Poop talk, ganders, and a recipe to kick off your holiday cheer!

We live in an age where we treat things as they come. Upset stomachs, bad breakouts, flus and colds; there’s a pill to pop for everything. The hidden cost of this is our guts fighting for survival while we kill off any and all bugs, the good kind included.

What most of us don’t realize is that bacterial diversity is essential to our body’s resilience, mental health, and a more pleasant toilet time! When we expose ourselves to more dirt, animals, and live foods, we build up the diversity of bacteria throughout our bodies.

Let’s get into how it works…

Our gut microbiome is essential to our overall health. Not only has diverse gut microbiota been linked to better and more regular bowel movements, it also reduces inflammation, sustains a healthy weight, improves immune response, regulates hormones, and even lifts mood, energy levels, and gives you a good nights rest. Don't we all want that!

The particular nutrients behind these fascinating changes are called short-chain fatty acid. Short-chain fatty acids are one of the byproducts of our food as it is digested. Short-chain fatty acids, in particular acetate, propionate, and butyrate, are what feed the cells in our gut lining and help metabolize bile in our intestines.

Having healthy levels of short-chain fatty acids helps prevent IBS, colon cancer and help treat symptoms of diabetes and improve insulin sensitivity.

The downstream effects of focusing on the health of our biomes are still being explored, but the evidence so far is showing that diversity is king! So much so, that some studies taking excrement samples from healthy, lean individuals into subjects struggling with weight management created fascinating results. The simple introduction of microbiota diversity helped those that received a transplant lose weight, reduce insulin resistance, and reduce high blood lipid levels, which are all linked to obesity.

Take that Ozempic!

There’s a lot of great ways to increase and maintain your short-chain fatty acid production levels. You may start with minimizing medication intake, especially antibiotics. While there are many people that need certain medication to stay healthy, keeping medication intake to the bare minimum is essential to keeping our gut alive and well. Understand when an antibiotic is the only option and when a prebiotic could help instead. Chronic medication use can disrupt our gut composition and put our health all over the place. Alcohol, tobacco, and other pollutants also disrupt our microbial friends!

And of course, chief among our points of leverage is our diet. Fermented foods like kimchi, kombucha, kefir, yogurt, and sauerkraut all help with increasing microbial diversity in our guts. High-fiber foods like fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts can also help, but fiber alone won’t contribute entirely to an increase in diversity. Dairy products like butter, ghee, cheese, and milk in particular have been found to help promote butyrate production, an essential short-chain fatty acid. When you get raw, friendly-bacteria-filled dairy from local sources, you’re making your belly a happy belly!

Now get to drinking!

From Queen Anne to Ballard, Cap Hill to Fremont, and back to Ballard again, this season has been a splash! It was great to meet our community and spread the word on supporting local dairies.

Be on the lookout for upcoming events in the Seattle area (and maybe even some new cities and states) early next year. We’re working on getting new dairy-direct products listed and making a couple of our own that we think you’ll really enjoy.

Happy holidays, you filthy animals! (*hint hint wink wink*)

(They were supposed to be cookies, but regardless they pair nicely with some raw goat milk.)

Pair up these holiday treats with a glass of the good stuff.

We’ll see you again next week! Hope this newsletter made you want some raw milk.

Wishing you the best,

rearchitecting the broken food system. freeing the food.