What Is The Nutritional Value For Probiotic Coffee?

The state of your gut microbiome — the trillions of bacteria, fungi, and viruses that live within you — is crucial for maintaining good health and directly impacts your immune system, heart health, weight, brain health, and perhaps even mood, according to Healthline. In order to improve your gut microbiome, it's advised to eat a healthy wide variety of foods as well as those that are fermented (a growing market, which may be a testament to the growing attention towards gut health), that contain healthy bacteria and prebiotic foods which contain a type of fiber healthy bacteria like to feed on.

According to Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, consumers have shown an increasing interest in pursuing optimal gut health by way of using probiotics and prebiotics. Fermented foods like yogurt, kombuchakimchi, and pickles are increasingly popular, so it's not surprising that new types of probiotics have appeared on the market. In addition, researchers have fermented a morning beverage staple, coffee, to boost it — and your gut — with more than one billion live bacteria, reports Very Well Health. But does probiotic coffee actually have nutritional benefits?

The mix of probiotics and coffee

Since most coffee is brewed or steamed hot, the extreme temperature conditions are not hospitable for bacteria to survive. Researchers recommend drinking probiotic coffee cold since the heat and acidity can kill the beneficial bacteria.

If you're not a cold brew type of person, there is a probiotic coffee you can drink hot. One Finnish company famous for its mushroom products, Four Sigmatic, launched a probiotic coffee product to promote gut health in the spring of 2020. The company states that it is made of "Fair-Trade 100% Organic Arabica Coffee from Guatemala, blended with Turkey Tail and Chaga functional mushrooms and 1 billion CFU of heat resistant probiotics and prebiotics from yacon," reports FoodBev Media. The company claims that the Bacillus subtilis probiotic strain used in their coffee is able to persist through boiling hot temperatures and stomach acid, which means that you can have your steaming cup of probiotic coffee and the beneficial benefits of healthy bacteria, too.