Can This Food Balance Your Gut Bacteria Better Than a Probiotic?

By now, just about everyone knows the value of probiotics for gut health.

The amount of research we’ve seen in the last 30 years shows just how important good bacteria are for keeping your digestive tract working right.

But what if there was a food you can enjoy that works better than probiotics?

Turns out there is.

Anyone who knows me knows I love cherries. I’ve loved them since I was a kid, especially tart cherries. I like them because they taste so good. But there’s another reason to be a cherry fan – polyphenols.

Polyphenols are a category of more than 500 chemicals that naturally occur in plants. I have reported to you before that polyphenols, especially flavan-3-ols, lower the risk of diabetes by boosting insulin sensitivity and slowing down sugar digestion and absorption.

Additionally, the reason why chocolate, tea, and coffee are so good for you is because they are rich in the group of polyphenols called flavonoids. And there’s more. Other studies have shown that polyphenols reduce the inflammation found in cardiovascular disease and arthritis. And now this.

The authors of this study start off their report by stating, “Tart cherries have been reported to exert potential health benefits attributed to their specific and abundant polyphenol content.” And because of the very many different benefits of polyphenols these researchers wondered if polyphenols worked their magic, in part, by affecting the balance of bacteria in our intestines known as the microbiome. Here’s what they found.

They discovered that tart cherry juice contained an abundance of several classes of polyphenols including anthocyanins, flavonoids, chlorogenic acid, and neochlorogenic acids. When they exposed intestinal bacteria in a culture to the tart cherry juice, the microbes metabolized these polyphenols to 4-hydroxyphenylpropionic acids.

The effect of this conversion was to create a large increase in the microbes Bacteroides and Bifidofactor. Both of these bacteria are considered healthy and beneficial for intestinal health. But that’s not all.

Remarkably, when they gave eight ounces of tart cherry juice every day to a group of nine men and women, the effect was to balance the levels of various intestinal bacteria. In individuals who didn’t have enough Bacteroides, the cherry juice increased the levels as expected. But in people who already had an abundance of Bacteroides, the juice decreased the levels of Bacteroides and increased the levels of other beneficial bacteria, such as Lachnospiraceae, Ruminococcus, and Collinsella. It shows that tart cherry juice has a balancing effect on the microbiome. This is known as a “prebiotic” effect. A diet high in vegetables also has a similar effect, probably because of the high content of polyphenols in vegetables.

So, the next time you’re in the grocery store, pick up a bunch of tart cherries, and eat all you want. Besides having a great effect on your microbiome, you can also benefit from the other marvelous effects of their high polyphenol content.