Feed the good ones

Most of the tens of trillions of bacteria living in your gut are on your side, and what they live on is fibre. Specifically, the kind of fibre we cannot digest ourselves. It passes through us untouched and reaches the part of the gut where they live, and they turn it into the short-chain fats that keep the gut wall healthy and the whole system calm.

The problem is modern. The average adult in Britain eats about 18 grams of fibre a day against the 30 the government recommends, and our great-grandparents ate more like 50 to 100 on a diet of roots, oats, pulses and whole fruit. The good bacteria have been half-starved for two generations, and we believe that shows up as bloating, cravings, and a gut that cannot absorb what you give it.

Agave inulin is the fix we chose. It is a prebiotic fibre pulled from the heart of the agave plant, the same plant as tequila, slightly sweet on its own, and it is exactly the kind of fibre those bacteria want. It is in the scoop to feed what is already in you, before adding anything new. A fed gut absorbs the rest of the pouch better, which is why the fibre section comes first in how we think about the formula, even though it comes after the protein on the label.

Fibre and live cultures together come to 3,500mg a scoop.