Dr. Justin Sonnenburg

Manufacturers put a ton of sugar in

after the fact to kind of mask the sour taste of fermented foods, which is hard for some people to become accustomed to.

Getting used to that sour flavor is difficult, but people really should try to stay away from those fermented foods that are loaded with sugar.

And that's what we instructed people in this study.

If you can get your hands on a SCOBY, kombucha is another one that's super simple.

It's like- You can grow your own.

You can just make your own and it's super easy to do.

I constantly have a batch of kombucha going at home.

And it's just, it's a SCOBY, a symbiotic community of bacteria and yeast.

that you brew tea, you add sugar to it, and you put the SCOBY in and you wait a week or two, depending upon the temperature.

And then you just move the SCOBY over to a new batch and you're old.

What the SCOBY was in is kombucha and it's wonderful.

so how much fermented food were they consuming in servings ounces how many times a day early day late day the general instructions were for people to eat as much fermented foods as possible more is better people during the height of the intervention phase were up over six servings on average per day of fermented foods so kind of two servings at each meal and the

you know, ounces or weight or size.

It really depended on what the fermented food was.

And we just told them to stick to what was a recommended dose on the package that they were buying.

You know, for kombucha, it'd be like a six to eight ounce glass sauerkraut, like a half cup or something like that.

And same with yogurt.

The big signal really was in the fermented food group.

We saw all the things that you would hope to see in a Western microbiota and Western human.