scientific framework I'm building off of is patchy, I think of the gut biome as something you have to "train up" to give effective responses instead of dumping its issues onto other regulatory mechanisms, so exposing it to a variety of training scenarios would be an instrumental part of that, and it probably wouldn't be a factor of specific foods so much as general %s of fiber, fat, acidity, salinity, etc.