Wellness That Travels With You

Travel moves three things at once — your clock, your food and your routine — and your gut notices all three. The good news is that most of what helps weighs nothing and fits in no bag at all.

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Your gut keeps time

The gut microbiota is not a fixed population sitting still. It rises and falls across a day. Most of what is known about knocking that cycle out of step comes from mice: the community shifts, and when the shifted community was transferred into germ-free mice, it produced obesity and glucose intolerance¹.

The food changes faster than you do

Ten volunteers moved to an entirely animal-based or entirely plant-based diet, and their gut communities shifted within one day². A week of airport sandwiches, hotel breakfasts and restaurant portions is exactly that kind of switch, and it starts working on day one rather than day five.

This is the most useful thing to know before a trip, mostly because it is the part you can still influence. Not by packing anything. By ordering a vegetable.

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Routine is the thing worth packing

Sleep travels badly and it matters. In 26 adults wearing sleep monitors, greater gut microbiome diversity tracked with better sleep efficiency and longer total sleep³. Cross-sectional, so the direction of the arrow is anyone’s guess — but nothing is lost by protecting sleep on a trip, and plenty is lost by not.

Transit changes too, and almost everyone notices. Stool consistency is strongly associated with gut microbiota richness and composition⁴, which is a technical way of saying the thing travel disrupts most visibly is connected to the thing underneath it. Fiber, fluid and walking are the unglamorous answers, and they are the same ones your grandmother gave you.

Keep the schedule. The schedule is doing more than the luggage.

If you are taking Flourish with you

Three practical notes, and nothing grander than that:

• Follow the storage instructions on your bottle. A live ferment is not improved by an afternoon in a hot car or on a sunny windowsill.
• Keep your usual daily timing, on local time rather than home time. Consistency is doing more work here than the dose.
• Check the rules before you fly. Liquids over the carry-on limit go in checked baggage, and some countries restrict which supplements can be brought in.

And the plain version of what you would be carrying: a probiotic is live microorganisms that, in adequate amounts, confer a health benefit⁵, and benefits belong to individual strains rather than to a category⁶. If you are heading somewhere with real health risks, a travel clinic is the right stop — that is a medical question rather than a supplement one.

What actually travels with you

Your microbiome does, obviously. It is the one piece of luggage you could not leave behind if you tried. What you can carry on purpose is a routine: meals at roughly the right hours for wherever you are, something green on the plate when it shows up, sleep defended where it can be, and whatever you normally take, taken normally.

Flourish is a food supplement, at home and away.

Sources

1. Thaiss, C. A., Zeevi, D., Levy, M., Zilberman-Schapira, G., Suez, J., Tengeler, A. C., Abramson, L., Katz, M. N., et al. (2014). Transkingdom control of microbiota diurnal oscillations promotes metabolic homeostasis. Cell, 159(3), 514–529 — the gut community rises and falls on a daily cycle; disrupting that cycle in mice disturbed it, and transferring the disturbed community into germ-free mice produced obesity and glucose intolerance. The human arm was two volunteers flown across eight time zones. Source
2. David, L. A., Maurice, C. F., Carmody, R. N., Gootenberg, D. B., Button, J. E., Wolfe, B. E., Ling, A. V., Devlin, A. S., et al. (2014). Diet rapidly and reproducibly alters the human gut microbiome. Nature, 505(7484), 559–563 — 10 volunteers spent five days on an entirely animal-based or entirely plant-based diet; the gut community shifted within a single day of the new food arriving. Source
3. Smith, R. P., Easson, C., Lyle, S. M., Kapoor, R., Donnelly, C. P., Davidson, E. J., Parikh, E., Lopez, J. V., et al. (2019). Gut microbiome diversity is associated with sleep physiology in humans. PLOS ONE, 14(10), e0222394 — 26 adults wearing sleep monitors; greater microbiome diversity tracked with better sleep efficiency and longer total sleep. Cross-sectional, so it cannot say which causes which. Source
4. Vandeputte, D., Falony, G., Vieira-Silva, S., Tito, R. Y., Joossens, M., & Raes, J. (2016). Stool consistency is strongly associated with gut microbiota richness and composition, enterotypes and bacterial growth rates. Gut, 65(1), 57–62 — 53 women; how fast things move through you tracks with what lives in you. Source
5. Hill, C., Guarner, F., Reid, G., Gibson, G. R., Merenstein, D. J., Pot, B., Morelli, L., Berni Canani, R., et al. (2014). The International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics consensus statement on the scope and appropriate use of the term probiotic. Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology, 11(8), 506–514 — the definition this article uses: “live microorganisms that, when administered in adequate amounts, confer a health benefit on the host.” Source
6. Sanders, M. E., Merenstein, D. J., Reid, G., Gibson, G. R., & Rastall, R. A. (2019). Probiotics and prebiotics in intestinal health and disease: from biology to the clinic. Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology, 16(10), 605–616 — review setting out why effects are strain-specific and cannot be generalized across a category. Source