Dr. Will Bulsiewicz

This is going to improve your gut microbiome.

This is going to help your immune system be strong.

So it's a little more complex than fiber in the sense that there are, thus far, we've identified at least 8,000 polyphenols.

The listeners of this show will recognize many of the names.

I'm going to list a few.

Quercetin, resveratrol, curcumin from turmeric.

These are just a few examples of the 8,000.

So now to fully understand this, we would have to conduct studies on all 8,000 and we're not even close.

But what we're seeing, Jonathan, is that these polyphenols, they're big molecules.

They're highly complex.

And what that means is that we can't absorb them easily.

So they may be in our nutrition.

You eat plant-based food, they have polyphenols.

But they actually, much like fiber, make their way down to the gut microbiome in the large intestine.

And that's where they get activated.

because it's the microbes that have specialized enzymes that allow us to basically unlock the polyphenols and give them access to them.

So 90 to 95% of polyphenols require our gut microbiome.

And when this occurs, very similar to the fiber story,

the microbiome has changed.

It becomes healthier.