Prebiotic foods are already part of your diet. You might as well find out what they are and what they do for you so you can up your health game.
Toss the Supplements
Look, supplement manufacturers have to make a buck, right?
Good for them – and for everyone. I take a few key supplements myself. I look at them as ‘gap fillers’ to bolster my diet.
However, not all of supplements are necessary. This is especially true when it comes to prebiotics.
The bottom line is that prebiotic foods are all you need, not supplements.
While I usually like to recommended supplement brands I think are top notch, this time I have no recommendations at all.
Except for eating right.
SO JUST BE SURE TO EAT THE RIGHT STUFF!
Foods play many roles. The most well-known role is to provide metabolic energy in the form of food electrons. (NOT calories, as popular dogma would have you believe. See what I mean in my little diatribe about this myth, here: Calorie Counting Madness.)
An equally important role is feeding your friendly gut bacteria.
By now you’re hopefully aware of your microbiome – the assembly of microbes living in your gut, in your nasal passages, and on your skin.
Those poor little microscopic beings need nutrition, too!
That’s where prebiotics shine. They’re the food your gut bacteria need.
When well-fed, those little guys & gals ensure your gut health. And , thereby, the health of the rest of your body along with it.
Because … [drumroll] … if you’ve got poor gut health, you’ve got overall poor health.
A very short list of health issues arising from poor gut health includes poor immunity, inflammation, indigestion, weight gain, and even neurodegeneration. (How does your gut health relate to your brain health? Great question, which I’ve briefly addressed regarding the gut-brain axis, here: Alzheimer’s Disease – What To Do About A Modern Medical Fiasco.)
Everything you want from good health starts in your gut.
No two ways about it.
And that means you must feed your microbiome the right stuff.
Your Food vs. Their Food
Keep this concept in mind: The food you eat for your own metabolic energy is unavailable to your gut bacteria because you digest it.
This means the food you eat for your gut bacteria has to be indigestible (or nearly so) as metabolic energy for you.
Generally this means fiber.
Certain types of fiber now wear the moniker, prebiotics. (It’s a bit of an odd word derivation, meaning “before” (pre) “life” (biotic). Just my take. Regardless, we’re stuck with it.)
Dietary fibers span a wide range of digestibilities. Thus, a wide range of “prebiotic-ness.”
The poorest prebiotics include insoluble cellulose fiber. Since they’re not soluble, they’re as close to indigestible as can be. Both for you and for your gut bacteria.
Example: you won’t get much, if any, prebiotic value from celery. And certainly no metabolic energy.
In contrast, the best-known prebiotics include certain kinds of starches and other carbohydrates providing a range of digestive resistances.
FUN FACT TO COME: Even though nearly 100% of the articles you’ll find on prebiotics focus on plant sources, I’ll mention some surprising non-plant sources a little later.
Ultimately, consuming a variety of foods containing a breadth of prebiotic activities is therefore highly valuable for keeping your gut microbiome happy.
Types of Prebiotics – Some Science-y Details
You can skip this section and go right to the foods list below. After all, I won’t be giving you an exam over this information.
I include it here because, by golly, that’s what scientists like me do. So just bear with my little ‘need’ here for a moment.
As mentioned above, the best-known prebiotics are semi-digestible carbs.
Specifically, they’re chains of sugars hooked together.
The digestibility of such chains depends on whether you have the right enzymes to break the chemical bonds (i.e., linkages) between individual sugars.
Sugar-to-sugar linkages are key to their digestibilities.
Cellulose, which I mentioned earlier, and starch are both made from ordinary glucose. We have the right enzymes (amylases) for breaking the glucose linkages of starch. We don’t have the right enzymes (cellulases) for cleaving the different linkages between glucose molecules in cellulose.
SIDENOTE: You aren’t supposed to digest cellulose. Instead it acts to your benefit as a food waste mover through your bowels. For this reason I’ve always been puzzled as to why supplements of digestive enzymes include cellulase. It’s not a human-made enzyme, and you don’t need it. Unless you want to be like a cow chewing its cud.
Fructans
Chains of fructose (fruit sugar) of medium size, called fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS) or oligofructose. The most common example is inulin.
Galacto-Oligosaccharides (GOS)
The main individual sugar is galactose. If it’s an extension of lactose (milk sugar), GOS may also contain some glucose.
