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Culinary Medicine

Chronic disease can’t be addressed without diet playing a role. Food is as much medicine as prescription medications are. Helping one another eat better, cook, and learn from what keeps us healthy.

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Natto: A Nutritional Powerhouse That You Have Never Tried

4 min readJan 16, 2025

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Source: Canva Pro

My first encounter with natto came after watching a Netflix show called Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut. Although I had heard of natto before, I was fascinated by the health benefits being discussed. Our microbiome is a collection of bacterial colonies that reside in our large intestine. Each person has a different microbiome. It plays a huge role in wellness.

What got to me on the Netflix show was when they compared the microbiome from a typical American diet with a Japanese professional eater named Kobayashi. Despite the professional eater consuming incredible amounts of hot dogs, mayonnaise, and whatever other awful food you can think of, his microbiome was healthier than the typical American’s.

What was the secret? Eating natto regularly. Although probiotic foods are beneficial in general, there are some characteristics of natto that make the the benefits go far beyond your gut.

Spore me the details

Natto is made by fermenting soybeans with a specific strain of bacteria called Bacillus subtilis. with the strain has shown benefits for the gut including less flatulence and bloating after six weeks of use…

Culinary Medicine
Culinary Medicine

Published in Culinary Medicine

Chronic disease can’t be addressed without diet playing a role. Food is as much medicine as prescription medications are. Helping one another eat better, cook, and learn from what keeps us healthy.

Dr. Julian Barkan
Dr. Julian Barkan

Written by Dr. Julian Barkan

Family Med Physician writing to express my thoughts, sometimes teach, and mostly learn. Editor of Flipping the Script/Patient Perspectives/Culinary Medicine

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