Ben Willing
speaker
54 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 28 Jan
Ben Willing’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Thanks for having me.
Well, it's microbes, of course, that are changing the food.
And so through their activities and their enzyme activities, it changes the food to make it usually better.
Well, you know, the question of the large trials is actually one of the challenges, so we don't fully know that they're always the best for you, but the evidence is building, and that's actually kind of why we have an initiative around it, trying to build the evidence to say that it is good for you.
A couple fermented foods that are good for you, like yogurt, and have clear effects, they do things like glucose lowering, improving kind of aspects around diabetes,
that have been demonstrated and other ones are doing things like lowering your cholesterol levels and importantly lowering your inflammation.
And that's kind of the one that's gotten some recent attention.
Well, it's an interesting question around there's a group talking about the idea that it's actually the amount of microbes that we consume.
I'm not sure that I'm convinced by all that evidence because it's hard to separate whether it's a fermented food or it's a food with microbes because, of course, usually they're going to go together.
So the idea is that if you eat more microbes, that's going to stimulate your immune system, and that's a good thing.
My personal belief is that it's actually related to the things that the microbes produce.
And so while they're fermenting, they make different types of molecules that have kind of benefits, both to the microbial community that's in your gut, as well as to affecting directly our bodies.
Yeah, so many ways.
And I teach a class and I talk about the gut microbiome is essentially another organ.
And if we didn't have a microbiome, we would be so susceptible to infections that would come in.
And it also kind of shapes our physiology.
We would look totally different.
Our gut would be much more thin and frail if we didn't have microbes stimulating that surface.
And so those microbes, they've co-evolved with us and they help us be who we are and are then protected from some of the nasties out there.
Oh, well, I mean, the most basic thing is the fact that they take things that we can't digest, like fiber, and turn them into beneficial molecules that kind of tell our gut to be healthy, make it non-permissive to things, and
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