If you feel like everyone and their mother is on a quest to improve their gut health (or proselytizing about a pill or potion that’s “healed” theirs), you’re not wrong. In a 2024 International Microbiota Observatory survey conducted by the market research agency Ipsos on behalf of the Biocodex Microbiota Institute, more than 50% of Americans reported changing their habits to support their gut health—and a 2024 survey by the consulting firm McKinsey found that over 50% of consumers in China, the US, and the UK anticipate making it a higher priority in the next two to three years. And social media—the true arbiter of popularity—reflects this newfound obsession too. Gut-health content is so prolific on TikTok, it has its own hashtag (#guttok), which boasts billions of views, no less. Taken together, all this demonstrates a huge appetite for gut boosters—which the cash-stuffed digestive health industry has swooped in to satisfy.
Plenty of valid concerns are fueling the hype. For starters, research estimates that two thirds of Americans deal with GI symptoms like bloating, heartburn, diarrhea, and constipation. And it’s hard to overstate how much these issues can affect your everyday life, impacting your ability to do basic things like eat well, poop regularly, and even have sex. What’s more, an ever-growing body of research connects your gut to other aspects of your well-being, like your mental state and immune system, so it’s not a stretch to say that nurturing your gut could set off positive ripple effects throughout the rest of your body.
What gut health really means
The tricky part is there’s no one way a healthy gut should look, Priya Simoes, MBBS, a board-certified gastroenterologist and assistant professor of gastroenterology at Mount Sinai in New York City, tells SELF. “Good” digestive health just means “not being plagued by gut-related symptoms,” and “more scientifically, having a diverse gut microbiome,” Dr. Simoes says, describing a colon teeming with all sorts of beneficial bugs (a.k.a. probiotics). “But there is no gold-standard set of bacteria that everyone should have,” she says. “More is better, but there’s huge [variation] from person to person”—meaning, the mix of microbes that make up a healthy GI tract in one individual might look super different in another.
That’s why there’s unfortunately no “one-size-fits-all” probiotic supplement you can take as a quick fix, Olufemi Kassim, MD, a board-certified gastroenterologist and clinical assistant professor in the division of gastroenterology and hepatology at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine, tells SELF. Instead, improving your gut health looks more like nurturing the good bacteria that already live in your digestive tract by taking care of yourself. “A lot of the habits that were ingrained in us as children (like, ‘Eat your fruits and vegetables’ and ‘Get good sleep’) still very much hold true here,” Dr. Simoes says.
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