Being prescribed antibiotics is never pleasant. First, you’ve got the initial infection you’re trying to fight. Then you’ve got to be aware that certain antibiotics don’t interact well with alcohol and get your dosage timings right. But perhaps the most stressful aspect these days is the knowledge that powerful medications can destroy a lot of the good bacteria in our gut, leaving us open to new issues and digestive symptoms. 

Fortunately, there are things we can do to give good bacteria a fighting chance, whether you’re on medication or not.

You can’t move these days without running into a new probiotic supplement packed with hard-to-pronounce bugs and costing a fortune. 

But are these supplements really the best way to build good gut health?

Talking on the latest episode of the Zoe Science & Nutrition Podcast, Dr Tim Spector suggests that there’s a far simpler and more affordable solution: fermented foods.

“Fermented foods are probiotics – live microorganisms – in food. We’ve had these foods for thousands of years in our diets,” he explains.

In fact, he claims that you get many more types of probiotics in foods such as kefir and kimchi than you do in a single tablet.

“Compared to probiotics, they generally have lower doses, but most of them – apart from maybe cheese and yoghurt – have many more types, much more diversity of microbes than you’d find in a capsule.”

He goes on to explain that the average yoghurt might have three species of bacteria but that a spoonful of kimchi can boast up to 40 different types of microbe. 

That matters because lots of probiotic supplements focus around one or two strains – and not all strains are going to work for you. For a start, how do you know which types of bacteria are already thriving in your gut and which you could do with having more of? 

It all depends on your gut community. “Some people just don’t have a community that’s going to be receptive to this new guy [the probiotic supplement] coming in and telling them what to do… whereas fermented foods give you a much broader choice. You’ve got all these microbes that are happy living together in the food and, collectively, they’re going to have a better chance of having an effect on your gut and restoring it to health. 

“We know from other stories and randomly controlled trials on fermented foods that getting four or five little portions a day in a few weeks can reduce inflammation and boost your immune system. So there’s now science behind these fermented foods.”

His top tip? Try to eat as many different types of fermented food as you can – go for diversity. That might mean starting the day with a glass of kefir or bowl of yoghurt, refreshing with a glass of kombucha, having a bowl of miso soup at lunch, and adding a spoon of kimchi or sauerkraut to your evening meal.

“We don’t know which ones are the best; we don’t really know how to personalise them for you yet… hopefully some of them will work; throw the kitchen sink at your problem,” he advises.

It kind of goes back to everything we’ve been saying here at Strong Women: you’re generally better off trying to get your nutrients from food rather than supplementing individual groups. Protein power is really convenient, but if you can get good quality protein from eggs, tofu, spinach or meat (if you eat it), then that’s probably going to be better. It’s the same for vitamins; a multivitamin might save you time but you’re nearly always better off aiming to eat a wide variety of plants that’ll not only be rich in fibre, but also offer a gamut of vitamins in more digestible amounts than an effervescent vitamin C tablet.

As for gut health, food and movement seem to be the go-to choices for experts. The best thing you can do for maintaining or repairing the gut is focus on fibre and ferments, and to stay active.

Images: Getty