Ten weeks of high fiber. Their gut bacteria stayed where they were.

Today’s letter

What to add when more fiber has not helped

My sister Jeanette keeps a printed list taped to the side of her refrigerator. Chia, oats, lentils, raspberries, flax. She wrote it out in March, after a video told her to get forty grams of fiber a day, and she stuck to it the way she sticks to everything. By June she was eating more fiber than anyone I know.

She was also bloated by two in the afternoon most days, and no less tired than she had been in the winter. When I asked her about it in August, she said the list was fine and the problem was her. Then she said the thing I keep hearing from women her age…

“Why does it work for everyone but me?”

Jeanette is fifty four and she has never once quit halfway through anything. She raised two kids while working nights at a print shop, she ran the school fundraiser nine years running, and she reads the label on everything before it goes in the cart. Give her a rule and she follows it to the gram.

The rule she was handed this year was a number. Eat more fiber, then eat more than that, because the gut is where everything starts. Nobody told her that fiber is one lever and not the whole machine, so when her stomach got worse instead of better, she read it as proof she had done it wrong.

Here’s what gets me.

She followed the advice exactly. None of it was her fault.

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Let me show you how I know. Not with my opinion, but with a study that put both halves of the gut health conversation side by side and watched what happened.

Researchers at Stanford took 36 healthy adults and split them into two groups. One group spent ten weeks adding fermented food: yogurt, kefir, fermented cottage cheese, kimchi and other fermented vegetables, vegetable brine drinks, kombucha. The other group spent the same ten weeks adding high fiber food: legumes, seeds, whole grains, nuts, vegetables and fruit. Both lists are what a doctor would call a good diet.

Most of the people in the trial were women, average age fifty one. Blood and stool went to the lab the whole way through, and the team counted two things: how many kinds of bacteria were living in the gut, and the level of 19 proteins tied to inflammation.

What they found

Stanford School of Medicine, 2021. Wastyk et al., Cell.

The high fiber group (no change)

After ten weeks, the variety of bacteria in the gut stayed on average about where it started, and not one of the 19 inflammation proteins came down.

The fermented food group (more variety)

The variety of gut bacteria went up, with bigger servings linked to bigger effects, and 19 proteins tied to inflammation came down.

Same ten weeks, same effort, two different results inside the gut.

In other words, ten weeks of adding fiber was not enough on its own to make the gut more varied, and the food with live cultures in it was.

Her discipline was never the missing piece. Neither is yours.

So why would the fiber, of all things, leave the bacteria where they were?

Fiber is food for the bacteria she already has, and if the kinds that break down a particular fiber are thin on the ground in her gut, there is nobody home to eat it. It ferments anyway, which is where the gas and the pressure come from, and the researchers suspect a longer run or a slower ramp may be what that group needed. Fermented food does something different. The jar arrives with live bacteria in it, so she is not only feeding the population, she is adding to it, and that is the part the list on the refrigerator never mentioned.

Jeanette never stood a chance with one ingredient and a number. Neither did you, I’d bet.

That’s the part no one says out loud… she was given half of an answer, and it was the half that works slowest.

Try this today

Pick one fermented food you already like and eat one serving of it today, at a meal you already eat. A cup of plain yogurt with breakfast, a small glass of kefir, a few forkfuls of sauerkraut or kimchi next to dinner. Buy it from the refrigerated section and look on the label for live or active cultures, because the shelf stable jars are usually pasteurized and the bacteria in them are gone. Keep every bit of the fiber you are already eating. Do the one serving a day for two weeks before you think about a second.

This one does not just feed the bacteria. It adds to them.

Promise me you’ll try it today? Saying it out loud is half of what makes it stick.

I’m in. I’ll try it today →

This works because of what is alive in the jar, not because fermented food is magic. It isn’t. The bacteria go in, some of them stay, and the variety in there has somewhere to grow from.

Jeanette put a bottle of kefir in the refrigerator door this month, right next to the list, and she says two in the afternoon is easier now. She kept the oats and the lentils. Nothing came off her list at all.

What she needed was never more willpower, and that is the part I want you to hear. There’s still time for you.

So if you have been adding fiber all year and waiting to feel different…

It was never your fault.

— Cole

P.S. How many fermented foods are in your refrigerator right now? Just the number, hit reply. On Monday I’ll tell you what the Stanford group worked up to.

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