Gut health consumer expectations: overview
- Gut health claims rose 61% between 2024 and 2025 worldwide interest
- UK consumers often link gut health to immunity and anti-inflammatory benefits
- German consumers strongly associate gut health with immunity and inflammation benefits
- Anti-bloating increasingly defines gut health perceptions among UK consumers today
- Broader health associations are declining as expectations become more focused
Gut health is one of the main forces shaping the functional foods boom.
The trend has grabbed the imagination of consumers worldwide, with global food and drink launches with gut health claims rising 61% between 2024 and 2025 alone, according to analytics company Innova Market Insights.
Growth has already been profound. The gut health ingredients market is expected to reach new heights of $63.8bn (€55bn) by 2036 from $34.3bn (€29.6bn) in 2026, according to market research company Future Market Insights.
The gut health benefits that a food provides depend on the strain of probiotics used, explains Dr Megan Rossi, founder of The Gut Health Doctor.
“Simply adding a random live bacterium to an ambient product makes little scientific sense unless that specific strain, at that dose, has been shown to deliver the desired benefit,” she says.
“Different strains can do very different things, so we need to move beyond the idea that all probiotics are interchangeable and instead ask: what is the exact strain, and what outcome has it been clinically shown to support?”
The actual effects of gut health products can vary widely, says Professor Colin Hill at University College Cork.
“Because it’s not really a defined physiological benefit, claims can range from very specific ones backed by clinical evidence to vague claims probably coming from the marketing department rather than evidence from R&D.”
If gut health benefits vary widely, so do consumer expectations, which have shifted over time.
What do consumers expect from ‘gut health’?
Consumers associate a number of benefits with gut health, often related to (perhaps unsurprisingly) the gut.
“Many consumers understandably assume that a product labelled for gut health will quickly improve their digestion or resolve symptoms such as bloating, constipation or irregular bowel movements,” says Rossi.
In the UK, just under 16% associate gut health with anti-inflammatory benefits, according to AI analytics platform Tastewise, with roughly 15% linking it to immunity.
Meanwhile, 11.1% of UK consumers link gut health to anti-bloating.
Other associations are not quite as closely linked with the gut itself. These include: metabolism (8.8%), heart health (7.6%), hormone balance (5.3%), joint and bone health (2% each), liver health (1.4%), and kidney health (0.3%).
While most of these benefits consumers associate broadly with food as a whole, gut health being included in this, anti-bloating is “the one benefit gut health genuinely owns”, says Miriam Aniel Oved, senior consumer trends analyst at Tastewise.
Meanwhile, German consumers view gut health quite differently. Nearly 22% associate it with immunity, far higher than any category for UK consumers, and 21.3% associate it with anti-inflammatory benefits. Associations with blood sugar and metabolism are 12.9% each.
Conversely, only 2.6% of German consumers associate gut health with bloating.
Has this changed over time?
What consumers expect from gut health have grown significantly over time, says Rossi.
“In the past, gut health was often thought of primarily in terms of helping people to ‘poo more regularly’,” she says.
Yet as public awareness of connections between the gut and benefits such as immune, metabolic and mental health have grown, expectations have broadened.
“Some may now assume that a gut health product or probiotic will improve everything from their hormones to their mood.”
Yet while expectations are expanding among many consumers, some associations are actually narrowing, according to Tastewise.
Associations of gut health with anti-bloating are increasing for UK consumers, Tastewise data suggests. It went up by 6% between August 2024 and July 2026. With the exception of hormone balance, which increased by 9%, all other associations declined.
“The associations being shed are the whole-body ones – bones, heart, joints, liver,” says Oved. “The two gaining are the benefits closest to how people experience their gut day to day. Gut health is becoming a more specific claim in the UK, and a smaller one.”
Overall interest in gut health in the UK is cooling by around 6% a year, says Oved, despite its increasing presence on restaurant menus.
German associations with gut health have changed profoundly. Associations with blood sugar have also grown by about 20%, and it is the only German association growing at all. In fact, associations with immunity in Germany have fallen by 25%, heart health by 35%, and liver health by 44%.
Expectations around gut health continue to change. In such a broad category, which emerging science continues to make broader, such expectations will likely continue to evolve.
