Health Beyond the Blog: “Hack Your Health” on Netflix

Gut and Immune Health Intersect in Documentary Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut

by Stephanie Oehler

The importance of healthy eating for longevity and chronic disease prevention is well-understood. It can feel impossible, however, to determine what actually constitutes a healthy food choice. Taglines such as “immune support” and “supports gut health” on food products leave consumers wondering which are beneficial and which simply have clever marketing strategies.

I didn’t fully understand the importance of gut and immune health in overall wellbeing until I watched the documentary Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut. This Netflix film, released in April 2024, highlights the importance of the microbiome, the community of bacteria that live on our skin and in our digestive tract and directly influence our ability to fight infections. 

Hack Your Health breaks down the complex and often-misunderstood role of the microbiome in a lighthearted and easy-to-understand manner, using yarn puppets and computer animations to depict our gut microbes. The film features interviews with experts such as Giulia Enders, a physician and author of Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ, and Erica Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at Stanford. These experts emphasize the essential role of the gut in mood regulation, immune function, and weight maintenance.

The documentary also included the perspectives of regular people. Filmmakers interviewed a mother striving to maintain a healthy weight, a PhD student experiencing chronic stomach pain, a competitive eater struggling to feel hunger cues, and a Michelin-starred pastry chef with disordered eating. The film showed each individual undergoing tests to determine the diversity of bacteria present in their microbiome. Experts then gave these four individuals guidance on how to improve their gut health to address their health challenges.

Hack Your Health explains that we shape our microbiome with each of our choices, including what we eat, where we travel, and who we surround ourselves with, at both individual and population levels.  For example, the industrialization of our society has led to a reduction in the number of bacteria in our microbiomes. This loss can be offset by increasing the variety of foods that we consume, especially fruits and vegetables. Experts say that consuming 50 grams of fiber per day and 20 to 30 different types of fruits and vegetables per week is an effective strategy while products like probiotic yogurt or fermented foods can be useful in supplementing the microbiome.

The film skillfully demystifies the microbiome, reminding us to prioritize buying a variety of fruits and vegetables rather than over-packaged products with flashy taglines.

Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut is available on Netflix.