Giulia Enders

Another trick is to snatch the bad bacteria’s food away (anyone with siblings may be familiar with this strategy).

But sometimes our bacterial community faces attack. That can be from antibiotics, a bad diet, illness, stress, and many, many other causes. Our guts are then less well cared for, less protective, and less good at giving advice.

The fact that almost all the probiotics we know—give or take a yeast or two—are lactic-acid bacteria shows how little we have yet discovered in this area. Lactobacilli are normally less common residents in the guts of adults, and Bifidobacteria are unlikely to be the only health-promoting microbes present in the large intestine.

The treatment is known as fecal bacteriotherapy, or more directly, a fecal transplant. The feces used in medical fecal transplants are not pure, but they are purified. Then, it does not really matter whether they enter through the front or back door, so to speak.

Food we cannot digest in the small intestine is called dietary fiber or roughage. But, despite the name, it is not rough on the bacteria of the large intestine. Quite the opposite, in fact: they love it!

Finally your gut microbes get enough to eat, so they can produce vitamins and healthy fatty acids or put the immune system through a good training session.

This is exactly how prebiotics can help: they are roughage that can only be eaten by nice bacteria. I

Those are just a few dishes that Bifidobacteria and Lactobacilli love to eat. We now know that they prefer vegetables from the lily family (Liliaceae), which includes leeks and asparagus, onions, and garlic. They also like Compositae plants, which are those from the sunflower family, including endives, salsify, artichokes, and Jerusalem artichokes. Resistant starches are also on their list of favorites.

, the best strategy is to gradually increase the amount of dietary fiber and not to feed your bacteria with massive, unmanageable amounts. After all, the food we eat is still first and foremost for us, and only secondarily for the inhabitants of our large intestine.

Pure prebiotics can be bought at the pharmacy or drugstore. These include the prebiotic inulin, which is extracted from endives, and GOS (galacto-oligosaccharides), which are isolated from milk. These substances have been tested for their health-giving effects and are pretty efficient at feeding only certain Bifidobacteria and Lactobacilli.