You can definitely improve your gut health without ever touching a single vegetable. I think as time has gone on, we've understood that the gut is complex. We've understood that it's not just as simple as fiber. And this is coming from a guy that has no problem with fiber.
But I look at the big picture. So, I've got seven ways that you can improve gut health without ever touching a single vegetable. The first one, jumping right in, is collagen. Now, it doesn't have to be a collagen supplement. it could flat out be ground beef with the gristle.
The simple matter of fact is that collagen seems to have a powerful effect specifically on the gut. It could be the protein, flat out, could be the amino acids. It also could be the peptides, collagen peptides, that act as quote-unquote signaling molecules to spur growth and repair, specifically within the gut.
So with this, we look at a study that was published in JMIR. Now, this was done on women, and they gave them an eight-week course of collagen supplementation. Now, full disclaimer, only 35% of the women finished this trial, which I find odd because it's not hard to take a collagen supplement, but either way.
Of those 35%, of those that completed, 93% of them had improvements in their gut health and reduction of digestive symptoms. Now, why does this happen? It has to do with intestinal permeability.
So when we think gut, we automatically think microbiome. Just to give you context, the microbiome is hugely important, but it's what we know the least about. We know much more about the structural integrity and the gut lining and the cells and the enterocytes and that whole piece, right?
The epithelial layer. We get that much more than we get the microbiome. And we do know that these tight junctions are so critical because when those are busted or those tight junctions are not tight anymore, that's when bad things can leak into the bloodstream. That's when the gut is not having integrity. So, collagen seems to improve those tight junctions.
In fact, we've seen in other studies that collagen actually reduces some of the tumor necrosis factor alpha induced damage to these junction proteins. In other words, inflammation induced damage. Could the same thing be done by just having regular protein? Possibly.
There's also evidence to suggest that collagen peptides have sort of a signaling effect, which might actually signal and spur some of the growth and repair that we need in the gut to prevent that damage. The second thing that you can do to improve your gut health without ever eating a single vegetable is similar. It's consuming bone broth. Now, bone broth obviously has collagen in it, but it also has other things.
It also has more gelatin, slightly different. Now, there's a study published in Medicina. Now, note this is a rodent model study, but it illustrates an interesting point. They induced ulcerative colitis and colon damage into these mice. Kind of sucks.
It does suck. But what they did is before they did that... They had some of the mice eat as much bone broth as they wanted to, ad libitum.
What they found is that the mice that were sort of pre-dosed with bone broth had significantly less symptoms and issues when they induced ulcerative colitis or any kind of colon damage. It had a protective effect. So it seems as though bone broth might be more preventative in some ways. Now the one thing they did notice with this is that yes, 55% of bone broth is made up of just amino acids. So yes, they were getting protein.
So would eating just protein protect the gut in this way? There is a good chance. There is a solid chance that it would.
But again, we come back to the gelatin. We come back to the collagen, which has signaling properties to improve gut health. As a matter of fact, they saw that there were decreases in interleukin-6, decreases in interleukin-1 beta, these inflammatory cytokines that are associated with gut damage. So specifically, there's a reduction in inflammation with the bone broth consumption.
Okay, moving into the next one. You've heard of fermented veggies before, but we're not talking about veggies here. I don't want you to go seeking out sauerkraut just for sauerkraut's sake. If you don't want a vegetable, you don't have to touch a vegetable. But fermented foods in general have a profound effect.
And as a matter of fact, a good majority of the research on probiotic-rich and fermented foods is really in fermented dairy to begin with. Kefir, cottage cheese, yogurt, these things have a lot of research stacked up for them. More so than a lot of other fermented food research.
That's what's wild. There was a study published in the journal Fermentation that found that simply adding in fermented foods increased the prevalence of what's called bacteroidetes, the bacteria strongly associated with good metabolic health and healthy weight, and decreased the levels of Prevotella, which is a little bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes Prevotella is good, sometimes it's bad. So it's really hard to ascertain like what that effect was.
But the bottom line is that the fermented foods are probably going to have a bigger impact than eating a salad anyway. So if you had to choose between, hey, I'm going to have some flax seeds and some chia seeds on this beautiful bush of arugula, or say, I'm going to have a little bit of kefir and possibly maybe a fermented carrot. You might get more out of that, right?
Or even a fermented beef stick. The evidence on fermentation, bioactive peptides, is getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And I think we have a lot of evidence now to support that there's more ways to sort of skin that than just saying, I'm going to eat vegetables.
So the microbiome is important, we just have to learn a lot more. So at the end of the day, when it comes down to the microbiome, when it comes down to probiotic effects of food and whatnot, The biggest levers we can still pull there are probably with the probiotics. I mean, that's just the evidence is there and this is really like strong, more isolated literature with that. I put a link down below for the recommended probiotic that I would use. I don't always use one.
I typically use one when I'm shifting my diet or when I'm changing something. Because I feel like bacteria and I feel like the probiotics help you kind of adapt in some ways. If I just had a different lifestyle but my diet was the same, my microbiome would be entirely different, right?
It's not just food influenced. So microbiomes are wildly different between all of us and by adding in probiotics at different times you can have different effects. But most of them are garbage.
The thing I like about this one's seed, first of all that's a 25% off discount link, which you can't beat, but they have a prebiotic and a probiotic in one capsule. So really unique technology there that allows it to have a multi-stage colonization potentially. where the prebiotic is kind of going in first, and then you have the probiotic getting into the later stages in the digestive system. Really cool stuff. And again, that's a 25% off discount link in the top line of the description.
And it's literally the only probiotic I have ever recommended and would recommend. Next up is a similar category, but it's slightly different. And that's the world of colostrum. Now, it's weird because with colostrum, a lot of the products that are on the market are heated so much that you lose a lot of the...
bioactive compounds in it. Like most of them would have a lot if they weren't heated and things like that. And if you were to get straight colostrum, I mean, it's illegal most places, you can't really get it, right? But there are colostrum supplements.
And additionally, some of the benefits that you would get from colostrum, you can get from whey protein concentrate. I like whey protein isolate, but whey protein concentrate has the lactoferrin and lactoferrin has an iron binding capability to help you excrete excess iron in the gut. which can cause oxidative stress in the gut, which can cause oxidative damage, and a more permeable gut, right?
So there is a very clear indicator there that excess iron in the gut is not what we want. It's not good. But colostrum, if you can get your hands on a good colostrum supplement, I'm not even naming a brand here, has an effect because you have immunoglobulins that can help combat pathogenic compounds. Pathogenic compounds are not always where they're just going to give you diarrhea and make you sick. They can happen at a small scale and just affect the gut integrity, again, leading to a more permeable gut, which can lead to higher systemic inflammation and more just gut distress and poor gut health in the first place.
But there's also tissue and growth factors that are in colostrum, right? And again, you can get some of this in whey protein concentrate too, but more so in colostrum. So these signaling peptides actually signal growth and repair. Again, if you're dealing with a damaged gut, you want to signal that growth and repair.
And gut tissue repairs very fast. So it turns over really quick, but it also can get damaged really quick. Number five is the fruit polyphenols.
The more that I investigate fruit, the less that I'm convinced it's the fiber in fruit that makes it unique. I think fiber is great, but I think most of the benefits from fiber come from the satiety aspect, the glucagon-like peptide 1 response, the effect on GLP-1 to make you less, I don't know, control your blood sugar and less hungry. Certainly benefits to fiber.
Heck yes, all the way. But I'm not convinced that that's the reason fruit is great. Because there are lots of fruits that don't have a lot of fiber, and they're still beneficial.
Take this study, for instance, that took a look at the polyphenols in fruit. It was published in the journal Functional Foods. They were looking at red wine, they were looking at apple polyphenols, they were looking at berry polyphenols, they were looking at tea polyphenols, blueberry juice polyphenols. So all in different forms, not necessarily in whole fruit form.
And what they essentially found was that... anywhere from about 400-ish milligrams per day to 600-ish milligrams per day was a sweet spot and where you can start seeing a change in gut microbiome effect and also just gut health in general. And by the way, this was a study that was a 27-study meta-analysis.
So it wasn't like it was one small study. It was looking at a large body of studies and finding that polyphenols have a huge impact on the gut. Polyphenols could technically be classified as a prebiotic.
However, a lot of people would say that they're more of just like a compound, like a flavonoid or something that's going to impact. So we know that polyphenols have impacts on our mitochondria directly. They have impacts on reactive oxygen species, but then they do have this direct impact on the gut as well. So it's kind of like a threefold, fourfold effect. So you could get the same effect by drinking blueberry juice.
by consuming blueberries, even though you get some fiber with the blueberries, which I'm all for. So it's not just this pure fiber effect. The gut is more complex than that. So if you don't want to eat a vegetable or you don't even want to eat a fruit, you could probably still get some effect by having the polyphenols from it. This next one I love.
Brand new study published in 2024, Nature Communications, was looking at something called protein pacing and a little bit of intermittent fasting compared to just a general healthy, cardiovascularly healthy diet. And they were looking at a couple of things. They were mainly looking at what would happen with body composition, but also there were some interesting effects on the gut. So it was an eight-week study.
It was isocaloric. So they ate the same amount of calories. Just one group was spacing their meals up a little bit more and spacing their protein out a little bit more. And the other group was eating more consistently.
Now, the fasting group, the intermittent fasting group, lost significantly more weight. Okay, it was like 8.86 or something percent versus 5%. but there was also more quote-unquote deep abdominal fat loss so like almost like a more belly fat loss type thing well that's all fine and dandy but where it's interesting in the context of this video is there were significant improvements in gut health so they noticed that symptoms of ibs overall gut symptoms went down in the fasting group but did not go down in the caloric restriction group even though they were both restricting calories the same amount eating the same isocaloric type of diet okay now there's a specific strain of bacteria Christensinalisia, which went up.
Again, a bacteria largely associated with good metabolic health. Now, you're giving your gut a break. If you look at large bodies of literature, we can see that taking a break from food is good. We are in this world where we just consistently consume, so taking a break from food is definitely good.
And that couples nicely into the next one, which you wouldn't have thought. But one of the best things you can do for your microbiome is drink adequate amounts of water. Now, you're probably going to want to turn this video off early because this is just a simple one, but no, hear me out on this.
The Journal of Nutrition published a paper and they found that drinking water, simply drinking water, accounted for a 13% variance in microbiome. So basically, increase the variation. Those that drank higher amounts of water had more microbiome diversity.
They also had less risk of infection, like pathogenic issues, because you're clearing more out. One of the best things you can do for your gut is be hydrated. And a 13% increase in variation is great. When you look at the longevity studies, it's less about the diversity and it's more about the variation and individuality of a person. So the ability for their microbiome to move and fluctuate and change.
An adaptable microbiome. And drinking water allows that to happen. Probably because you can flush out an increase, like the fecal content of bacteria.
So maybe you flush out bad things better, right? The more you hydrate, maybe you have the ability to flush out. Bad bacteria. I'm speculating, but more research needs to be done on this.
Although it's very, very interesting to find out that one of the best things you can do for your gut, possibly even above fiber, is drink more water. I'll see you tomorrow.