Professor Tim Spector urges ill Brits to add one food to diet after taking antibiotics to help recovery

As the season of illnesses descends, Professor Tim Spector has a stern warning for anyone taking antibiotics as ignoring this effect could leave them in recovery until the summer

Countless Brits might find themselves battling through colds, respiratory illnesses and many other bacteria-founded health issues this winter and may turn to antibiotics for assistance. However, this could leave their bodies struggling to recover for up to six months, not from the illness itself but from the medicine they took.

With the winter chills closing in, Professor Tim Spector and Dr Will Bulsiewicz took to the ZOE Science and Nutrition podcast to share some candid insights about the lesser-known effects most antibiotics have. While the modern medicinal marvel targets unwanted bacteria that cause illnesses throughout the body, it also impacts the very integral bacteria that operate naturally in our gut.

These bacteria are vital to digestion, immune health and can even impact what type of food you crave, meaning this unseen impact of antibiotics could hurt your body more than the illness it aims to fix. But the professor highlighted one food group that could make all the difference in your recovery; fermented foods.

He specifically called out yoghurts, cheese, kefir, sauerkraut and kombucha - although he noted yoghurts and cheese were lower down in his priority list as they have less diversity in probiotic cultures than the other fermented options.

Fermented foods are enriched with probiotics which, as the name suggests, feeds the bacteria in our gut that antibiotics hinder. The expert urged: “They have lower doses compared to probiotics (pills) but most of them have many more species or types of microbes than you’d find in a capsule.”

He explained that everyone’s unique microbiome won’t respond the same way to each species of probiotic microbe, so he suggested “throwing the kitchen sink at your problems” with as much and as diverse an array of fermented items as you can find in the hopes that at least one will take hold. But his suggestion also came with a major warning for those who haven’t shopped in the fermented food section before.

The professor warned: “You can be conned very easily in this game. It shouldn’t have a shelf life of two years. If it’s really cheap, it’s unlikely to be the real thing. Check their isn’t huge amount of sugars or artificial sweeteners and that it hasn’t been pastuerised, this might be in tiny little letters to give it a longer shelf life.”

Outside of fermented items, Professor Tim urged everyone, not just those who have recently come off antibiotics, to increase their fibre intake through a diverse array of plant foods in their diet. He explained, referring to the bacteria in our: “That will impact the good guys and getting more of those good guys in, they’ll suppress the bad guys. The bad guys like inflammation, a slightly stressed gut.”

Additionally, time-restricted eating, which is when you limit what hours during the day you can eat during, can also be beneficial if you time it right: “Give your gut a rest overnight. Microbes themselves have a sort of late night cleaning service, so they can come in and really tidy up your mucuousal layer. It’s a combination of those things.”

Ultimately, the expert suggested that one of the top ways to protect your gut microbiome from falling into disarray is avoiding antibiotics in the first place: “If you look at the literature, often the difference between taking and not taking them is about one day of symptoms. This is true for many conditions that do self-resolve, not all but many. Anyone that values their gut microbiome more than a day of nasal symptoms need to take note.”

Dr Will highlighted a study looking at how long it took for people’s guts to return to normal after a course of antibiotics: “The vast majority of people recover by 8 weeks but there was a small subset that took a harder hit and it basically started to resemble the gut of an ICU patient. These particular people didn’t get back to their baseline for about 6 months, but they did get back.”