The Gut Is Where They Start

Jordan Rubin was nineteen when Crohn’s disease wasted him. His own account, and Dr. Josh Axe’s retelling of it, says he saw more than seventy practitioners, tried a long list of supplements, and did not turn until the food changed: whole foods, fermented dairy, meat from animals that had eaten grass, and organisms that live in soil. Axe writes that Rubin gained 29 pounds in 40 days on that plan, and that within a month of adding the probiotic he calls a black powder, the trips to the bathroom slowed and the strength began to return. Rubin’s book Restoring Your Digestive Health says he has remained free of the disease and of medication. That is his testimony. It is not a coupon you can redeem for the same ending.

Axe’s teaching starts in the same place. He argues that a permeable gut, what he calls leaky gut, lets proteins through the wall and stirs inflammation through the rest of the body. He treats that lining as upstream of a long list of chronic trouble. The foods he names for it are ordinary, and they overlap with Rubin’s almost completely.

Bone broth, first

Rubin has said for years that broth is the food you can still take when you can take almost nothing else. Chicken, beef, or fish bones, long-cooked, strained if you must, sipped. He has also said that in a bad flare he would stay with broth and bring fermented food in later, not all at once. Axe’s reason is the amino acids. He names proline, glycine, and glutamine, and he says the lining of the gut is built of collagen, so a person who wants that lining repaired should be eating the food that supplies it. In his leaky-gut teaching he has recommended about eight ounces of broth twice a day. In his later anti-inflammatory reset he writes one cup a day. Either way, it is a bowl, not a pill. This journal already keeps a pot of it.

Then something that is still alive

Both of them want fermented food that was not heated after it fermented. Rubin’s list from the years he was recovering includes raw sauerkraut, kefir from goat’s milk, and the soil-based organisms he still credits. Axe’s list for the gut is kefir or fermented yogurt, fermented vegetables, and, beside those, wild fish and vegetables cooked until they are easy: broccoli, cabbage, carrots, squash. He has said he does better with a little goat’s milk than with cow’s milk. Rubin, when the gut is inflamed, also pulls gluten and the A1 dairy of ordinary cow’s milk.

A spoon of kraut or a glass of kefir is the practice. Rubin has warned that a gut in a flare may not want the fermented food yet. Broth first. The kraut when the body can meet it.

What they add around the bowl

• Wild fish, especially salmon. Both of them treat it as a daily kind of food, not a rare one.
• Cooked vegetables rather than a raw pile, when digestion is poor. Axe is plain about this. Steam them or put them in the pot.
• Berries. Rubin has told people with Crohn’s and colitis to eat a pint of blueberries a day. That is his instruction for a sick gut, not a rule for every breakfast.
• Herbs they both use in the kitchen: ginger, turmeric, rosemary. Food first. We are not sending you to an essential oil taken by the spoon.

None of this is a claim that a jar of kraut cures a named disease. Axe believes the gut lining sits under a great deal of chronic illness, and Rubin believes a biblical, fermented, broth-heavy table is what brought him back. We can cook what they cook. We cannot promise their outcome. If you are ill, a bowl of broth is nourishment. It is not a person who can examine you.

“Eat honey, my son, for it is good, and the honeycomb is sweet to your palate.”