I ran a 10-week experiment eating 6 servings of fermented foods a day and was VERY surprised by the results - especially biological age. Subscribe to Nourishable    / @nourishable  

Thanks to Viome for providing me with the testing kits for this experiment. As of April 2024, I've decided to no longer be part of the Viome affiliate program.

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00:00 Intro
00:53 Fermented Food Definition
01:38 Experimental Design
03:04 Baseline Testing
03:33 Fermented Food Shopping
03:51 Day 1 Fermented Food Experiment
05:05 Fermented Food Meals
06:05 Post-Diet Testing
06:13 Gut Health Results
07:12 Inflammation Results
07:54 Biological Age Results
09:35 Results Interpretation
11:16 Do fermented food microbes take up residence in the gut?
11:54 Should you eat more fermented food?
14:23 Experiment Conclusions

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Hosting, Research, Writing & Post-Production by Lara Hyde, PhD
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Music & Video Production by Robbie Hyde
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Opening Motion Graphics by Jay Purugganan https://www.c9studio.com/WP/

The information in this video is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this video is for general information purposes only.

Script with in-text citations: https://bit.ly/fermentedfoodexperiment

References
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33398...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34256...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37226...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35406...

I designed my n-of-1 experiment to replicate this study by a team of researchers from Stanford in the Sonnenburg lab. They recruited eighteen healthy volunteers and tested inflammation levels in their blood and profiled their gut microbiome, which is a nice way of saying that sequenced the microbes in their poop. Then they guided their participants to ramp up their fermented food intake to six servings a day over a month, and then maintain that intake for six weeks. Then they tested their gut microbiome and blood again at the end of the study. After eating fermented foods, they found that lower levels of inflammation and higher diversity in the gut microbiome - together supporting that yes, eating fermented foods is linked with beneficial health markers. I’m getting a diversity of products with live, active cultures - kefir, yogurt, cultured cottage cheese, kombucha, though I’m avoiding ones with more than 5% juice, and a whole bunch of fermented veggies like kimchi, sauerkraut, fermented beets, and fermented carrots. Putting it all together, if we cherry pick which data to look at, we can conclude that my n-of-1 study also supports that fermented foods increase gut microbiome diversity and reduce inflammation, just like the Stanford study. But it’s important to point out that not all of my Viome metrics improved, and some actually got worse, like my gut lining health and butyrate production, and others were categorized as not optimal, like my cellular and energy efficiency and gas production. So this suggests that fermented foods are associated with some improved health markers, but they’re not a panacea. Lots of health claims focus on the live, active probiotics - so are the fermented food microbes moving into my gut to increase diversity? I didn’t measure the microbes in my fermented foods, but the Stanford study did, and they did not find the fermented food microbes taking up residence in participant’s microbiomes. Should you incorporate more fermented foods into your diet? There are other factors to consider when contemplating dietary change in addition to the potential health benefits: habit sustainability, cost, and whether you can overdo it. My takeaway from the longest diet study I’ve ever done is that there seem to be some health benefits of fermented foods on my gut microbiome, inflammation, and even biological age. I really enjoyed all types of fermented foods, well except for that water kefir that tasted like vomit, so it’s a dietary shift that I can see myself maintaining for many years to come.

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