Dr. Justin Sonnenburg

good microbial community in there afterwards.

You may not.

You certainly want to pay close attention to what you're eating while you're doing the reconstitution of the community after you do something like that.

For sure.

Yeah, you're exactly right.

And we can break down, you know, there's a lot of data of why different components of processed food are so bad for us and so bad for our microbiome.

And I can talk about a few examples of that.

But the flip side of this, the plant-based diet, if you're eating a bunch of complex,

fibers that feed your gut microbiota, your gut microbiota produces these substances called short chain fatty acids, things like butyrate.

And it's known that these short chain fatty acids play really essential components, both in terms of fueling colonocytes

enforcing the barrier, keeping inflammation low, regulating the immune system, regulating metabolism.

Your gut microbiota is just producing this vast array of fermentation end products that then get absorbed into our bloodstream and have all of these tremendous cascading effects that appear to be largely beneficial on our biology.

Now, processed foods, I think, is this other dimension where you have all of these weird chemicals, artificial sweeteners,

weird fats, a lot of refined, simple nutrients.

The simple nutrients we've talked about, but we know that, for instance, artificial sweeteners can have a massive negative impact on the gut microbiome and can lead us towards metabolic syndrome, actually.

There's been beautiful work out of the Weizmann Institute on this.

And then emulsifiers, these compounds that are put in processed foods to help them maintain shelf stability so things don't separate.

all the moisture content is retained appropriately.

Many of these are known to disrupt the mucus layer.

And as soon as you start disrupting that barrier, that can lead you in the direction of inflammation.