The buffet.
Prebiotics are food for the crew. Probiotics are the crew. Everything on this menu is something your own tools can’t cut, so it rides all the way Downtown, where the crew is waiting with napkins.
No tools required
Pick a dish. Try your tools on it (they won’t fit), then serve it to the crew and watch what they cook up.
Inulin
A chain of fructose beads. Ours comes from Jerusalem artichoke root.
FOS
Shorter chains of the same beads. Bifidobacteria love them. Onions and bananas carry some.
Polydextrose
A glucose-based fibre, in our probiotic strips.
Fibre
The parts of plants your own enzymes can’t cut. Some of it feeds the crew; some just keeps things moving.
How the buffet works
- Order up.You eat plants. Along with the starch and protein, they carry fibres: inulin in onions and chicory, cellulose in every plant wall, pectin in fruit.
- No tool fits.Your own enzymes only fit a short list of links. Fibre’s links aren’t on it, so it slides through the stomach and small intestine uncut.
- Dinner’s served.In the colon, the crew ferments it into short-chain fatty acids, plus some gas. That’s the giggle.
Prebiotics are food for the crew. Probiotics are the crew.
A probiotic packed with its own prebiotic has a name: a synbiotic.
Short-chain fatty acids
When colon microbes ferment fibre, three small acids come out, roughly three acetates for every propionate and every butyrate. Plus gas.
Acetate
About 3 in 5
The most common one. The same molecule that makes vinegar sour. It travels on through the body.
Propionate
About 1 in 5
Most of it heads to the liver.
Butyrate
About 1 in 5
The main fuel for the cells lining the colon.
Gas
Some
Hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and in some people methane. The laugh track, basically.
It all happens Downtown. Visit the colon on the map.
Coming up next on Channel GG
Inulin
A chain of fructose beads. Ours comes from Jerusalem artichoke root.