Is Gut Health just a fad?

The concept of gut health has gained popularity in recent years. We’re seeing product after product hit the market promoting “gut health”. In fact, chances are if you’ve ever seen one of those supplement ads and clicked it, you’re now being re-targeted by 8 other similar products.

As popular as the concept is today, think back to when you first heard the word “probiotics”. Remember? It was only a few years ago when it was the hot new buzz word everyone in the healthy lifestyle circle was talking about. Dr. Oz and Oprah were promoting it, while we saw other celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Halle Berry drinking it in the form of Kombucha. Probiotics appears to have turned into the discovery of the century with claims to cure us of disease, help us lose weight, and even fight depression. How did this happen?

Shortly after probiotics got popular, another hot buzz word came to play. Remember what that was? For those of you that guessed “prebiotics”, you’re right. All of a sudden “probiotics” was no longer enough to save the world, it needed its trusty sidekick “prebiotics”.

Search: How to improve Gut Health?

Let’s take it a step back to about a decade ago. Back then if you heard the word gut it was in phrases like “trust your gut” or “that takes guts” as if that was the organ that gave you special powers. To a degree that was true. Today we know how your gut impacts your energy, strength, and even mental capabilities. Similar organs in your body that have received credit to helping you were your heart and brain. There was already a lot out there on how to take care of those organs, then why not your gut? That’s mainly due to knowledge and awareness. Prior to recent years, no one was really searching for “how to improve gut health”, “improve gut health”, or even “gut health”. But, in the last 5 years it’s become a more popular topic – especially this year:

Now, when you search for the above phrase your top results are:

1. 7 Signs of an Unhealthy Gut and 7 Ways to Improve Gut Health
2. 10 Ways to Improve Your Gut Bacteria, Based on Science
3. 6 Ways to Improve Gut Health – Blue Zones

Solutions at your fingertips that help self-diagnose and treat yourself and I’m sure some of you already have. You might have experienced some positive results. They might have been temporary. You might have tried it with a friend or partner and got different results. While the concept of gut health is important, there might not be a single solution that works for everyone, and even if it didn’t it wouldn’t do so equally. I know this might go against everything the new “probiotic”, “microbiome”, “gut-health” product marketers are trying to sell you, but I’m a numbers guy and data doesn’t lie.

What Next?

At the start of this article I asked the question “is gut health just a fad?” I followed by showing trends in search and popularity, which might have made you lean towards it being a fad especially if you got in on the fad. However, the fact is this isn’t just a fad and gut health is changing lives, including my own. In my seven years of research which included trying supplements, and making my own kombucha and kefir, I realized one thing – there’s truth to this, but one that will continue to require more research and data. Gut health is largely impacted by what we give it. This is something that can be measured quantitatively and even more important – qualitatively. Some days I felt the same solutions work better or worse than other days. The fact is, our bacteria counts (both good and bad) can be measured, however, this doesn’t necessarily correlate with how we feel. The impact of this qualitative and quantitative data is what we seek to explore and we’ll continue to share those results on this new venture we’ve affectionately named Biomli.