It’s a pretty wild time to be alive. Many experience occasional bloating after meals, energy dips no matter how “clean” their daily plates are, and unpredictable digestive days. If you let them, a lot of so-called wellness experts will try to convince you that you are lacking some micronutrient or another… but our ancestors weren’t counting macros. They were eating biodiversity.
This isn’t a rejection of macronutrients — protein, carbohydrates, and fat are essential, and no amount of ecological nuance changes that. But macros tell us very little about the deeper nutritional intelligence of a meal: its mineral density, its phytonutrients and polyphenols, its fiber and bitter compounds, its medicinal compounds, its microbial exposure, and its overall ecological complexity. That complexity is exactly what modern diets have lost over the past few generations, and what “rewilding the microbiome” is really about.
What Our Ancestors Were Actually Eating
Let’s zoom out for a moment. Humans evolved alongside extraordinary plant diversity. For millennia, hunter-gatherer and Indigenous food systems relied on dozens — sometimes hundreds — of edible and medicinal species throughout the year, from wild greens, roots, tubers, fruits, seeds, and mushrooms to seasonal herbs and flowers. The point was never that every single meal contained hundreds of plants. It’s that the annual food landscape was broad, seasonal, and constantly shifting with the ecology of a place.
Ethnobotanists have spent decades documenting what that looked like in practice. In the Brazilian Amazon, researcher Darrell Posey’s long-term fieldwork with the Kayapó people documented their sophisticated classification and use of more than 600 native plant species for food, medicine, tools, and ceremony, including deliberate management of “forest islands” to increase the abundance of useful species within their landscape (Agroforestry Systems).
In Lombok, Indonesia, an ethnobotanical survey of Sasak communities recorded 111 distinct food-plant preparations drawn from 91 genera and 43 plant families within local cuisine alone (Journal of Ethnic Foods) — and that's before counting the additional species used for medicine, dye, craft, and so on. Across Mesoamerican and Amazonian communities more broadly, ethnobotanical literature consistently documents plant knowledge in the hundreds of species per community, tied closely to the specific ecosystem each group inhabits.
Diversity Outside, Diversity Inside
Today, our food system looks dramatically different. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), roughly 75% of the world's food comes from just 12 plant species and five animal species, while rice, wheat, and maize alone provide nearly 60% of the world’s food energy derived from plants.
Despite an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 edible plant species existing globally, only a few hundred are widely cultivated, and just a handful dominate modern agriculture. This narrowing of our food supply has consequences that extend well beyond what’s on our plates. Dietary diversity is closely linked with nutritional adequacy because different plants provide distinct combinations of fiber, phytochemicals, vitamins, minerals, and other beneficial compounds that no single crop can offer.
At the same time, relying on so few staple crops makes our global food system more vulnerable to pests, disease outbreaks, and climate-related disruptions. Expanding the variety of plants we grow and eat (whether through seasonal produce, heritage varieties, wild foods, or functional botanicals) isn’t just about adding novelty to meals. It’s a way to support more resilient food systems, preserve biodiversity, and reconnect with the rich diversity of plants that has nourished humans for thousands of years. (WHO)
Furthermore, that loss of diversity ripples beyond our food system, showing up inside our guts. Research comparing the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population in Tanzania, with industrialized populations has consistently found greater gut microbial richness and diversity among the Hadza, alongside microbial species that are rare or even absent in Western populations. While many factors contribute — including environment, antibiotic exposure, and lifestyle — the Hadza’s seasonally diverse, high-fiber diet, which draws from a wide variety of wild plant foods, is considered a major driver of these differences. (Source: Science)
Rewilding the microbiome is vital to our bodies and our planet. On one hand, trying to recreate a Paleolithic diet or chasing the latest wellness trend only creates “blindness to the forest for the trees,” restricting our big-picture perspective. So, another way we can consider approaching this is to attempt to restore ecological diversity to the foods we eat. That means shifting the focus to a broader variety of plants, more dietary fiber, bitter herbs, ferments, legumes, mushrooms, spices, and other minimally processed whole foods that nourish different microbial communities rather than the same few species every day.
Greater dietary plant diversity has repeatedly been associated with a more diverse gut microbiome, and microbial diversity is widely considered a hallmark of a resilient gut ecosystem. Have you ever considered how many species you’re actually in relationship with? Here’s where we would start.
