Written by Bend Beauty
Key Takeaways:
Optimizing gut health requires ensuring you have the right amount of healthy bacteria in your body
While probiotics provide active, live bacteria, prebiotics provide that bacteria with what it needs to thrive
Many people connect supplementation for gut health with probiotics, but today we want to educate you about prebiotics. First, let’s dive into gut health for context.
What Affects Gut Health?
According to the Harvard School of Public Health, gut health is directly impacted by the makeup of your microbiome. Your microbiome is made up of trillions of microorganisms like bacteria, fungi, parasites and viruses. Every person has a unique microbiome that is influenced by their DNA at birth, and later influenced by environmental factors and lifestyle choices like diet and exposure to pollution (1). Optimizing our gut health is about ensuring we have the right amount of healthy, diverse microorganisms in our bodies. We can do this through diet and lifestyle choices, and by supplementation.
Prebiotics Help Probiotics Flourish
Probiotics contain active live bacteria that are targeted to improve gut health and digestive function. Prebiotics are currently a lesser-known concept. Prebiotics are what promote beneficial bacteria growth in the gut – think of them as healthy food for your gut microbes. While a probiotic provides active, live bacteria, a prebiotic provides that bacteria with the nutrients it needs to thrive. In other words, prebiotics help probiotics thrive. Prebiotics help our bodies maintain a diverse variety of bacteria in our gut, which can strengthen our immune response. Most prebiotics are classified as a type of fiber (2).
Your Glow Begins Within
Taking care of your gut health means ensuring you have a healthy supply of prebiotics in your body. Diet along with supplementation is the key to ensuring you’re supporting the growth of diverse, active bacteria in your gut. Some examples of prebiotic foods to incorporate into your diet to support gut health (3):
Garlic
Bananas
Onions
Chickpeas
Lentils
Kidney beans
Even with an abundance of healthy, delicious, fiber-rich options – many of us still don’t get enough in our daily diets. According to nutrition.org, just 7% of American adults meet their daily requirement for fiber intake.
Here’s where supplementation can help. Bend Beauty’s newest supplement, GUT GLOW, is a prebiotic fiber product that is easily incorporated into your daily routine as it’s a clear, flavorless powder. We love GUT GLOW because it’s not only an excellent source of prebiotic fiber, but it also improves IBS symptoms – keeping your gut beautiful and balanced.
Bend Beauty products are BBP approved and deliver self-love in every dose of their premium beauty and wellness supplements. Shop Bend Beauty – and use code BBP20 for 20% off your purchase on bendbeauty.com.
You can catch our Founder + CEO on Beyond Beauty Project: The Podcast here!
Bend Beauty and the Beyond Beauty Project are committed to helping improve our self-esteem and confidence around body image and mental health. Our collaboration is focused on changing the way we talk about beauty – from eliminating the term “anti-aging” from our vocabularies, to understanding that it’s never too late to take better care of your skin, or yourself.
Our current Education Collection series is all about gut health.
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