The best way to prepare a shake for a healthy gut is to combine both probiotics and prebiotics in the shake. The best probiotic food for preparing a shake are yogurt, or kefir. Why are they the best?
- The most important reason yogurt and kefir are great is that they pack a lot of probiotics. If you buy a good yogurt, prepared with care and using good cultures, you will have the best probiotic food.
- Secondly because of the taste, fermented milk is a sour milk, which combines perfectly with almost anything. You can make sweet shakes, you can make vegetable purees, and many more, the limit is only your imagination.
- Fermented milk drinks are a great source of protein, and because the milk is already fermented, that protein is so much easier to digest.
Have I convinced you yet? Either way, we can pass to the second main component of this probiotic shake – the prebiotics. Normally, when you drink yogurt, or you eat any fermented food, there should be no need for added probiotics. The fermented food will contain enough food for the bacteria to thrive in your gut. But this is no ordinary shake this is a shake to help your probiotics colony to grow fast, so we will add some prebiotics, not only one type, but more, to allow a healthy growth, and minimize the impact on your stomach. These prebiotics are:
- Bananas, bananas contain a modest amount of soluble fiber, but they taste great, and they will make your shake very tasty.
- Apple cider vinegar is a great prebiotic, will only add just a little of it, because we like our food to taste great, even if it’s healthy.
- Honey, you must think by now that honey is on the list to make the shake irresistibly tasty. If you think that, you are wrong, at least in part. The main reason to include honey in the recipe, is the prebiotic properties of pure, unpasteurized bee honey. We get the taste as a bonus.
- Acacia gum, or gum Arabic, is a natural gum, made of the hardened sap of African acacia. Acacia gum is one of the natural foods with the most prebiotic content by weight. The prebiotic fiber from acacia gum is also one of the fibers with less impact on your intestinal comfort. We will add some acacia gum to improve the prebiotic content in your shake. Acacia gum is also great to treat IBS, constipation, and diarrhea.
After the probiotic/prebiotic base, let’s add some fruit to make this a complete meal, my favorite combination is mango, strawberry, and just a little orange juice, although many times I don’t add the orange juice.
Now is the time for the recipe, with quantities, here it is:
- One cup of plain yogurt or kefir, make sure they only contain milk and cultures, any additive is a sign of a poor quality.
- A half of a ripe banana
- A half of teaspoon of ACV. You can go up to two teaspoons if you like the taste, most of the people like it.
- One or two teaspoons of honey
- One teaspoon to one spoon acacia gum. If you never had acacia gum before, start with one teaspoon, and slowly increase the dose.
- A quarter or less of a ripe sweet mango
- 4 small to medium strawberries
- 4 – 6 tablespoons of orange juice, (this can be omitted)
Add everything into a blender and blend until smooth. I add the strawberries at the end, so that the strawberry seeds don’t get pulverized in the shake.
Serve and enjoy!
Heather’s Tummy Fiber Organic Acacia Senegal
Gum Arabic is probably one of the most underestimated foods. Maybe because we use it mostly as a stabilizer in the food industry, and we think that, as most of the stabilizer, it’s there only to enhance the final product, and it is not an essential food. This is so far from truth. Gum Arabic, or Acacia gum, as it is also known, or E414, as it appears on many product labels, is a great food, that can improve everyone’s life. It is one of the foods with the greatest content of soluble fiber, and is used by an increasing number of people to treat, IBS, diarrhea, constipation, …
There is another prebiotic shake recipe, very popular on the Internet, proposed by Dr. Junger in one of Doctor’s Oz shows. This prebiotic shake is proposed by Dr. Alejandro Junger, the “Father of Detox”, as the only thing you eat for your breakfast, for three days. After each prebiotic shake, you take a dose of probiotic supplements. The prebiotic shake and the probiotics, are the first step in cleaning your body.
Here is the recipe:
- 10 oz almond milk
- 1 medium banana
- 1/2 cup blueberries
- 1 handful baby spinach
- 2 tsp apple cider vinegar
- 1 scoop plant-based protein powder
Blend all together and drink. If you want to know more about Dr. Junger’s 3-Day Jumpstart Cleanse, read this. You can also read about a traditional cleanse, practiced by Eastern Europeans, read my article.