How Fermented Foods Feed a Healthy Gut Microbiota: A Nutrition Continuum

26 May How Fermented Foods Feed a Healthy Gut Microbiota: A Nutrition Continuum

This book examines the role of fermented foods on human gut health and offers a unique contribution to this rapidly growing area of study. Fermented foods have been consumed by humans for millennia.  This method of food preservation provided early humans with beneficial bacteria that re-populated the gut microbiota upon consumption.  However, novel methods of production and conservation of food have led to severed ties between the food that modern humans consume and the gut microbiota.  As a consequence, there has been a documented increase in the prevalence of autoimmune diseases and obesity, which has been correlated to decreased diversity of gut microbes, while infectious disorders have decreased in the three past decades.