Mouthwash, Supplements and GLP-1s – the Surprising Things Messing With Your Microbiome According to Mr Gut Health

There is a tub at the back of my cupboard that I no longer make eye contact with. Greens, it says, in the optimistic lettering these things favour, and it cost the better part of £40.

I bought the emerald powder one January in the annual fit of self-improvement that grips us all somewhere around the second week, used it perhaps twice, and have been quietly ashamed of it ever since. It sits beside the matcha I also don’t drink; a small shrine to the person I briefly intended to become.

I mention this only because the tub is not just a tub. It is a monument to an entire industry – one built on the elegant premise that your insides are a problem, that the problem is complicated and that the solution costs £39.99.

Somewhere along the way, gut health stopped being about what you ate and became something you bought. There are powders and tinctures and capsules with strain names like minor European royalty. There is, God, help us, raw milk.

Author and scientist Jordan Haworth would like a word about all of it. Better known to several hundred thousand Instagram followers as Mr Gut Health, he has built a career on the deeply unfashionable position that none of this needs to be difficult.