This might be the start of an irregular blog series about stuff I have found helpful, which I’m mentioning it in case it’s of use to someone else. Feel free to ignore; I recognize that any time somebody on the internet says “I improved/fixed X problem by doing Y,” there’s kind of a whiff of proselytization that can turn people off. I know not every solution will work for everybody. But on the other hand, hey, maybe it helps somebody. That would be nice.

Cutting for (non-icky) discussion of digestive health.

For quite a while now, I’ve had fairly frequent digestive problems. Nothing severe, but happening often enough that I knew I should probably talk to a doctor about it. Which I kind of dreaded doing, because I suspected the doctor would say I had IBS or something — and just so we’re perfectly clear, yes, I’m well aware that “I don’t want this diagnosis” is a stupid reason to avoid going to the doctor.

Meanwhile, I keep reading news articles about the research being done on the gut biome, which increasingly makes me feel like we are in fact just the meat cars our intestinal bacteria ride around in. They’re being implicated in more and more facets of our health — not just digestion but psychological things like anxiety. Hell, if you suffer a head injury, that damages your gut biome. What the hell? How do these meat cars even work!

Then one day I think: well, I am an affluent American, which means good statistical odds that I am not going to win any contests for Best Intestinal Flora. I’ve been taking a probiotic for years, to what benefit I’m not sure, but they also say it’s good to eat certain kinds of food that foster the right sort of microbiota. Most of the foods on that list are fermented, and I don’t like most fermented foods . . . but I do like miso.

So hey, let’s experiment. I am too lazy to make full-bore miso soup with wakame and green onions and little tofu cubes, but I bought a container of fresh miso and some dashi stock, and I started having a cup of miso broth in the mornings.

Within a week, something like 80% of my problems were gone.

I feel like a frickin’ clickbait article saying that: This one simple trick doctors don’t want you to know! Except they do want you to know, and also, this legitimately seems to work for me. I wouldn’t go the miso route if I had to worry about my sodium levels — I’ve dialed back to three times a week anyway, just in case — but there are other foods that get recommended, like sauerkraut and gimchi.

So here ya go: possibly of use to some of you. Certainly easier to arrange than a fecal transplant, which is just a horrifying phrase anyway. Tried in moderation, it’s unlikely to hurt, and certainly anybody who’s had to take an antibiotic recently could probably benefit from restoring some of what that nuked.