During the last 5 to 10 years, grocery retailer cabinets have change into more and more full of probiotic sodas, drinkable yogurts and fermented drinks marketed towards supporting your intestine microbiome — the microscopic group of micro organism and different residing organisms that stay in your gastrointestinal tract.
Some native companies have even constructed manufacturers round this intestine well being increase.
Comfortable Intestine Meals, for instance, is a Leon-Valley-based pop-up grocer providing probiotic drinks and fermented produce. On the East Aspect, a taproom bar referred to as Fermenteria brews its personal water kefir, a bubbly fermented drink. EndoMune Probiotics, began by San Antonio gastroenterologist Dr. Lawrence Hoberman, has grown right into a nationwide probiotic complement enterprise.
Analysis into the intestine microbiome has accelerated shortly over the past twenty years, as scientists have uncovered increasingly more connections between this group of microorganisms, our general well being and numerous ailments, together with in San Antonio.
UT Well being San Antonio researchers lately discovered a hyperlink between a selected bacterium within the intestine and lupus, an autoimmune illness with no treatment that impacts an estimated 1.5 million Individuals, a discovering that would doubtlessly result in more practical remedies.
However how a lot of the intestine well being meals and complement increase is rooted in proof versus wellness hype? In accordance with the UT Well being researchers behind the current lupus findings, it’s sophisticated.
“I simply had an e-mail from a colleague asking me, ‘I’ve a pal who simply bought recognized with lupus, ought to she take probiotics?’” mentioned Laurence Morel, an immunologist who co-led the lupus research and heads UT Well being’s microbiology and immunology division. “We don’t have easy solutions.”
What’s the intestine microbiome?
Your gastrointestinal tract is house to trillions of micro organism, fungi, viruses and parasites that float round or connect to the interior partitions of the big gut, small gut and abdomen. Scientists seek advice from this group of microbes because the intestine microbiome, or intestine microbiota.
Most of those microbes stay symbiotically with us. They get shelter and meals, and in flip assist our our bodies break down vitamins and preserve dangerous microbes in examine. With out them, our our bodies wouldn’t be capable to break down sure complicated carbohydrates and fibers, and we might be disadvantaged of necessary vitamins like short-chain fatty acids and nutritional vitamins B1, B9, B12 and Ok.
Researchers have additionally discovered that the intestine microbiome has implications outdoors of our digestive system. The intestine microbiome performs an particularly necessary position within the immune system, serving to us struggle illness, in addition to the nervous system through the gut-brain axis, and our endocrine system, which regulates hormones.
Analysis has proven that sufferers with a big selection of ailments and circumstances — starting from weight problems, despair, Alzheimer’s, eczema and colon most cancers — additionally are inclined to have unbalanced intestine microbiomes, or “dysbiosis,” which means they lack an satisfactory variety of wholesome micro organism or have an overgrowth of dangerous ones.
These findings alone don’t imply intestine dysbiosis is inflicting or contributing to those ailments, defined Yong Ge, co-lead of the lupus research and intestine microbiology researcher at UT Well being.
“We now have repeatedly seen that the microbiome is totally different between wholesome individuals and diseased sufferers,” he mentioned, “however the first query is whether or not it is a trigger or a consequence.”
For some ailments, like lupus, there’s a rising physique of proof that this imbalance is contributing to the illness, Morel mentioned. “We aren’t saying that it causes [lupus],” she added. “But it surely’s a part of the amplification of the illness.”
Ge and Morel’s lupus paper, printed in April in Nature Communications, discovered that supplementing lupus-prone mice with a selected bacterium — F. prausnitzii — alleviated illness development. This bacterium is among the most ample in wholesome guts, and has been proven to be depleted in lupus sufferers, Morel mentioned.
The discovering may doubtlessly pave the best way for human research, and if profitable, result in a focused probiotic therapy for lupus sufferers.
The rising intestine well being market
As analysis on the intestine microbiome has grown, the well being and wellness market has adopted. A 2026 survey by the Worldwide Meals Info Council means that curiosity in intestine well being has made its approach out of wellness tradition into the mainstream, with almost two-thirds of Individuals contemplating intestine well being a excessive or extraordinarily excessive precedence.
Nationally, prebiotic soda firms like Olipop and Poppi have exploded in recognition, with Coca-Cola saying its personal line of prebiotic sodas final 12 months.
Probiotic dietary supplements have taken off too. The U.S. intestine well being dietary supplements market dimension was estimated at $5.19 billion in 2024 and is projected to succeed in $9.36 billion by 2033, in keeping with Grand View Analysis.
Melissa Colunga, a San Antonio native, purchased Comfortable Intestine Meals in 2023. The fermented meals and probiotic grocer has been round since 2015, promoting out of its Leon Valley retailer and at native farmers markets.
“Folks will say, ‘Oh, I’ve been needing to give attention to my intestine well being,’ and we’ve had much more exercise … it’s like a buzz proper now,” Colunga mentioned.
Concierge clinics and on-line wellness retailers have additionally began promoting intestine microbiome testing: Stone Oak Ladies’s Middle, for instance, presents a $425 GI tract evaluation on their web site.
However wellness advertising and marketing hasn’t all the time stored tempo with the analysis itself.
Proof vs. hype
About 10 years in the past, the final assumption was that by now, all the new intestine microbiome analysis would have led to a number of focused remedies for numerous ailments, Morel mentioned. Weight problems, for instance.
“Weight problems has sturdy associations with adjustments within the intestine microbiome,” Morel mentioned. “Possibly when you may give [patients] a capsule with wholesome intestine micro organism, they might enhance.”
However that largely hasn’t occurred, Morel mentioned, partly as a result of the mechanisms behind how the intestine microbiome influences illness are nonetheless not fully understood.
There are additionally so many alternative microbes, and everybody’s intestine microbiome is totally different, Ge added.
What is evident, Morel mentioned, is that diets excessive in fiber — like entire grains, fruit and greens — are usually good in your general well being, no matter how a lot of these advantages will be attributed to selling a wholesome intestine microbiome. Moreover, diets low in fiber and excessive in ultra-processed meals have been related to a lower in microbial variety and decrease ranges of useful micro organism.
Fermented meals like yogurt, kimchi, kefir, sauerkraut and kombucha, to call a couple of, have been proven to advertise the expansion of excellent micro organism within the intestine as properly, and these meals can simply be a part of an general nutritious diet, Morel added.
“It’s most likely higher than consuming a hamburger, for certain,” she mentioned. “However when you’re speaking about evidence-based research by which you’re evaluating kefir drinkers to non-kefir drinkers — it’s a tough research to do, and I don’t assume it’s there, at the very least it’s not there with a rigorous methodology.”
On the subject of probiotic dietary supplements and wellness clinic choices, Morel and Ge are extra skeptical. Though probiotic dietary supplements are usually protected for wholesome adults, proper now there isn’t sufficient information to help their advantages, what doses are wanted to see a profit, or whether or not the identical advantages might be achieved by dietary adjustments, the researchers mentioned.
Morel and her colleagues are engaged on answering a few of the unknowns relating to the intestine microbiome. A few of her colleagues are working with a personal firm to develop an antibiotic that may goal a selected class of unhealthy micro organism that promote lupus with out destroying useful micro organism. Others are investigating hyperlinks between traumatic mind accidents, stroke and the intestine microbiome.
“My hope is that we are able to have extra particular concepts of which micro organism we may promote the expansion of both by straight supplementing these micro organism or having the dietary situation that promotes this,” Morel mentioned. “I’m unsure that is going to work, however we are attempting.”
