Hi

I just got water kefir/ tibicos, soon I'll get milk kefir and also kombucha.

Love the stuff, similar to sprouting small natural stuff are working to make me healthier !!!


Still, people keep saying it won't colonize in my gut, any way to change that?

Someone can explain this to me, and point me into the right direction?

I'm not even sure if they understand the whole process well enough to know for sure what the best way to do this is...

That is good stuff though. Try making saurkraut too if you haven't already done it!

The people saying this to you may be comparing drinking kefir with taking a high-quality, high-potency probiotic supplement. However, eating and drinking any probiotic-containing food/drink like you are talking about will eventually get you there. It just might take a year of drinking kefir, eating sauerkraut, yogurt with active cultures, etc. on a daily basis to achieve the same results as taking a supplement like I mentioned for say three months.

Nobody really knows...It's all theory...I'm simply coming from my experience of thirty-plus
years of medicinal herbalist practice; both using and experimenting with probiotics & prebiotics (substances that are super-food for the probiotic bacteria) and recommending them to clients for various health reasons.

Keep doing what you're doing...The healthier your gut is, the healthier the rest of your body will be, especially your brain!

I myself need to get into fermented foods, as well as more probiotics. I've tried a few kinds of probiotic supplements and i can tell there's some benefit but i'm still very new to all this. Would anyone have some advice or guidance on what i should try or do for my gut? I have Autism and some pretty rough gut and bowel issues, also have some skin issues (like some sort of full body acne rash thing), i also have Candida (which i've recently tried Diflucan for 200mgs orally daily for about a couple months now and haven't noticed really any reduction in Candida symptoms except for what i've gotten from Caprylic Acid though that has a major laxative effect especially with me having no gallbladder). I've also thought about making my own fermented foods because around here stores really don't carry any of the live stuff, only the canned stuff.

Any help/guidance/advice would be appreciated

As I said before, I would recommend anyone wanting to change there diet and/or get on the probiotic thing to star by making saurkraut and komeboocha and kefir etc .

You can make them very easy. For saurkraut just get good cabbage , sourced from a reputable farm stand or farmers preferably but if not get good organic cabbage. Cut it up, salt it (I use pink Himalayan salt) and then mash it up to get the water/juice out from the inside of the cabbage. The cabbage will ferment in its OWN juice. Oh, you might want to rinse off the cabbage first before you do this too, depending on where you sourced it (use your common sense on this). After mashing it up very well , put it in a clean mason jar. If there isn't enough juice from the cabbage to cover it completely and then some (maybe an extra 1/4-1/2 inch_ then add some clean water to it. Keep in mind that when you are mashing the salt helps bring out the juices (I usually salt it before I mash it then come back to it and mash it half an hour later..) So yeah that's basically it. Put a coffee filter over the rim of the jar with an elastic or something similar to keep bugs etc from getting in but to still ensure some amount of air flow. Then wait a bit. You should see activity after just a few days and you can try a little then but I normally wait atleast 2 weeks to eat any. And keep it out of your fridge!!

You can make komboocha from store bought kombooocha simply by adding the komboocha to a mason jar and adding sweet tea, Make sure when you brew the tea you allow it to cool to room temperature before adding it to the komboocha and for the first couple fermentations you should use regular black (Camellia sinensis) tea.

Probiotics tend to have a wider range of strains of bacteria but do your homework before buying any as they are pricey and a good handfull are garbage and inactive.

I really don't know anywhere enough about this stuff to give good advice but making your own fermented foods is healthy, tasty and fun. If you want to get your gut healthy I suggest eating a healthy diet and doing some research. Read up on the "GAPs" diet and some of the stuff Natasha Campbell-McBride talks about ( I read a book by her a few months back and it was very interesting and seems to make sense) The Gaps diet would probably help get your body back to a baseline/equilibrium but there are also other diets out there, although they do seem to share alot of common features... So anyways, look around and do your homework.

Saurkraut tends to beat out probiotic supplement pills in both bacterial counts and gut colonization rates from what I can find.

A lot of the information out there is fairly dodgy, but this article appears to be well cited and seated in the actual research. Though I'd like to see the actual test results for so often parroted tens of trillions bacterial count from the Mercola test.

Pro-biotics are great. However, taking all the pro-biotics in the world won't do you any good if you aren't feeding the 'good' bacteria what they need to thrive. Good health is more than just adding things to your diet or taking a supplement. To avoid a rant, I'll leave it at that and continue to the topic of discussion.

Pre-biotics are what pro-biotics eat. There are some really good pre-biotic (resistant starch) foods that will keep your 'good' bacteria from being overrun. Dietary or insouluable fiber, resistant starches, whatever you want to call them, are indigestable to us, but out gut bacteria love them.

Green Bananas (when unripe, the resistant starches haven't been converted to sugar yet)

Plantains

Sweet Potatoes (Avoid regular potatoes,they are part of the nightshade family)

There's also a supplement you can get called Inulin powder. It's also used as am artificial sweetener, but goes great on salads or in smoothies.


I will also share my pre-biotic blast smoothie recipe.
I use a 16oz Ninja Blender cup


1-2 green bananas
1/4 cup almond butter
2 tsp Inulin powder
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp vanilla

Optional, but highly recommended

1 York peppermint patty (makes it irresistible)
1 square 90% dark chocolate


Top off the glass with goat milk (casein A2 protein instead of A1)

Blend till smooth

Refrigerate 1-2 hours

Why should this be an issue?


And what's a York peppermint patty? That does not exist in my part of the world.

They contain proteins called lectins. Lots of foods contain lectins but certain ones are worse than others because of our ancestral diets. Think peanut or gluten allergies, both caused by lectins. Tomatoes and potatoes, both of the nightshade family, have these lectins that can wreck havok on your microbiome. Some people are more tolerant than others, but, even those that consider themselves healthy, might benefit from avoiding certain lectins.

There's a very good book that goes in depth about what lectins are and how they affect us called "The Plant Paradox" by Steven R. Gundry

York peppermint patties are delicious little chocolate coated candies that have a peppermint flavored nougat center. Adding straight peppermint flavor would probably do the same thing.