8 Healing Foods that Boost Your Brain Health & Supercharge Your Stomach

Following the Probiotic Diet Eating Plan will promote the growth of beneficial bacteria and other microbes in your intestines while starving the bad guys, leaving you feeling energized.

You’ll notice that many of the healing foods I recommend have gone through a fermentation process, which means they were cultured through the intentional growth of bacteria, yeast, or mold, a process as old as biblical times. Since refrigeration hadn’t been invented back then—and foods weren’t known to have a “shelf life”—people in ancient times didn’t have the option of freezing food or storing any foodstuffs inside a cool box. Instead, they learned how to preserve foods for a short time through the process of fermentation.

Our ancestors knew the value of fermented food, if for no other reason than fermented foods kept them from starving between harvests. They fermented milk and vegetables not only to preserve these foods—don’t forget that you couldn’t run down to your local Walmart in 300 BC if you needed a gallon of milk—but to take advantage of the health benefits of fermentation. I would imagine that the Bulgarians of Metchnikoff’s day who consumed “sour milk” did so because they instinctively knew that cultured milk promoted intestinal health. Although they knew nothing about helpful flora, they listened to their gut and knew they felt better—and lived longer—when they consumed gourds of cultured dairy.

Healing Foods to Focus On

In general terms, here’s an outline of foods that you need to be focusing on when you’re on the Probiotic Diet:

1. Healthy meats

I strongly urge that you purchase and prepare meat from organically raised cattle, sheep, goats, buffalo, and venison that graze on nature’s bountiful grasses and fish caught in the wild like salmon, tuna, or sea bass. Grass-fed meat is leaner and is lower in calories than grain-fed beef. Organic and grass-fed beef is higher in gut-friendly omega-3 fatty acids and important vitamins like B12 and vitamin E, and way better for you than assembly-line cuts of flank steak from hormone-injected cattle eating pesticide-sprayed feed laced with antibiotics.

Fish with fins and scales caught from oceans and rivers are lean sources of protein and provide essential amino acids in abundance. Wild-caught fish are a great source of omega-3 fatty acids DHA and EPA, which can reduce inflammation in diseases of the gut such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Wild-caught fish can be purchased in natural food stores and fish markets, but supermarkets are stocking these types of foods in greater quantities these days. Some of the best fish to eat are wild-caught salmon, high omega-3 tuna, sardines, mackerel, and herring.

2. Raw milk and cultured dairy products from cows, goats, and sheep

The consumption of cultured dairy is absolutely critical to the success of the Probiotic Diet. Raw milk provides important enzymes and good bacteria that are crucial to probiotic support for the gut. These enzymes and bacteria aren’t found in pasteurized milk since they’re inconveniently destroyed during the pasteurization process. Raw milk contains lactic acid bacteria that can kill certain pathogens and thereby prevent disease, and provide more calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, and sulfur than pasteurized, homogenized dairy.

The best dairy products are the lacto-fermented kind—yogurt, kefir, hard cheeses (preferably aged), cream cheese, cottage cheese, and cultured cream. You can shop for them at natural food supermarkets in certain states, but the best sources of raw cultured dairy are found at local farms. (Visit www.RealMilk.com for a farm near you.)

Another advantage to eating cultured dairy is that those who are lactose-intolerant—and many with digestive issues such as irritable bowel syndrome are sensitive to lactose—can often stomach fermented dairy products because they contain little or no residual lactose, which is the type of sugar in milk that many find hard to digest.

Certified organic whole milk kefir, sold in ready-to-drink quart bottles, is a tart-tasting, thick beverage containing naturally occurring bacteria and yeasts that work synergistically to provide superior health benefits. Kefir is also a great base ingredient to build smoothies around: just add eight ounces of kefir into a blender, an assortment of frozen berries or fruits, a spoonful of raw honey, maybe some multi collagen or bone broth protein powder, and you’re well on the way to churning up a delicious, satisfying smoothie.

