Green Eyes On: New Non-Dairy Probiotics and the Future of Food
by Sara Snow on 07. 7.08
Photo: Hans Neleman/Getty Images
After a weekend of fireworks, barbecues, and cuisine that may contain more than one hot dog or Jell-O fruit mold, we turn our attention to the gut. And a new breakthrough in probiotics.
"The gut?" you ask. Um, yes. The gut.
Sometime shortly before the holiday weekend I spoke with Steve Demos, a man I’ve known for quite some time and someone my dad, Tim Redmond, has known for quite a few more, since they were both pioneers in this industry of natural and organic foods.
Steve was the mastermind behind Silk Soymilk. You’ve most likely come across this product in stores -- if not used it on your cereal. Or you've seen the commercials -- cows dressed in people's clothes begging people to drink milk from a bean instead of milk from an udder. The commercials, I believe, started after Steve took a much needed but short-lived retirement from running a company that had grown as large as his.
A Healthy Stomach Makes for a Healthy Body
During these few years of 'retirement,' Steve traveled, spending his days talking to doctors and healers. Along the way, he discovered what he now believes is key to preserving health: protecting the gut.
Let’s back up. Believe it or not, our body houses more bacteria than cells. But these bacteria aren't all bad guys. There are charming, good guys too that keep us healthy. In fact, according to Healing Daily, 15% of the bacteria in your lower intestine may be bad -- but 85% of these guys are good. They help make sure we don’t get things like salmonella or E. coli poisoning. They also help make sure we’re digesting properly and efficiently. Without the good bacteria, you can get constipated, bloated, gassy...all things that add up to general unpleasantness in the gut, and eventually, bigger problems.
Photo: GoodBelly non-dairy probiotics
Probiotics Add Good Bacteria to the Stomach
So here’s where probiotics come into play. Probiotics join ranks with the good bacteria (being of the good-guy sort themselves) and they work to prevent the harmful bacteria from taking over, helping improve digestion and the absorption of minerals and nutrients, and lowering cholesterol. They even lower high blood pressure. That's one action-packed cure-all.
Now back to Steve. So the doctors and healers he spoke with told him the secret to health lay in the gut. Not the skeletal system or the circulatory system, the gut. Steve took this seriously and searched and found a patented probiotic that was being used in a hospital in Sweden to accelerate the recovery of patients. This bacteria didn’t just flow through the digestive track, it colonized there and went to work.
The thing that really set Steve’s finding apart was that he found he could grow the bacteria on a different protein than what most probiotics in the U.S. depended on. Instead of dairy, he would grow it on oats. While the dairy industry has us convinced that probiotics are only found in yogurt, and those of us who don’t or can’t do dairy have despairingly resigned to mixing probiotic powders into our juice, Steve threw some bacteria at oat milk and founded a colony.
GoodBelly, the First Non-Dairy Probiotic
And so GoodBelly was born, and brings to market what Steve coins a "Next Food (PDF)." A food that answers a call and a need. Not just another flavor of strawberry or another slickly packaged same-old, but a food that will actually solve a problem.
Steve predicts the next generation of foods will battle the problem: How do we best maintain our body’s ecosystem? The answer is through the gut.
Sara Snow is green lifestyle expert, and a regular contributor to TreeHugger via her Green Eyes On columns. She can also be seen on CNN.com on Thursdays from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m.
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::Your Digestion, Topic in TreeHugger Forums
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With all of our obsession about food - eating the right things - not eating the wrong things - trying to figure out which is which - most of us know little or nothing about beneficial intestinal bacteria, much less probiotics. Nutrition is a good start, but probiotics carries it to the next level.
Can you imagine an American hospital using probiotics to aid in healing? It's a good thing Steve Demos did some traveling.
For the body to heal, it needs the tools. This sounds like a great step in the right direction.
Interesting, I have had numerous digestion issues in the past, largely solved by switching to all organic diet, but I still would like to eat other things with friends once and a while without the...after affects.
I didn't even know yogurt helped, huh :)
Ack, I wish I could drink Silk(although I do a lot for the environment and for my wallet by making my own) but I can't stomach carrageenan at all. I like the Silk Creamer but can't eat much after having some with the pain. :/ Hopefully this stuff is more stomach friendly.
Whenever my dog has an issue and ends up vomiting, I give her a spoon or two of plain yogurt. It's always solved the problem.
There is no need to buy into expensive marketing and choose "probiotic" products. All yogurt contains probiotics.
You can make your own "probiotic" yogurt in your oven, and even use one of the flashy brands as your culture inoculation if you really believe they're better.
Good article but Good Belly isn't the first non-dairy probiotic. Cultured soy "yogurts" have been out for years. There's even a coconut milk yogurt out now from So Delicious that is certified vegan.
Sauerkraut and kimchi also contain beneficial bacteria. There's no need to buy any special probiotics, nor any need to buy yogurt. And as Tim says, this isn't the first non-dairy yogurt-style probiotic either.
I found out - quite by accident - that when you're taking antiobiotics you should be on some type of probiotic - yogurt, for example, and now finally an alternative - "good belly." Thank you for the information. My doctor never discussed probiotics with me. I wonder why.
Early this year, GoodBelly was heavily promoted in Boulder, Colo., with newspaper coupons for a free 4-pack. So I tried it. I found the taste OK, not great, but the deal-killer for me was that it left a bad aftertaste that seemed to linger for hours.
Sounds like another "edible food-like substance" (as Michael Pollan would put it) to me. And soy is hardly universally tolerated.
Many more people think they have lactose intolerance than actually do. The lactose in most yogurt is at least partially broken down, anyway, so the vast majority of us can digest it with ease. If you have trouble with it, however, why not take probiotics in pill form?
The store I work in sells non-dairy probiotics in veg (and non-veg) capsules. Some have up to 50,000,000,000 (50 billion) organisms. You would need to eat ridiculous amounts of yogurt, dairy or otherwise, to match the potency. Also, most of those bacteria cannot easily survive the stomach acid. So enteric coated capsules deliver more organisms safely to your gut.
Michael R is right. You cannot eat enough yogurt to counteract taking antibiotics.
A healthy person eating a balanced diet might not have the need for them, but for those with special dietary restrictions (my son, for instance has an anaphylactic reaction to milk products and also cannot eat soy), probiotics are sometimes necessary.
For a good education on supplements, vitamins and alternative therapies, check out www.supplementinfo.org
What about soy yogurts, as Tim mentions? Silk even has a line (which is really tasty)! The ones I've tried say on the package that they contain probiotics. What makes GoodBelly different?