2025 Wellness Trend: Throwing a New Year’s Feast for the 100 Trillion Guests in Your Gut
By Ross Pelton, RPh, PhD, CCN
Scientific Director, Essential Formulas
As we enter 2025, it’s time to plan a feast—not just for you, but for the 100 trillion microbes that inhabit your gut. Your gut microbiome is a lively party of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms, and what you eat influences whether they thrive or merely survive.
Every time you eat, you are feeding these 100 trillion guests. These probiotic bacteria flourish on the nourishment provided by dietary fibers and polyphenols. These two food groups are essential for the survival and functioning of these bacteria.
Understanding the importance of dietary fibers and polyphenols in supporting your probiotic bacteria is empowering. These two food groups are crucial for the health and viability of your probiotic bacteria and the production of postbiotic metabolites, which affect many aspects of human health, particularly the immune system.
Dietary Fibers are classified as either soluble or insoluble, and both types have essential functions and provide significant health benefits. These nutritional fibers occur primarily in plant-based foods such as vegetables, fruits, and whole, unprocessed grains.
Fibers are classified according to their solubility and fermentability, which are essentially equivalent. Soluble fibers are readily fermentable by anaerobic probiotic bacteria in the colon, producing important health-regulating postbiotic metabolites. Insoluble fibers are poorly fermentable and, thus, are not a good source of postbiotic metabolites. However, insoluble fibers do increase water absorption and accelerate intestinal transit time.
Polyphenols are a large compound class that occurs primarily in plant-based foods such as fruits, vegetables, seeds, herbs, and spices. Over 8,000 polyphenols have been structurally identified. Sub-categories of polyphenols include flavonoids, phenolic acids, lignans, and stilbenes. The largest sub-category is flavonoids; there are over 4,000 known flavonoids.
Plant-based foods, especially fruits and vegetables, are the primary sources of dietary fibers and polyphenols. This underscores the importance of consuming a diet that contains a wide variety of plant-based foods. Doing so enables your probiotic bacteria to produce diverse postbiotic metabolites, the foundation of creating and maintaining a healthy microbiome.
It’s concerning that 90-95% of American children and adults are not consuming enough dietary fiber and polyphenol-rich foods. This deficiency in nourishing their probiotic bacteria leads to a shortage in the production of postbiotic metabolites, contributing to various health problems.
Dysbiosis, a term for a microbial imbalance in the gut, can lead to uncomfortable intestinal symptoms like gas, bloating, loose stools, constipation, and pain. More worryingly, dysbiosis is linked to an increased risk of a wide range of health concerns, from intestinal to mental/emotional illnesses.
Dr. Ohhira’s Probiotics is a complete microbiome product that contains probiotics, prebiotics, and postbiotic metabolites. It is produced in a multi-year fermentation process, producing a final product with over 500 postbiotic metabolites. Directly delivering postbiotic metabolites explains why Dr. Ohhira’s Probiotics has developed a worldwide reputation for relief from dysbiosis-related intestinal complaints and maintaining a healthy microbiome. At Essential Formulas, we refer to this as Dr. Ohhira’s Advantage.