Fiber, Fermented Foods & Bitter Herbs
Much of the internal complexity our bodies require depends on fiber, specifically the type gut bacteria can actually ferment. Stanford microbiologists Justin and Erica Sonnenburg have described a “fiber gap” between ancestral and modern diets, showing in mouse studies that low-fiber diets don't just reduce microbial diversity in the short term; over several generations, they can permanently extinguish bacterial species that don’t get restored even when fiber is reintroduced (Cell Metabolism). In other words, a hungry microbiome doesn’t just recover on its own — the diversity has to be actively maintained, or it can be lost for good.
On a brighter note, if fiber feeds the microbes you already have, fermented foods appear to help diversify them further. In a 2021 randomized clinical trial published in Cell, Stanford researchers found that a 10-week diet rich in fermented foods — yogurt, kefir, fermented vegetables, and kombucha — increased overall gut microbial diversity and reduced markers of inflammation, while a high-fiber diet alone did not produce the same anti-inflammatory effect over that timeframe. The two approaches appear to work differently, and complementarily: fiber feeds existing microbial diversity, while fermented foods seem to help introduce it.
Bitter compounds have a long history in herbal traditions specifically because of what they do at the level of taste receptors. Bitter taste receptors (known as TAS2Rs) aren’t limited to the tongue! They’re distributed throughout the digestive tract, and research shows that activating them can stimulate gastric acid secretion, bile release, and digestive enzyme output (Frontiers in Endocrinology). It’s the physiological logic behind the herbalist’s classic pre-meal bitters: a small amount of bitter flavor, taken before eating, primes the digestive system for what’s coming.
A Brief Educational Look at Parasites
No conversation about gut ecology is complete without acknowledging parasites. This subject is usually approached with either total silence or complete panic. Neither serves the conversation well. Parasites are organisms that live in or on a host; some play defined ecological roles, and human relationships with them are ancient. The “old friends hypothesis,” proposed by immunologist Graham Rook, suggests that some organisms humans co-evolved with — including certain helminths and environmental microbes — may have played a role in training and regulating the immune system, and that reduced exposure to them in industrialized environments may be one contributor (among many) to the rise in inflammatory and autoimmune conditions (Immunology).
Of course, we’re not making an argument for seeking out infection, nor are we attempting to diagnose anything. But the context matters: the idea of periodically supporting the gut’s terrain is not a modern wellness invention. Structured cleansing practices exist across many traditions, from Ayurvedic panchakarma to Amazonian limpiezas. These seasonal rituals were built around the idea that digestive ecosystems benefit from periodic attention, not just constant intervention.
Learn more about our community cleanse here. Or, get 97% off the 4-week cleanse when you sign up for The Herbalist Collective Bundle (offer ends July 30, 2026).
Trust (And Support) Your Gut
You don't need to forage 600 species to apply any of this knowledge. Here are a few evidence-informed places to begin rewilding your inner ecosystem:
Widen your plate. Rotating in new plants, herbs, and mushrooms — not just eating “more” of the same few — is the most direct way to reintroduce dietary diversity.
Feed your fiber-eaters. Our Liver Vitality formula combines Dandelion, Burdock, Milk thistle, Nettle, Chlorella, Spirulina, and Moringa into a daily blend traditionally used to support liver cleansing processes and the digestive terrain the microbiome depends on.
Add mushroom diversity in one scoop. Our Adaptogenic Powder blends seven medicinal mushrooms — Reishi, Lion’s Mane, Cordyceps, Chaga, Agaricus, Maitake, and Shiitake — with heirloom Cacao. If biodiversity is the underlying goal, this formula will get you closer to it!
Reach for bitters before meals. Our Amargo Digestive Bitters draws on the same bitter-compound tradition described above, formulated to be taken before eating.
Don’t skip the fiber. Our Gut Sweep Tea offers traditional fiber support from Psyllium Husk, Marshmallow Root, Slippery Elm, and Burdock Root for gut terrain and regularity.
Rewilding the microbiome is a fool’s errand if we strive for some perfect ancestral diet none of us can fully return to. So what if we insist on asking a different question than the primary one modern nutrition culture has trained us to ask? Not “did I hit my macros today” — but “how many species did I actually meet today?”
