Botanical Fibre Multi — Botanical Fibre Multi — psyllium, glucomannan and sugar beet fibre in one powder

Maybe you noticed it in your thirties. The bloated feeling after lunch that didn't used to happen. The gut that doesn't quite settle into a rhythm during a busy week. The afternoon energy slump that has more to do with what you ate than what you slept. You're not unwell — you're just running on a diet that the gut wasn't really designed for.

The Mediterranean grandmother's plate was, on close inspection, mostly fibre — bitter greens, beans, whole grains, fruit, herbs, the rough end of every loaf. The supermarket trolley, by contrast, has been engineered for shelf life and softness.

The cost of taking the fibre out is a cost paid privately, by the gut. The slow daily work of the colon — moving food through, holding water, feeding the bacteria that live there — is the part of digestion that asks for fibre and asks for not very much else. When fibre is missing, that work doesn't stop; it just gets harder.

This pot is one quiet way to put some of that lost roughness back into a modern week. Nine plants and live cultures. One scoop.

A 180g pot — about thirty-six servings of 5g, one heaped teaspoon each. The texture is fine pale powder, gently aromatic from the fennel and peppermint. Stirred into water it thickens and swells; drunk quickly with another full glass of water on top, it slips down with no fuss.

That's how this kind of supplement works. Not with fireworks. With patience, and with a glass of water.

Psyllium — Plantago ovata — is a small annual plant of the dry plains of north-western India and Pakistan. It throws up slender stems with little spikes of pale pink flowers, and the flowers turn into seed pods full of tiny brown seeds, each one wrapped in a translucent fibrous husk. The husk is what we use. The Hindi name for the seed is isabgol — the horse's ear — for the curved shape of the husk under the field worker's lens.

Psyllium husk is almost pure soluble fibre and absorbs water.

We use psyllium whole husks powder as the largest single ingredient in this blend. It is the workhorse of the formula — the plant the formula is built around.

In the volcanic soil of central Japan, on the slopes of Gunma and Ibaraki prefectures, farmers have for at least fifteen hundred years cultivated a strange-looking plant called konnyaku — Amorphophallus konjac — the corm of which is grated into a grey gelatinous block that is sliced into noodles and simmered in dashi. The fibre that gives konjac its texture is called glucomannan — a soluble fibre with extraordinary water-holding capacity. Gram for gram, glucomannan absorbs more water than almost any other plant fibre on earth.

. We include glucomannan as part of the blend — not as a stand-alone weight-loss product, but as a supporting fibre for the daily ritual.

When the British and French sugar industries process sugar beet — Beta vulgaris — they extract the sucrose and are left with a fibrous pulp that has historically been used as cattle fodder. The pulp, dried and milled, is one of the most concentrated dietary-fibre powders in European agriculture. It is bland, almost flavourless, and adds the kind of insoluble bulk that a modern white-bread diet doesn't deliver. Quietly excellent, and quietly under-used.

Note: L-glutamine is an amino acid; we don't make authorised health claims for it. We include it because of the long body of physiological literature describing its relationship with the gut wall.

Inulin is a soluble fibre belonging to a family called fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS) — long chains of fructose units that the human stomach cannot break down, but which the bacteria of the colon can. The bacteria ferment inulin into short-chain fatty acids — chiefly butyrate, propionate, and acetate — that the colon cells use as fuel. Chicory root is the commercial source. Inulin, a fibre from chicory root.

Three plants that every old culinary culture had on the windowsill. Fennel seed (Foeniculum vulgare) — the after-meal seed of every Indian restaurant, in Roman cookbooks since Pliny, the after-meal seed of every Indian restaurant. Peppermint leaf (Mentha piperita) — Greek folk medicine, English kitchen garden, the cooling green note in any digestive tea. Ginger root (Zingiber officinale) — the pickled accompaniment to sushi, the steaming infusion of the Indian household, the warming spice of every Christmas cake. Three quiet companions whose role in the formula is as much taste as function — they make the powder pleasant to drink, and they earn their place in the long after-dinner tradition of every culinary civilisation.

The last two ingredients on the label are not plants but living organisms. Lactobacillus acidophilus and Bifidobacterium bifidum are two strains of bacteria native to the healthy human gut. Lactobacillus acidophilus and Bifidobacterium bifidum. Note: under current UK rules, the word probiotic is not allowed on a food supplement label — but the cultures themselves are permitted as ingredients. Their inclusion in this powder is a quiet acknowledgement that the gut is a community, not a tube — and a daily fibre with a small live-culture component is closer to what real fermented food traditions (Bulgarian yogurt, Korean kimchi, German sauerkraut) have always offered.

We sweeten the powder with a small amount of Stevia rebaudiana leaf extract — the South American leaf that has been chewed for sweetness by the Guaraní people of Paraguay for hundreds of years, and is now an authorised sweetener. Stevia is a sweetener — a plant-derived one, the only sweetener in the powder, used in trace. No added cane sugar; no maltodextrin; no synthetic colours. Just a leaf doing the job a leaf has done for the Guaraní for centuries.

Lay these nine ingredients on a table — psyllium, glucomannan, sugar beet fibre, L-glutamine, inulin, fennel, peppermint, ginger, the two live cultures — and what they share is a single quiet theme: the return of fibre, in real plant form, to a modern diet that has quietly lost it.

We didn't pick them at random. We picked the great soluble-fibre traditions of three continents — the Indian isabgol, the Japanese konjac, the European sugar beet — added the after-dinner kitchen herbs, the prebiotic chicory root, the gut-wall amino acid, and the two well-studied live cultures, and laid them in a single pot. The thinking isn't more is more. It's the gut wants what real food used to give it, in roughly the order real food used to give it.

Add 1 to 2 heaped teaspoons (5–10g) of powder to a small amount of water or juice (about a quarter of a glass), stir slowly into a paste, then top up with more liquid until the glass is full. Stir well and drink immediately. Follow with another full glass of water. Take 1 to 3 times a day, ideally about thirty minutes before a meal.

⚠️ Important. Taking this powder without enough water can cause choking. Always use a minimum of 250ml of liquid per heaped teaspoon. If swallowing is difficult, do not use this product. The fibres swell rapidly on contact with water — they are designed to. That swelling is the point of the formula, and it is also the reason for the water rule.

Most people start with a single daily teaspoon for a fortnight, then build to twice or three times a day if comfortable. Start with one teaspoon a day. If after sixty days nothing has changed, stop. A supplement that isn't doing anything for you isn't worth the money.

This is a food supplement — it complements a varied diet, doesn't replace one. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, taking medication (especially thyroid medication, oral diabetes medication, or anticoagulants — fibre changes the absorption of many medicines, and a window of one to two hours between this powder and any pill is sensible), or living with a medical condition, talk to your GP or pharmacist first. Best consumed within three months of opening; replace the lid after each use.

⚠️ May contain traces of mustard and sesame. Manufactured in a facility that handles cereals, egg, fish, milk, nuts, soya, mustard and seeds, and products derived from crustaceans. Produce of more than one country. Blended and packed in the United Kingdom.

If you've read this far, thank you. We tried to write the kind of page we'd want to read before spending money — no neon promises, no overblown language.

— Vitadefence