Cheese, please! Eight everyday foods that are great for gut health – and aren’t kimchi, kombucha, ’kraut or kefir | Food

Kimchi, kefir, kombucha, cabbage. Mention the words “gut health” to anyone these days and the “4 K’s” will spring to mind. Still, there are other ways to support your gut microbiome, many of which are cheaper and more readily available.

Sometimes they are better for you too. “A lot of those flavored kombuchas and kefirs that you find in the stores—they might have something notional good, like fiber and culture, but those ingredients are often just there to allow health claims to be placed on products that are high in sugar and designed to lead to overconsumption,” says Chris van Tuleken, a physician and author of Ultra Processed People: Why Are We All Eating Things That Are Not Food … and Why Can’t We Stop? “You can’t have food that’s good and bad.”

It lists the ingredients on the back of a popular kombucha drink. “Black tea leaves, green tea leaves, then flavors and sweeteners! We have growing evidence that non-nutritive sweeteners negatively affect your health, even if in some ways they may be slightly better than sugar. Real food—by Van Tulleken’s definition, unprocessed or minimally processed food—is complex, and there is little merit in pointing to one particular element of it and saying, “This is good.”

“It involves taking fiber, antioxidants or cultures of good bacteria and adding them to an otherwise over-processed product. The science of what’s good for our microbiome is still evolving, but there are some simple things we’re sure of. Whole or minimally processed fruits and vegetables, including beans and legumes, are good for you. Meanwhile, there is good reason to believe that food with emulsifiers, resins, modified starches, and non-nutritive sweeteners is likely no great for the bugs inside you.”

There is, says Tim Spector, co-founder of Zoethe personalized nutrition company and author of Food for lifeincreasing evidence that eating fermented foods can support gut health, because they contain probiotics: live bacteria and yeast believed to have health benefits. These include foods like kefir — but also include “commercially available fermented foods, such as some cheeses and full-fat live yogurt,” as well as miso, vinegar, and olives that are unpasteurized.

Yet the cheapest and most readily available gut support of all comes in the form of prebiotics: substances in food that can’t be digested but that feed the microbes our guts already contain. All fruits, vegetables and legumes contain prebiotics (some more than others) and “you don’t have to buy the most expensive products to get the health benefits. For example, frozen and fresh vegetables have the same nutrients. Canned grains and legumes are excellent value and easy to store,” says Spector.

The following list is not exhaustive – but these are pro- and prebiotic foods that, in their least processed form, will enrich your gut without worrying your wallet.

Probiotics

Cheese

It’s easy to forget that cheese is a fermented food because it’s often demonized. “It’s high in salt and fat,” says Van Tuleken. But it’s also a rich source of bacterial cultures – even richer than fermented vegetables, says Bronwen Percival, cheese buyer for Neal’s Yard Dairy and co-founder of the Fermented Foods Research Site Microbialfoods.org. “In kimchi you’ll get an extreme dominance of lactic acid bacteria, but in cheese you’ll get an incredible diversity.” There are lactic acid bacteria, but there are also bacterial cultures associated with the ripening and ripening of the cheese, and studies show that “this really affects the microbial gut diversity’.

This is especially true for raw milk cheese – that is, cheeses made with unpasteurized milk (best avoided if you’re pregnant or immunosuppressed) because heating the milk will “selectively kill various microorganisms.” Likewise, cooking cheese, even if it’s unpasteurized, will compromise the number and variety of microorganisms that make it into your gut. Neal’s Yard Dairy specializes in artisan raw milk cheeses – and they don’t come cheap – but Percival says “you don’t have to tell the difference between Parmesan at Tesco and Appleby cheddar from NYD. Tesco Parmesan will still be made with whey starter [that is, the bacterial cultures that kickstart the cheese-making process].” The important distinction to make is unpasteurized versus pasteurized—although, she says, even pasteurized cheeses will have probiotic bacteria from the ripening process.

Miso

Every morning, Jonathan Hope drinks miso—a salty, umami-rich paste made from fermented soybeans—with lukewarm water. He makes his own unpasteurized version that is full of koji mold. “It’s an easy way to incorporate living food into the morning of your day,” says Hope, who sells her miso through an online farmers market Wilde. “Like other fermented foods, miso naturally contains probiotics and is likely to support your gut microbiome,” Spector says.

“Although there aren’t many studies specifically on miso, there may be potential health benefits if eaten as part of a balanced diet. It’s richer in probiotic bacteria if it’s unpasteurized because they’re destroyed in the heating process (hence Hope’s lukewarm water), but “pasteurized miso isn’t bad for you in the same way that pasteurized kimchi isn’t is bad for you,” he says. Fermented grains and legumes are “still full of prebiotic fiber that the stomach will benefit from.” Miso is easy to incorporate into your diet and a little goes a long way, so even if the initial cost is high, it’s cheap in the long run. Use it anywhere you’d use salt, Hope says, and mix whites and reds for a more balanced flavor profile.

olives

The health benefits of olives are more than monounsaturated fatty acids, says Federica Amati, chief nutritionist at Zoe and author of Every body should know this. In addition to these “quality fats,” olives are rich in polyphenols, which help gut bacteria thrive. This is true of “all olives, whether canned, jarred or fresh” – but the advantage of looking for unpasteurized olives is that they are a “living” food, like kimchi, and so rich in probiotic bacteria. “Olives are not edible straight from the tree,” explains Mariana Colocotroni of Oliveologywhich sells unpasteurized olives from Greece. “They must be cured” – soaked in fresh water or brine for nine months – then preserved in olive oil and vinegar. Industrial-scale producers cure with caustic soda, which is faster – but most producers pasteurize or sterilize their olives regardless of the drying process. “In jars, in cans and all olives that are stuffed or pitted will be pasteurized,” she explains. They are still healthy, but not probiotic. Look for pitted olives from small suppliers and ask about processing. Also look out for Throuba olives, the only olives that can be eaten straight from the tree thanks to a fungus that allows them to lose their bitterness as they ripen.

Vinegar (not just apple cider)

Apple cider vinegar gets a lot of good press, but all vinegars are fermented, meaning they are live if unpasteurized. “They’re easy and cheap to make at home,” says Wylde Market founder Nick Jefferson, who sells artisanal vinegar made from seasonal ingredients but also makes his own from leftover wine with equal amounts of water. “The ‘mother’—the combination of cellulose bacteria and acetic acid that develops when alcoholic liquids ferment and convert the alcohol into gut-friendly acetic acid—does the rest.” see in vinegar that has not been pasteurized. “These stringy parts may seem off-putting,” he says Sarah Du-Feu, who makes vinegar with everything from elderflower to rhubarb“but it’s a healthy sign.”

Prebiotics

mushrooms

It’s easy to get splashed with weird and wonderful mushroom varieties, but while price may indicate taste, ‘it’s not an indicator of health benefits. It’s good to try different varieties because you’ll get a diverse range of plant compounds,” says Spector, but “they’re all good. Even the humble mushroom will keep you healthy. Their high fiber content “nourishes your gut microbiome. They also contain a range of bioactive compounds not found in other foods that may benefit health, including [anti-oxidant] ergothioneinewhich has several different roles in the body,” c Protection and repairsays Amati.

pulses

“There’s no such thing as a bad pulse,” says Amati—as long as they’re canned or dried and not overprocessed. The growing popularity of pulses in recent years has led to companies producing pulse-based snacks that have none of the benefits of beans in their minimally processed form. “You’re no better off with them than you are with a bag of chips,” says Van Tuleken, reading the ingredients listed on a bag of lentil chips. “It’s got 40% lentil flour, potato starch and a very long list of flavourings, all of which are there to make you eat way more than the ‘recommended’ 18g portion.” These snacks aren’t good for your gut – and they’re not cheap, unlike a tin of beans or a packet of lentils which will set you back no more than a few quid depending on the quantity and where you buy them. Fancy beans in jars are divine, but there are no health benefits to buying fancy beans other than taste and texture. “Legumes are an excellent source of fiber and other healthy plant compounds, such as polyphenols [which help our gut microbes],” says Amati, and that’s as true for an 80p can as it is for a £5 jar.

Dark chocolate

This is not carte blanche to feast on Bourneville. “Higher-quality dark chocolate with a cocoa content of 70% or more is best,” Spector says. Cacao contains gut-friendly polyphenols, and the lower sugar content means it’s “difficult to eat a lot at once and can be more satisfying because of its rich, bitter taste.”

Bread with sourdough

Sourdough is sometimes described as a living food, but it is not: the probiotics in the sourdough are destroyed when the bread is baked. The value of sourdough for the intestines derives mainly from the fiber it contains – but the bioavailability of these fibers it depends on how it’s processed. “Something people need to watch out for is ‘sourfaux’, which is what we call a product that’s marketed as sourdough but made through a shorter process involving baker’s yeast or other leavening agents,” says Chris Young, co-ordinator of Real Bread Campaign. “The necessary changes to the dough cannot occur to the same degree—or perhaps at all—if the all-important lactic acid bacterial fermentation is reduced or omitted.” Worse, many of these acids contain emulsifiers that are has been shown to be harmful to the intestinal lining. Choose a sourdough starter that has been fermented slowly—preferably overnight—and is made from stone-ground whole grains. “Good sourdough bread is healthy for most people. “Bad sourdough bread is probably just as unhealthy as other types of bread,” says Spector.