"Take things to the next level by including a small shot of fermented foods in your diet daily. Fermented foods - like live yogurt, artisanal cheeses, kimchi, kombucha, kefir, and sauerkraut - contain living microbes, known as probiotics. Once you’ve eaten them, these bugs can set up home in your gut, increasing the number and diversity of bacteria that make up your microbiome."

Tim Spector, Professor of Genetics

" Fermented foods provide living bacteria and also supply the fermentation products of those microbes, ie. the chemicals that the microbes make as part of their growth in the fermented food. Bacteria in fermented foods also lowers the glycemic index of that food making it less sugary than in the absence of fermentation....Probiotic supplements are expensive and my guess is that they won't be as good for you as fermented foods would be."

Erica Sonnenburg, PhD, senior research scientist at Stanford University School of Medicine

 "What they discovered was that the fermented foods contributed to gut microbiota diversity. Increased gut microbiota diversity significantly increased anti-inflammatory markers and decreased pro-inflammatory markers like CRP.”

Andrew Hubermann, Ph.D. , Neuroscience Professor

“Microbiota-targeted diets can change immune status, providing a promising avenue for decreasing inflammation in healthy adult. This finding was consistent across all participants in the study who were assigned to the higher fermented food group.”

Christopher Gardner, Ph.D. , Professor

We can increase our stock of good bacteria with probiotics – yoghurt, fermented foods like miso, sourdough bread, blue cheese, olives etc... "We always ate plenty of probiotics until the arrival of 'clean' industrialised food; farmers produced the sauerkraut, the milk and cheese. Of course, some bacteria make people ill, so I am not romantic about it. But this is the one thing I really loved learning about cleanliness – we need to put energy into [maintaining] good bacteria, not always trying to avoid the bad."

Giulia Enders, MD, medical doctor at the Institute for Microbiology in Frankfurt