WORDS: Dr Amantha Imber
Over the years, I have spent countless amounts of money buying probiotics supplements – those little capsules that reside in the VIP section of the pharmacy: the chemist’s fridge. Sadly, when I would take these little pills home, they would end up sitting unloved and forgotten at the back of my own refrigerator. What could have been an expensive habit (had I remembered to take them) simply turned into a very wasteful and ineffective one.
While these supplements are easy to get hold of at the local chemist, research suggests that their tablet form might not be the most impactful way to deliver to your body the probiotic goodness.
Professor Tim Spector has spent a large part of his career studying nutrition and the gut microbiome. Spector says that one of the most beneficial things you can do to improve gut health is to eat your probiotics. ‘We know that eating regular amounts of fermented foods and a variety of fermented foods gets lots of good bugs [i.e. probiotics] into your system,’ he explains.
You are probably aware that plain yoghurt falls into the probiotic food category. And cheese (the type that looks like cheese and hasn’t been moulded into the shape of a stick) is another form of fermented food.
Spector also says it can be helpful to remember the four K’s, which are all excellent sources of probiotics:
- Kefir: a fermented milk drink that looks like a runny yoghurt.
- Kombucha: fermented (and sparkly and sweetened) tea. Just avoid going for one of the brands that adds a bucket of sugar into the mix.
- Kimchi: salted and fermented vegetables, such as cabbage and radish (typically served as a Korean side dish).
- Kraut: a general term not just for fermented cabbage, but also lots of other fermented vegetables.
So how much of these foods do we need to eat to see the benefit?
Spector says to aim for small servings, regularly. ‘As many times as you can is probably better because these probiotic foods don’t stay in your gut long-term. You need to be constantly refreshing your gut with them to make them work well.
‘The best study tried to get people to have five individual servings of fermented food a day, and in two weeks those people experienced a big boost to their immune system,’ Spector reports. ‘But rather than having a whole big bowl of yoghurt, it might be adding little bits of fermented foods to your meals. A little bit of kimchi to your rice or pouring a bit of kefir onto your curry, for example. It’s little and often. At the moment we say it’s somewhere between one and five servings a day, but little and often is the key.’
If you want to take things a step further, you might want to try making your own fermented products, which is also a lot cheaper.
Put it into action
Add one serve (30ml) of fermented food (think of the four K’s: kefir, kombucha, kimchi, kraut) to every meal.
If you don’t fancy making them yourself, most supermarkets stock all of the above. But be warned, while you can generally find fermented vegetables at the supermarket, check the ingredients listing before buying. If they contain vinegar, they are ‘pickled’ and not fermented, so they won’t deliver any gut-friendly probiotics.
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This is an abridged extract from The Health Habit by Amantha Imber.
Dr Amantha Imber is an organisational psychologist and founder of behaviour change consultancy Inventium. Amantha is also the host of the number one ranking life improvement podcast How I Work, which has had over 5 million downloads, where she interviews some of the world’s most successful people about their habits, strategies and rituals.