As for yogurt, if you shop at a health food store, I prefer you consume yogurts not made from cow’s milk. You’ll be better off purchasing yogurts derived from goat’s milk and sheep’s milk, which are easier on stomachs as well as less allergenic because they do not contain the same complex proteins found in pasteurized cow’s milk. Goat’s milk and sheep’s milk yogurts are readily available at natural grocers, although my personal favorite—the yogurt made from sheep’s milk—is more difficult to find in stock but can often be ordered if you ask the store dairy manager. If you are able to find raw cow’s milk yogurt, it can be wonderful for your health.

One thing I don’t like in Breaking the Vicious Cycle is that Elaine Gottschall never discussed the differences between pasteurized was better for you. In fact, she stressed that you should consume pasteurized dairy, presumably because of the conventional wisdom that pasteurization kills unwanted or deadly microbes when, in reality, heating milk to 161 degrees also destroys the beneficial bacteria and probiotics in the milk or yogurt product.

Mrs. Gottschall’s mindset—and I know this from having many over-the-phone conversations with her (we never met in person)—was that she wanted the Specific Carbohydrate Diet to be user-friendly for the masses. That’s why she recommended foods that you could pick up at any corner supermarket: conventional eggs, pasteurized and homogenized dairy, conventionally raised chicken and beef, and fruits and vegetables from “agribusiness”—the huge conglomerations that boost yields (and therefore profits) by using persistent pesticides and fertilizers that leave toxic residues in the fruits and vegetables you consume.

Mrs. Gottschall was also not overly concerned with artificial colors and artificial sweeteners, and she even said it was okay to “add a crushed saccharin tablet” to sweeten a glass of wine. I hold the opposite view: low-calorie artificial sweeteners like aspartame, saccharine, and sucralose (found in those blue, pink, and yellow packets on restaurant tables) are practically poison in my eyes because of their alleged link to many health problems, including cancer. From all the studies I’ve seen, I think you’d be crazy to get within ten feet of them.

3. High omega-3 eggs

Free-range eggs from hens that roam around a pasture instead of being caged throughout their short lives have the highest-quality protein of any food, except for mothers’ breast milk. But the main reason I’m a huge fan of eggs in the Probiotic Diet is because of their high concentration of omega-3 fats.

So what are omega-3 fatty acids? Omega-3s are a type of fat that the body needs to run the gastrointestinal system. They manufacture and repair cell membranes and hormones, balance the nervous system, and expel harmful waste products. They are essential to health because the body cannot naturally manufacture its own omega-3 fatty acids.

The Probiotic Diet is designed to increase your consumption of omega-3 fats and decrease your consumption of another fatty acid known as omega-6s. Omega-3s and omega-6s are the only two essential fatty acids (EFAs) that our bodies must have because they regulate body functions such as heart rate, blood pressure, fertility, and conception. The problem is that ever since Élie Metchnikoff was alive, our diets have flip-flopped. We receive very little omega-3s (because we don’t eat foods like wild-caught fish and pasture-raised eggs) and too many omega-6 fatty acids because omega-6s are found in sunflower, safflower, corn, cottonseed, and soybean oils, which, in turn, are found in processed foods and refined grains. If your favorite meal is chicken nuggets and French fries, then you’re eating a ton of omega-6 fatty acids, and that’s not good for you or your digestive tract.

Since the typical American diet is weighted heavily toward omega-6 fatty acids instead of omega-3s, we typically have a ratio of 20 omega-6s to one omega-3, or 20:1. That’s way too high and increases the likelihood of inflammatory and autoimmune disease, which strains your terrain. Following the Probiotic Diet should greatly improve your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio to something like 4:1, which is the bull’s eye you want to shoot for.

4. Extra-virgin coconut oil and grass-fed butter

These two important foods have anti-microbial saturated fats that can work wonders for people with digestive disorders. Coconut oil is so beneficial to digestive health that years ago a person suffering from Crohn’s disease wrote “Dear Abby” and insisted that eating macaroons eliminated symptoms of the disease. She was talking about your standard-recipe macaroons, the ones with white sugar, white flour, bad oils containing omega-6 fatty acids… but she included six to eight grams of coconut oil! Just the addition of extra-virgin coconut oil to a recipe that would normally be anathema to the Probiotic Diet helped out someone with Crohn’s disease, and the reason why was because of the anti-microbial fatty acids in coconut oil.

