Gut

If it weren’t for my medical studies I would never have had the knowledge necessary to write this book, so I thank all my good teachers and professors, as well as the German state, which pays for my university studies.

When many women go through menopause, their bones get weaker. This is due to a mid-life crisis in the ovaries. They have to say goodbye to their life of producing hormones and learn how to enjoy their retirement. But the bones miss those hormones! No prebiotic in the world can help with this kind of osteoporosis.

In one experiment, ITFMIX was seen to improve calcium absorption in young girls by up to 20 percent. That is good for the bones and can help protect against osteoporosis in old age.

Inulin can be produced with different chain lengths, which is great for attaining a beneficial distribution of good bacteria. Short inulin chains are eaten by the bacteria at the start of the large intestine and longer chains are consumed closer to the end.

Most prebiotics are sugars that are linked into chains. When we speak of sugar, we often mean a particular molecule extracted from sugar beet or sugar cane, but there are more than a hundred different kinds of sugar. If, historically, we had developed a sugar industry based on endive sugar, our sweets would not cause tooth decay. Sweetness is not in itself unhealthy, we simply eat only the most unhealthy kind of sweetness.

Too many meat toxins can damage the large intestine and, in a worst-case scenario, can even cause cancer. The end of the gut is more prone to cancers on average than the rest of the organ. That’s why researchers are so keen to

Pure prebiotics can be bought at the pharmacy or drugstore. These include the prebiotic inulin, which is extracted from endives, and GOS (galacto-oligosaccharides), which are isolated from milk. These substances have been tested for their health-giving effects and are pretty efficient at feeding only certain Bifidobacteria and Lactobacilli.

, the best strategy is to gradually increase the amount of dietary fiber and not to feed your bacteria with massive, unmanageable amounts. After all, the food we eat is still first and foremost for us, and only secondarily for the inhabitants of our large intestine.

Those are just a few dishes that Bifidobacteria and Lactobacilli love to eat. We now know that they prefer vegetables from the lily family (Liliaceae), which includes leeks and asparagus, onions, and garlic. They also like Compositae plants, which are those from the sunflower family, including endives, salsify, artichokes, and Jerusalem artichokes. Resistant starches are also on their list of favorites.

This is exactly how prebiotics can help: they are roughage that can only be eaten by nice bacteria. I