What has it come to when you find yourself wondering if you’re the only person who ever flunked their colonoscopy? I fully realize that this topic does not automatically pair well with food and recipes. However, this most recent personal failure (I simply could not drink the Kool-Aid, so to speak) has put me of a mind to think anew about digestive health. Or at least to pay attention to related information as it crosses my path.

These days, with aging film stars shilling yogurt and smoothies fortified with probiotics (acidophilus cultures and the like) at every turn, there seems to be no lack of preoccupation with what’s indelicately termed “gut health.” So it comes as no real news that every colon’s goal should be a healthy population of favorable bacteria so as to achieve a boost in immunity and mineral absorption and a reduction in harmful bacteria and bloating.

For a person who just flunked their colonoscopy, such information is nothing short of riveting.

In case you happen to be curious, this means I get a remedial colonoscopy, resulting in a prolonged preparatory process. If you fail to drink two liters of something akin to viscous Gatorade all in one night, well then you have to spread it out over three days. I figure a diet of Jell-O and chicken broth for 72 hours should be good for at least a couple of leftover holiday pounds off the midsection.

And when it’s all over, I intend to douse my gut with so much fortified yogurt as to make Dannon’s stock prices soar. But I just found out, much to my astonishment, that eating yogurt isn’t enough. According to Sheah Rarback, a registered dietitian and faculty member at the University of Miami School of Medicine, you have to give the probiotics some "prebiotic" foods to snack on once they get to your colon.

Prebiotic foods contain fibers that make it through the stomach and upper intestine and arrive in the colon ready to nourish the healthy bacteria, Rarback wrote in a recent column for The Miami Herald. (Click here for the entire article.) So in addition to lapping up my yogurt, I’ve also got to eat either artichokes, asparagus, onions, leeks, garlic, bananas, whole wheat, barley and/or rye. But heck. I’ll have just endured three days of eating practically nothing. Prebiotics and probiotics here I come. I can hardly wait.