Coconut oil, a miracle food that few people have heard of, has healthy fats that slow the absorption of sugar into the bloodstream, thereby keeping blood sugar levels on an even keel. It’s easy to add to your diet; all you have to do is think intentionally about adding extra-virgin coconut oil whenever you pull out a saucepan to cook scrambled eggs, glaze diced onions, or heat up leftovers. I even add a tablespoon of coconut oil to my Vitamix blender when I whip up a delicious smoothie for breakfast.

Extra-virgin coconut oil contains medium-chain fatty acids such as lauric, caprylic, and capric acids, which are anti-viral and anti-fungal. Since most people suffering from digestive problems have an overgrowth of yeast and potentially high levels of virus in their systems, this obscure food can work wonders. I recommend those with digestive problems consume two to four tablespoons of extra-virgin coconut oil per day. A side benefit of extra-virgin coconut oil is that it helps you balance your weight whether you are under- or overweight. Consuming extra-virgin coconut oil to the tune of four tablespoons per day is a great way for those who are underweight to pack on the pounds.

Grass-fed butter, or raw butter, is good for your digestion because it has compounds that help repair the gut lining. Organic butter also contains anti-microbial fatty acids, including butyric acid, which has strong anti-fungal effects in the digestive tract. The superb fatty acids in butter help heal the mucosal lining and provide an environment for beneficial microflora to colonize. Butter also contains glycosphingolipids, which protect you against infection.

5. Cultured and fermented vegetables and other “living” foods

Raw cultured or fermented vegetables such as sauerkraut, pickled carrots, beets, or cucumbers supply the body with lots of probiotics. Although these fermented vegetables are often greeted with upturned noses at the dinner table, these foods help reestablish natural balance to your digestive system. Cultured vegetables like sauerkraut are brimming with vitamins, such as vitamin C, and contain almost four times the nutrients as unfermented cabbage. The lactobacilli in fermented vegetables contain digestive enzymes that help break down food and increase its digestibility.

I’ll have a lot more to say about fermented vegetables in the next chapter, “Probiotic Foods from Around the World,” but let me put a plug in for three raw foods that are essential to the Probiotic Diet. They are avocados and chia and flaxseeds.

I’ll grant you that a lot of raw veggies can give you a problem if you have an acute inflammatory condition or an ulceration in the gut, but avocados and chia and flaxseeds are foods high in healthy fats such as monounsaturated fats (in the case of avocados) and omega-3 fatty acids from chia and flax. Indeed, chia’s fiber-rich seeds have the highest percentage of omega-3s of any plant, including flaxseeds. These three foods are high in protein, too, so if you’re a vegetarian, make sure you’re eating plenty of avocados and chia and flaxseeds. Natural food stores carry wonderful chia seed and flaxseed products.

6. Bone broth

Your entire gut lining is made up of collagen, which means you need to consume foods that support collagen production. Bone broth can help repair the gut lining, and it’s also easy to digest, because it’s in an amino acid form. Bone broth is high in proline, glycine, and hydroxyproline, as well as glucosamine, chondroitin, and hyaluronic acid— all of which help heal and reseal your gut lining.

7. Herbs and spices

Some cultures consume a lot more spices per capita than we do in a lot of westernized countries. Nutrient density-wise, herbs are powerful. Ginger is the ultimate healing herb for your gut. It’s slightly warming and anti-inflammatory. Peppermint is also excellent. You can consume peppermint as an essential oil, adding a drop or two to a smoothie or other recipe, to help cool and soothe the digestive lining. You can also add a little cardamon to your coffee or a smoothie, as well as consider taking licorice root and fennel.

8. Sprouted, soaked, or sour-leavened grains

I totally agree with Mrs. Gottschall that grains are problematic to those with gut issues. But there are ways to neutralize these disaccharides and that’s through consuming grains that have sprouted, been soaked overnight in water, or leavened with a sourdough culture. A whole grain sourdough bread, for instance, would have less disaccharides and be in a form that most people can tolerate. The issue with grains doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach.