How To Improve Your Gut Health /What Food to Eat/ Probiotics Benefits + Myths

hi i'm magnus ligbach i've been a trainer and nutritionist for a little more than 20 years and today i'm really excited because i'm here with my client friend susan davcoda who's also a professor and a scientist working at cedars-sinai here in los angeles at ucla do you mind telling us a little more about yourself and what you do absolutely um so yeah i'm i'm a scientist i run a research lab that really focuses on intestinal health gut health we really focus on the bacteria that live in your gut the so-called microbiome and we're interested in how the foods we eat affect the bacteria that live in our in our gut and what that means for inflammation what it means for metabolism and so we try to understand disease but we also try to optimize health so this is a part of a three-part series with susan and today's topic is about gut health and gut bacteria first off i'd like to thank ours koso for sponsoring today's video the coast is a general name for a japanese fermented drink made from vegetables and fruit as you might know fermented fruits are really good for your gut health i have personally been juicing our kosovo's for the past couple of months in the mornings i really love what it does for me and my gut this drink contains over 100 fruits vegetables and plants and it's been fermented for a whole year so if you're like me who cares about your gut health i recommend giving this a shot to learn more about this great product check out the link in my description below if you use the code magnus 10 you'll get 10 of your first purchase and now back to today's video so today we're going to talk about postbiotics prebiotics probiotics common misconceptions and fermented foods uh amongst other things so uh where do we start suzanne there's so much to cover on this topic i think um you know things that the first thing that i get asked about the most when we start talking about gut health is what probiotic should i take i think people are inundated with you know you go to the you go to the store and you see a shelf that has hundreds of probiotics and some are for women and some are for men and some are for kids and it's can be really confusing and you don't know what the labels mean um and should you even be taking one you know is there been is it like a vitamin there's no harm um and i think people are really confused and i think the industry doesn't really help people understand you know what to take better that's why we have you yeah so yeah i um you know i guess the first the first thing i would say about probiotics is that there has been a lot of research in the last three to four years showing that many of the probiotics on the shelf don't work at least not in the way that they claim they work so what does that mean the first thing that has been discovered is that the number of bacteria on labels often is not validated so they might say you have 12 billion or 20 billion on a label but if you actually test that the viability's half that or a quarter of that so you're paying a lot of money for these and you're getting a fraction of the potency so that's one many of the probiotics are not validated or tested appropriately the other thing and perhaps more importantly is that some really compelling research came out showing that many of those bacteria that you take actually don't colonize your gut you basically just poop them out and the reason being i think people don't really know that you have probiotic bacteria living in your intestines normally that you're born with them you don't only get them from a pill you have them naturally in your body um and so if you have them already taking one in a pill that foreign probiotic will meet your native probiotic and the native probiotic will say you know see ya there's no home for you here i'm already occupying this this house and it will just out compete it and and you'll flush it out so again many people are paying some of these products or 100 plus dollars per for a month's supply and there may do nothing for you um so that has been some of the more recent discoveries that have come about um from the recent research and i don't want to say all probiotics don't work but we have learned that many of them don't [Music] what should you be taking or should you be taking anything to optimize your bacterias yeah great question i mean you know if i were if someone were to say okay how then do i choose a probiotic because there are some companies that do the research and do the work to put a good quality product out there it just may not colonize so how do you know then so if you really want to really tailor the probiotic to your gut you should get your microbiome sequenced and there's many kits out there now where you take a little swab you send it off and they'll send you your profile and basically if you're missing one of these good bacteria the profile will tell you that okay then you can say okay i'm missing lactobacillus i'm missing bifidobacteria these are common probiotics then you go to the store and specifically look for a probiotic that has what you're missing but if you have it then buying it and taking it will make no difference so what you want to do is say let me replace what i don't have the only way you can do it is by getting your microbiome sequenced um so that's the like prudent way to do it the really thoughtful way of taking a probiotic if you're willing to take the time to do it and you could potentially improve your gut health that way if you don't have the patience to do it you can promote natural your you can promote the bacteria already living in your gut that are good that's got to be the best thing right to actually help and feed the bacteria you already have yeah that that is the most natural way right to encourage the good bacteria in your gut to thrive um and some of the foods that we eat in our day-to-day life actually don't help those bacteria but there are foods that will help those bacteria and we want our diet you know if we eat you know the the thing that isn't talked about the most and promoting good bacteria is is fiber like the most unsexy food component that we eat that's so important it's so important and your bacteria love fiber i mean it they just thrive on fiber and what happens when you eat a lot of different kinds of fiber your bacteria break down the fiber and they produce chemicals that actually your your gut cells will take up and it makes it's healthy for your body it's healthy for your gut and so people you know they hear fiber is good for your gut but why and it's because the bacteria produce these chemicals that are really good for your body and that's what you want to encourage that that cycle through fiber what about fermented foods i love fermented foods fermented foods