"Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject." - Eliot Porter
Wanna do a shot?
I find it hard to believe this question has escaped you during your lifetime. Maybe it was during your college days. Perhaps it was during a raucous celebration of a momentous occasion or worse yet, just plain old-fashion debauchery.
Regardless, it's a ritual where 1.5 ounces of a liquor, 3 ounces if it’s a double, is poured, hoisted, and rapidly swallowed.
I also doubt that if completed, there wasn't a face contortion or grimace that followed, expressing your reaction to the god-awful taste.
Never mind the burn.
If you have ever participated in the celebratory activity of "doing a shot", you have onboarded a whole bunch of alcohol at one time.
And if you don't believe me?
Chat GPT tells me that 1 drink equals 1 ounce of 100-proof liquor, one five-ounce glass of table wine or one 12-ounce bottle of regular beer. (I love artificial intelligence)
I'll let the scientists and medical professionals relay the likely punishment a steady habit of shooting alcohol does to your body. (I said steady)
But what if adding one word to the question could radically change the results to the human body?
It can. And it does.
Wanna do a gut shot?
Hold my beer and let me explain.
If you've recently joined this space, or fallen off a turnip truck lately, or recently extracted yourself from the underbelly of a large rock, you surely missed the avalanche of information discussing the gut microbiome, it's interconnectedness to seemingly every bodily function, and the positive effect probiotics can have on this phenomenon.
In my gut microbiome elevator speech, building (rebuilding in my case) or maintaining your gut microbiome is best accomplished by eating a whole foods diet complete with fermented foods and plenty of fiber, moving your body, effectively managing stress, and getting good sleep.
In agricultural terms, the probiotics from the fermented foods seed, the fiber feeds, and the exercise, stress management, and sleep weeds the gut microbiome garden.
Because your time is valuable and probably in short supply, I want to address getting the fermented foods and probiotics in your system as quickly and easily as possible.
There are many foods that will get probiotics in your system but none as quickly and effectively as a swig of lacto-fermented brine.
A gut shot.
Whether it's fermented sauerkraut juice, fermented pickle juice, or any other fermented vegetable brine, an ounce or three of this brine is some of the most densely-packed probiotic material on the planet.
How can you get a shot?
The BEST way is to ferment your own sauerkraut or vegetables. It's the cheapest way (by a lot) to accomplish this task with the most control over ingredients and flavor profile.
Around here we're about creating habits, not creating obstacles to avoid ever starting. So, pick up a jar or container of fermented pickles or sauerkraut at your grocery store on your next trip.
A couple tips:
1. They MUST be refrigerated. Room-temperature means they're generally pickled, not fermented.
2. Fermented vegetables will produce a probiotic brine that is produced naturally, "during" the process of fermentation, not "added" after the fact like many small gimmicky "gut shot" drinks.
3. And be prepared to spend anywhere from $5 to $9 for a jar or container.
Hold on before you hit the ceiling.
A "gut shot" drink with far less potency will typically run in the $3 range or more for 2-3 ounces.
Compare that to a 16-ounce container that will usually produce 7-8 servings of a 2-ounce shot. That's about a third of the expense comparatively. for exponentially more bacteria.
Better yet, once you start making your own, the savings is astronomical. I can make 4-5 times the quantity for a fraction of the cost.
As to the quantity of probiotics, take a look inside this article to see some of the crazy numbers of colony-forming units (CFU's) in lacto-fermented brine.
But wait, there's more!
During an edition of The Proof podcast, the researchers from a small study on fermented foods having a direct impact on your immune system, detailed that while the most consumed fermented food in the study was Greek yogurt, the food that had the most out-sized probiotic impact in the study was lacto-fermented brine, via gut shots.
So, if you can muster up the strength and courage to choke down a shot of liquor to celebrate a joyous occasion and probably fast-track a hangover, you should be able to easily endure the "pucker factor" from a tart shot of probiotic juice that your gut microbiome will cheer for!
Thanks for reading,
Jeff