Starch and Glucose-Derived Oligosaccharides
Specifically, these are resistant starches, as opposed to easily digested ones. They’re made of glucose, sometimes arranged into branched chains.
Other Oligosaccharides
Oligosaccharide structures vary considerably based on several componenents. Different components usually mean sugar types (e.g., galacturonic acid, galactose, xylose, arabinose, rhamnose) and side groups (e.g., methyl, acetyl, feruloyl).
Nitrogen-Containing Carbohydrates
Certain animals and fungi produce something called chitin. It’s made of chains of N-acetylglucosiamine, which is a nitrogenated derivative of glucose.
The best sources of chitin from animals include the exoskeletons of insects and crustaceans (e.g., shrimp, crab, lobster). Mollusks (snails, clams, oysters, mussels) also produce chitin in their shells.
Many types of fungi produce chitin in their cell walls.
Plant-Based Prebiotic Foods
Many kinds of veggies contain prebiotics.
A few of the best prebiotic foods you can add to your diet include:
- Dandelion greens
- Garlic
- Leeks
- Onions
- Jicama
- Asparagus
- Jerusalem artichoke
- Under-ripe bananas
- Apples with skin
Having one or more of these items on a regular basis will certainly help feed your gut microbes very well!
HEADS UP: The prebiotic value of these and other foods is highest when they are raw.
Non-Vegetal Prebiotic Foods
(Chitin supplements sourced from all of the following are available on the market – just sayin’.)
Let’s start with insects, since they’re the easiest chitin-containing animal-based foods to source.
Yes, I said foods.
Getting chitin is just one of the many benefits from consuming edible insects. See what I mean here: Why Eat Bugs? Top 10 Reasons.
Gee, you haven’t lived unless you’ve had a nice snack of chapulines. (I love ’em!)
Actually, as gross as eating insects might seem, more than 2 billion people in the world depend on them as a major source of nutrition. And there may be as many as 2,000 different species of edible insects already being consumed somewhere in the world.
Next come the crustaceans. Specifically, shrimp.
You can eat the shells directly. They’re easiest to eat when fried to a crisp. Or you can freeze them for easy ‘powdering’ in your food processor, then spooning the powder into a smoothie.
Now for the tastiest sources of non-vegetal chitin: mushrooms. Mushrooms synthesize a mixture of cellulose and chitin in their cell walls. Just about any mushroom will do.
If you’ve always considered mushrooms and other fungi as part of a vegan diet, think again. They’re not plants. They’re classified in their own kingdom. And their closest relatives at the kingdom level are animals. Yup…fungi are more like animals than plants.
Any Side Effects from Prebiotic Foods?
Prebiotic foods are generally safe.
However, you can overdo any of the foods listed above and suffer some GI distress: gas and bloating, abdominal pain, diarrhea.
So you won’t do that, will you?
A ‘Special Needs’ Prebiotic
Personally I benefit from a certain seed powder that I take twice a day for its prebiotic properties.
Yeah, it’s a supplement. And I promised not to make any supplement recommendations (at least by brand). So I have no brand recommendation for you. Many manufacturers make it, and they’re all equally good, as far as I can tell.
What I mean by ‘special needs’ refers to a relatively small portion of the population who have had their colons removed.
That includes me.
One of the benefits from bacterial metabolism that I do not get is the production of hydrogen gas in the colon.
Hydrogen gas is a key antioxidant normally made in your colon bacteria.
Since I don’t have a colon, I feed my residual colon microbiome with a special prebiotic to induce them to make hydrogen.
That product is psyllium seed powder (NOT whole husks).
I take a half teaspoon in about 3 oz. of water, morning and evening.
Yes, it does give me gas. And that’s the gas I need most: molecular hydrogen (H2).
(If you thought the ever popular fun from lighting farts was due to methane gas, think again. Highly flammable molecular hydrogen is another gas in the mix. Go ahead and spread that bit of trivia to all your friends!)
Comments or Questions?
I’d love to hear from you. This and every other post here provides a comment section at the end of the post, exactly for that purpose.
So, by all means, leave me your thoughts.
I would be especially grateful if you point out any flaws in my logic, factual errors, or ordinary typos. (I’ll give you a little ‘huzzah’ in my heart.)
Then I’ll respond as soon as I can.
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All the best in natural health,
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