Research reveals the many benefits from having a primarily plant-based diet, meaning you don’t have to become a strict vegetarian. The vast array of essential nutrients and phytonutrients from fruit and vegetables promotes whole-body health.
It is well-known that this wholesome source of food provides natural antioxidants, enzymes, fiber, minerals, protein, vitamins, etc. What isn’t so recognized is that fresh food from plants may provide a source of healthy bacteria: probiotics. But first, a fruity look back in time.
An Apple a Day . . .
Many people may still recall that “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” This aphorism first appeared in a very different form back in 1866: Eat an apple on going to bed and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread. There were scary reasons for this line of thought.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, many medical practices were crude, including treating migraines with hydroelectric baths, giving morphine to babies who were teething, and drinking water laced with radium as a cure-all for everything from arthritis to impotence. Hence, the idea of eating an apple daily was to do something healthy to avoid having to get . . . treated.
The truth is that consuming apples isn’t going to keep away doctors, but a 2015 investigation published in Jama Internal Medicine suggests that people who eat apples daily take fewer prescription medicines. It all ties in with another truth: fruit and vegetable consumption can keep people healthy.
This brings us back to plant-based food delivering a vast array of essential nutrients and phytonutrients and the fairly recent research on probiotics in plants.
Just like humans, plants have a microbiome that is integral to keeping them healthy. This could mean that when you eat fresh fruit and vegetables, you are also consuming a diversity of good bacteria from plant probiotics that are beneficial for you.
Returning to the apt apple, a research article from 2019 was published in Frontiers in Microbiology that not only reflected on apples being one of the most widely eaten fruits all around the world, but that people ingest the bacterial communities within the fruit: around 100 million bacterial cells in an average-sized apple. This sheds a whole new light on eating an apple a day.
It’s important to note that this research stressed that organic apples contained more probiotics than those that are conventionally managed. This supports the idea of eating organic whenever possible to get the highest nutritive value from fruits and vegetables.
One of the many fascinating discoveries from this investigation is that the highest colonization of good apple bacteria was found in the fruit pulp and the seeds. Although the apple peel and flesh had more diverse bacteria, the seeds had the highest abundance. So . . . anyone who gets strange looks from eating apples right down to the core may be on to something.
The takeaway from this investigation is that maybe there’s even more to a primarily plant-based diet: a natural source of probiotics.
The AIM Contribution
From the get-go, AIM has emphasized the importance of eating right, which means whole food that mostly comes from the plant world. That’s where you get the finest source of life-giving nutrition.
This is also why the first whole food that AIM delivered to the world was the juice powder of young barley plants, something that was beyond ingestion by human beings until the availability of BarleyLife: a supplemental source of life-giving nutrition.
Whole-food options such as Just Carrots, RediBeets and CoCoa LeafGreens were added to the product list over time as more options to supplement the nutritional intake of AIM Members worldwide.
To contribute to good bacterial balance, AIM introduced FloraFood for probiotics and Fit ’n Fiber for prebiotics. Both of these natural health products supplement your intake of good bacteria (probiotics) and their nutritional needs (prebiotics).
One capsule of FloraFood contains 3 billion live cells from three different strains of bacteria that are good for the human gut. Each 16-gram serving of Fit’ n Fiber contains 8 grams of food for good bacteria. In other words, FloraFood and Fit’ n Fiber go handily together in supporting your microbiome.
Perhaps another aphorism is appropriate: Some AIM a day makes for a very healthy way.
The AIM Companies 