Plenty of research confirms what functional medicine doctors have insisted for many years: the gut microbiome plays a crucial role in your overall health. Imbalance in the microbiome, also called dysbiosis, can result in many unpleasant health conditions, including a higher risk of obesity, leaky gut, inflammation, autism, and arthritis.
A recent study at the Stanford School of Medicine shows how one simple change in your diet can improve the health and diversity of the microbiota in your gut while reducing inflammatory enzymes in your body.
What is this simple change? Adding fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, or yogurt to your diet. Let’s take a look at how fermented foods contribute to better health and disease prevention.
The benefits of fermented foods in your diet
In this Stanford clinical trial, 36 healthy adults were randomly assigned to a ten-week diet that included either fermented foods including yogurt, kefir, fermented cottage cheese, kimchi, and kombucha tea or high-fiber foods (such as legumes, seeds, nuts, whole grains, vegetables, and fruits).
The findings seemed very clear. While scientists and functional medicine doctors have recommended a high fiber diet to promote microbial balance and improve all-around health, the fermented foods-enhanced diet was found to be more effective in improving the gut microbiome.
The researchers found that participants in the fermented foods group had higher microbial diversity and a greater variety of beneficial gut bacteria. The study showed sharply reduced levels of 19 different inflammatory proteins (such as interleukin-6) linked to rheumatoid arthritis, type 2 diabetes, and chronic stress. The positive effects increased with higher amounts of fermented foods added to the diet.
Because high-fiber diets have been linked in multiple studies with lower rates of inflammatory diseases and lower mortality, researchers expected that this latest study would show that high-fiber foods decrease levels of inflammatory proteins.
“We expected high fiber to have a more universally beneficial effect and (to) increase microbiota diversity,” said senior research scientist Erica Sonnenburg, Ph.D. She acknowledged that the data suggested that short-term increases in fiber intake were “insufficient to increase microbial diversity.”
However, the results showed that higher fiber consumption resulted in more carbohydrates in stool samples, which many mean that the gut microbes failed to completely break down the fiber.
Since earlier research suggested that the microbiomes of people living in industrialized nations are deficient in fiber-degrading microbes, Prof. Sonnenburg hypothesized that a longer-term study might have allowed time for gut bacteria to adapt to the increase in dietary fiber.
It remains true that your diet should include plenty of fiber, which helps lower LDL cholesterol and decrease the risk of certain types of cancer.
The study demonstrated the three-way link between dietary changes, gut microbiome balance, and overall health. Diet impacts the gut microbiome. Low microbiota diversity is linked to the increasing incidence of obesity and diabetes.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, chronic degenerative diseases, most of which involve inflammation, affect 60% of all American adults. Inflammation-driven heart disease is the #1 killer of adults in the U.S., claiming roughly 655,000 American lives a year. And type 2 diabetes, which has an inflammatory component as well, is currently nearing epidemic levels, with over 34 million Americans currently affected.
Study co-author Justin Sonnenburg, Ph.D., an associate professor of immunology and microbiology, called the findings “stunning” and said that the research provided one of the first examples of how a simple change in diet could improve the gut microbiome and immune status.
The researchers intend to examine whether fermented foods can also cut inflammation in patients with existing immune disorders and metabolic diseases.
The benefits of fermented foods are too significant to be overlooked. Maybe it’s time to consider adding tasty, nutritious kimchi, yogurt, and kombucha tea to your healthy diet.