Image courtesy of Good Food.
Keeping your gut healthy is important, and it isn’t always easy to achieve optimal gut health, but it can be when you focus on eating the right foods. Eating the right foods on the regular can help keep your gut healthy, and one of those gut healthy foods is sauerkraut. Sauerkraut is a food that is popular in some places but not in others. In places like Germany, people eat it all the time, but here in the U.S., it is mainly eaten on occasion when people enjoy the few foods we like to pair with sauerkraut.
To reap its benefits, you can include a lot more sauerkraut in your diet, and make sure to have it at the absolute best time. Would sauerkraut work best to improve your gut health when taken in the morning or at night? How should you take sauerkraut? What foods are best to pair it with? We will let you know all of this and more so that you can work on improving your gut health with sauerkraut as soon as you would like to!
What Is Sauerkraut?
Sauerkraut is finely chopped raw cabbage that has been fermented by lactic acid bacteria. It has a distinct flavor, it is about as sour as the name suggests, and it can be eaten in different ways. Sauerkraut might be seen as a side or on hot dogs on occasion, but its gut benefits aren’t really talked about. Since it is a fermented food, sauerkraut can offer many benefits to your gut and that includes prebiotic properties that contribute to good overall gut health.
Sauerkraut is a German food that is very popular there, and in other places is often eaten a lot less. You might have sauerkraut on a hot dog every once in a while at a barbeque, or at a baseball game, or on the occasion that you have eastern European food. It tastes good paired with many different dishes, and some of those dishes will be easy to add into a weekly meal plan for the sake of eating more sauerkraut. Sauerkraut does double duty flavoring dishes and keeping the gut healthy, so it is a good idea to learn how to fit it into your diet.
How Is Sauerkraut Made?
To understand why sauerkraut is so beneficial to the gut, it is good to know how it is made. Sauerkraut is made using raw cabbage and a few extra ingredients that you might already have in your kitchen at home. It will need some sea salt, peppercorns, and caraway seeds. The cabbage should be washed and shredded, and then placed into a bowl full of the sea salt and seeds.
Then the cabbage should be covered with a sheet and weighed down with heavy plates and then put in a cool, room temperature spot for about five days. You can get even better results if you let it sit and ferment for about two to six weeks as well. The environment that the cabbage is kept in cannot be too cool or else the cabbage will take way too long to ferment. It also cannot be too warm or else the cabbage is at risk of getting moldy. The brine that the cabbage is sitting in will penetrate it over that time and give it that distinct sauerkraut texture and flavor, and all those gut healthy benefits.
What Makes Sauerkraut Good for Gut Health?
Sauerkraut is good for gut health primarily because of the prebiotics it contains. Prebiotics are an output of sauerkraut that is very healthy for the gut. They are non-digestible foods that feed the bacteria in the gut and make sure there is a proper balance of good versus bad bacteria. Prebiotics will feed the good bacteria and help regulate bowel movements, insulin, hormone levels, cholesterol levels, and even help to strengthen the immune system. And that’s not all. Prebiotics also reduce the risk of colon cancer, lower the risk of cardiovascular disease, and stimulate hormones that aid in appetite suppressing. They can even regulate your mood by reducing the levels of stress causing hormones.
How to Have Sauerkraut
Sauerkraut can be enjoyed in a number of ways, some of which you already enjoy, and some of which you haven’t seen before. If you want to have as much sauerkraut as possible from now on and need some help coming up with ideas, you can always come back to this list to figure out what to do. Here are some meal ideas with sauerkraut:
Breakfast
Sauerkraut with Bell Peppers and Eggs
You might not be used to having sauerkraut with breakfast foods, but you might want it more the more you get to try it out. You can enjoy sauerkraut in a skillet with eggs and bell peppers without taking too much time out to make it in the morning. All you need to do is saute onions and bell peppers and mix them with sauerkraut and broth in a skillet. Make sure to season everything before you cover it and let it simmer, and once you stir in some creme fraiche, make some space to crack the eggs into.
Lunch
Sauerkraut Grilled Cheese with Dijon
When you want a lot more grilled cheese in your diet, sometimes you have to look for creative ways to add it, and one way is to make a sauerkraut grilled cheese with dijon. This is a twist on the classic grilled cheese that offers a delicious umami flavor on top of the cheese. It doesn’t even take much extra work. All you need to do is to set up a grilled cheese the way you normally would, but this time spread some dijon mustard on the inside of the bread, and then some sauerkraut in between that and the cheese.
Dinner
One of the most common ways that people enjoy sauerkraut is with a sausage dinner. A dinner with sausage, potatoes, and sauerkraut is super popular in Eastern Europe, and you can start enjoying it on the regular just like they do! To make a version of this meal, you will need to have sauerkraut, onions, apples, bacon, broth, and maple syrup. All these seasonings will add a different depth of flavor to the sauerkraut, and after you combine it together, make your sausage and potatoes on the side.
The Best Time to Have Sauerkraut for Gut Health
Sauerkraut can help improve your gut health at any time of the day, but there are times when it manages to be most effective for your gut. There are factors about the time of day you eat sauerkraut that can make it have more or less effectiveness, and that is why the best time to have sauerkraut for your gut health is in the morning on an empty stomach. That is the best time to eat sauerkraut to improve your gut health for a few reasons.
First off, the best time of day to have sauerkraut is in the morning because that is usually when people wake up with an empty stomach. If you happen to sleep during the day and wake up at night time, that would be the best time for you to have sauerkraut. The thing that makes morning time the best is the emptiness of your stomach, so as long as that factor is there, you will get a little more out of your sauerkraut for the day.
A supplement that will help you support your gut’s health with or without eating sauerkraut is Dr. Emil’s Total Gut Complex. It contains just about everything you need from a supplement to support an all around healthy gut. You can find this supplement on Dr. Emil’s website or even on other online store websites. This supplement contains probiotics, prebiotics, and postbiotics, and will target each part of the gut for maximum results. Pair it with your added intake of sauerkraut for double the positive results.
Sauerkraut is a healthy food that can greatly improve your life if you have more of it, so have it any time of the day you want, but especially in the morning for optimal results when it comes to your gut’s health.