are great for you um but sometimes not not for the reason people think they're good for you um what is a fermented food right a fermented food is a piece of food that um has bacteria in the culture and the bacteria actually break down that vegetable kimchi you know bacteria breaking down the cabbage sauerkraut bacteria breaking down the sauerkraut produces sort of a sour taste and that act of fermentation is the bacterial breakdown of the food the sour taste you taste is that chemical that's good for your gut okay so by eating the fermented food people think it's beneficial because they're eating the bacteria it's like taking a probiotic but fermented foods will suffer from the same issue that a pill will you know you're expecting that bug to colonize your gut doesn't always happen why a fermented food is good is because it contains postbiotics and postbiotics are those chemicals that are produced by the bacteria so when you take in whether it's kombucha kimchi sauerkraut um any it could be fermented meat sometimes those chemicals your body will readily take that up so you're directly providing your body the chemical directly and that's why fermented foods are so good and there's actually really compelling data out coming out soon that those chemicals can actually reduce inflammation so what about other misconceptions you mentioned probiotics as one of them but i am interested in you know there's gluten tolerance intolerance there's there's lactose intolerance and can you talk a little bit about that sure um you know uh it seems that food intolerances are are increasing more and more these days you know i i think they didn't exist at as much as they did even 10 20 years ago so why is that i think the diet diet is changing in a large part the things that are in our foods are changing but fundamentally you know gluten intolerance for example is a is a tricky topic because you have outright celiac disease which is a genetic mutation that causes you to completely be unable to eat any gluten and that's of defined medical that's a that's a that's a disease right um and then there's everything else gluten intolerance and that gluten intolerance is not a genetic mutation it's not a medical condition it's a lot of it is fueled by this perception that gluten is bad for you but there are also some people who eat gluten and they feel worse or they feel foggy there's nothing really inherently in gluten that we've been eating it for a long time there's nothing inherently in it that should cause that but again it just harkens back to diet being so personal you know some people you really have to listen to your body and if you feel bad eating any food whether it's gluten or anything else your that's your body telling you that that food isn't working with your body chemistry and so you should keep a log of those things but i do want to make it clear that celiac disease is a medical condition glucose and sorry gluten intolerance is not um lactose is it is a very interesting one because you don't see babies that have lactose intolerance it's an adult problem only you only develop lactose intolerance as an adult which is which is quite interesting so it's clearly something that is happening over the course of your life so what is lactose intolerance it's a reduction in an enzyme that your body makes that breaks down lactose the sugar in milk so it's really an enzyme problem your body's not making enough of that enzyme anymore that can happen naturally with age or it can because you slowly and maybe some not consciously started eating less and less of dairy products if you don't eat the food your body's not going to produce the enzyme i was going to ask that because that's that's how it is with with everything we right yeah if you don't eat meat for a long time so your body will not be able to break it down once you eat it right yeah i mean it's it's very your your body is highly efficient and it doesn't really do anything extra that it doesn't have to do so you produce enzymes to it to break down the foods that your body sees if it doesn't see that food it's not going to keep producing that enzyme right so regarding lactose intolerance if you now get bloating and diarrhea when you eat lactose the natural reaction is to stop eating it obviously but there is actually a way where you can slowly slowly what we call titrate which means add back in small doses slowly increasing little little little bits and you can actually coax your body to start making those enzymes again so it's not a one-way street it's not you know that you can never have ice cream again but you have to be willing to suffer a little bit of pain to get to the point where you can ramp up that enzyme production again interesting i didn't know that about lactose well we live and we learn um are there anything else that you think we should address that people watching this could take with them yeah i i think the key for certainly for gut health but it would make sense for general health it's diversity so diets that what we do know regarding gut bacteria and gut health is diets that are too narrow um you know all one or n and you know at the exclusion of the other meaning you only eat plants and maybe one narrow spectrum of plants or you only eat meat and nothing else narrow diets actually reduce the diversity of bacteria in your gut and that's a bad thing you need an abundant uh community of bacteria in your gut for health the more different kind of bacteria you have the more of those different kinds of chemicals they produce that your body will use so you can achieve that by eating from all the food groups eat a diversity of foods present your body with many different things healthy things ideally but the more diversity you have in your diet the better your gut health will be so what i encourage people is don't try to avoid very narrow diets especially fad diets but narrow diets can cause long-term intestinal problems that is some great advice right there thank you so much for taking the time it's always a pleasure hope you guys like this video um susan if people want to find out more about gut health and and about you where can they find you uh you're welcome to find me on instagram um you if you just type in my name suzanne dakota i try to post as frequently as i can on topics usually focused on gut health but what i try to do is take current research and translate it into everyday terms and give a little bit of interpretation if you have specific questions you're welcome to dm me on instagram and i try to address all the questions so yeah find me there amazing thank you so much see you next week

Channel: Magnus Method

Views: 52,231

Rating: 4.9561276 out of 5

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Id: d419lMAYiJw

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021