DECODING YOUR MICROBIOME - THE ULTIMATE GUT HACK
Ben Greenfield
Ben Greenfield is an ex-bodybuilder, Ironman triathlete, Spartan racer, coach, speaker and author of the New York Times Bestseller “Beyond Training: Mastering Endurance, Health and Life”. In 2008, Ben was voted as NSCA’s Personal Trainer of the year and in 2013 and 2014 was named by Greatist as one of the top 100 Most Influential People In Health And Fitness. Ben blogs and podcasts at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, and resides in Spokane, WA with his wife and twin boys.
Ben Greenfield delves into "Decoding Your Microbiome - The Ultimate Gut Hack," exploring
Ninety percent of diseases can be traced back to the gut and the health of the microbiome. This is probably one of the most important things you can do for longevity and the absence of chronic disease.
Summary
- Prioritize a diet high in fiber, colorful berries, and fermented foods while avoiding refined sugars and grains to reduce inflammation and support bacterial diversity. - Practice "cooperative eating" by combining prebiotic fibers with probiotic-rich foods, such as adding chia seeds to yogurt or eating fiber-rich kimchi, to feed beneficial bacteria. - Ensure foods are both nutrient-dense and digestible by properly preparing them, such as soaking and rinsing grains like quinoa to remove digestive irritants like saponins. - Balance high-fat intake with adequate plant fiber and omega-3 fatty acids to prevent gut inflammation and maintain a robust, diverse microbiome. - Enhance the microbiome through lifestyle factors including regular outdoor activity, pet ownership—specifically dogs—stress management, and close physical interaction with loved ones.
Article
Decoding Your Microbiome, One Gut Instinct At A Time
Ben Greenfield Turned A Hall Of Biohackers Toward The Humble Gut At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki
There was something disarming, almost strategic, in the way Ben Greenfield opened his talk at Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki. “This morning I’m gonna speak on poop, actually,” he told the audience on Friday, 13 October 2017, cutting through the polished language of optimization, longevity and elite performance with a single earthy word.
The presentation, titled *Decoding Your Microbiome - The Ultimate Gut Hack*, took place in Helsinki, Finland, and did what the best conference talks sometimes do. It made a subject long treated as private, impolite or faintly comic feel urgent, public and profoundly human.
Greenfield, an ex-bodybuilder, Ironman triathlete, Spartan racer, coach and bestselling author, did not present the microbiome as a niche curiosity for wellness obsessives. He framed it as one of the great hidden forces in modern health, a living internal ecosystem that shaped inflammation, mood, resilience and the risk of chronic disease.
The Gut As A Second Brain
At the heart of Greenfield’s case was a striking proposition: the bacteria inside the body were not passive passengers but active participants in human life.
“The bacteria inside you affect your mood, depression, and anxiety,” he said. “Taking care of your microbiome can help you be happier and feel better during the day.”
That idea, once fringe, has increasingly moved toward the scientific mainstream. Greenfield linked gut health to the vagus nerve, the wandering communication line between the gut and the brain, and described the microbiome as central not only to digestion but to cognition and emotion. The gut, in this telling, was not merely a processing chamber for food. It was a second brain, deeply entangled with the first.
He reminded the audience that while humans share more than 99 per cent of their human DNA, their microbiomes can differ dramatically. What lived inside one person might be profoundly unlike what lived inside another. For Greenfield, this was why gut health could not be reduced to simplistic universal formulas.
Diet As Destiny
If the talk had one unifying message, it was this: food was the most powerful daily author of the microbial world within.
“Diet rapidly and reproducibly alters the gut microbiome,” Greenfield said. “Your diet is the number one thing that is going to influence what is living inside you.”
He urged the audience to avoid the modern staples that flatten microbial diversity and fuel inflammation, especially refined sugars and processed grains. In his account, foods marketed as healthy, including many gluten-free packaged products, could still undermine gut health if they were heavily refined and stripped of the structural complexity that beneficial bacteria thrive upon.
Against that backdrop, Greenfield’s dietary prescription was not austere so much as textured. He argued for a plate rich in fiber, color and fermentation. Berries dense in polyphenols, especially tart varieties, featured prominently. So did herbs and spices such as turmeric, ginger, curry and cinnamon, which he presented not as decorative extras but as microbial allies.
The Case For Cooperative Eating
One of the more memorable ideas in the talk was what Greenfield called “cooperative eating”, a practical strategy that paired prebiotic fibers with probiotic-rich foods.
The principle was straightforward. Beneficial bacteria did not simply need to be introduced. They needed to be fed.
A spoonful of chia seeds in yogurt. Fiber-rich kimchi. Sauerkraut alongside legumes. Kefir with flaxseed. In each case, Greenfield’s point was the same: the most effective meals were not isolated superfoods but collaborations.
“Introduce a wide variety of fermented foods into your gut,” he said. “Mixing ferments like kimchi, sauerkraut, yogurt, and kefir helps you build a robust and diverse microbiome.”
This emphasis on diversity mattered. Not one probiotic. Not one fashionable jar in the fridge. A range of fermented foods, a range of fibers, a range of colors on the plate.
Inflammation, Fat, And The Missing Fiber
Greenfield also challenged a simplistic high-fat orthodoxy that had become fashionable in some performance and biohacking circles. Fat itself was not the enemy, he suggested, but a high-fat diet without sufficient plant matter could become inflammatory terrain for the gut.
The remedy was balance. Omega-3 fatty acids from fish, anti-inflammatory fats such as olive oil and avocado oil, and above all enough fiber to temper and support microbial health.
His litmus test for food was unusually clear and refreshingly portable. “Ask yourself two questions when looking at your plate: is it nutrient dense and is it digestible?” he said. “Filtering your choices this way will help you choose foods that truly support your gut.”
It was a useful corrective to the era’s nutrition absolutism. Health was not just about theoretical nutrient content. It was about what the body could actually tolerate, absorb and use.
The Outdoor Prescription
Some of Greenfield’s most intriguing advice stepped beyond the kitchen. Gut health, in his account, was not built by diet alone. It was also shaped by contact.
He advocated outdoor exposure, interaction with the natural environment, stress reduction, close physical connection with loved ones and even dog ownership as ways to enrich microbial diversity. The modern indoor life, sterile and sealed off, was presented as a narrowing force.
“Get outside and breathe the air to increase the diversity of your microbiome,” he said. “By breathing deeply outdoors, you increase your cooperation with the environmental microbiome.”
For a conference devoted to human enhancement, it was a quietly radical message. The future of health, Greenfield implied, might depend less on separation from nature than on renewed intimacy with it.
From Performance Culture To Biological Humility
Part of what made the talk compelling was Greenfield’s own trajectory. He spoke as someone who had moved through bodybuilding, endurance sport and obstacle racing, tracing a path from external performance toward internal ecology. The body he once trained as a machine had become, in this presentation, something more porous and more mysterious.
He mixed irreverence with seriousness, humour with biological awe. But beneath the jokes was a deeper challenge to the audience at Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki. Not every hack was a device. Not every breakthrough came in capsule form. Some of the most consequential health interventions were old, mundane and stubbornly unglamorous: fiber, fermentation, clean fats, outdoor air, microbial diversity.
In an age eager for the next optimization frontier, Greenfield’s talk argued that the frontier had been inside us all along.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki