Natalie Alyn Lind and Ayesha Curry swear by Coconut Cult, the $39 probiotic yogurt at the heart of the gut-health boom, but dietitians say the evidence is oversold and fiber does more.
Coconut Cult arrives packed in ice. A sixteen-ounce jar of the fermented coconut yogurt runs about $39 direct from the company, shipping included, because it has to travel cold, and it is eaten not by the bowl but by the spoonful, a tablespoon at a time, the way one might take a supplement or a small, expensive vice. The label promises 50 billion colony-forming units in a single two-ounce serving and 16 distinct live microbes, and the founder, a former Los Angeles comedy writer named Noah Simon-Waddell, refers to himself as the Cult Leader. The product is a joke that is also a real business, and lately it has become a fixture in the wellness routines of the famous.
Natalie Alyn Lind, of the Yellowstone spinoff Dutton Ranch, told NewBeauty that a scoop of Coconut Cult follows her morning lemon-and-olive-oil shot and her sea moss, because “if my gut is not ready, then my entire body isn’t.” Ayesha Curry named the same yogurt to Marie Claire, folding it into a stack that includes a probiotic called Superfood and, separately, sea moss she is honest about not understanding. “I can’t say it’s doing anything, but it’s part of the routine,” Curry said. That sentence is the whole gut-health economy in miniature. The routine has a momentum of its own, and the question of whether any given item earns its place inside it is set aside.
The reach extends well past the wellness-interview circuit. Mark Wahlberg folded a jar of the Japanese cheesecake flavor into the enormous bulking breakfast he documented on Instagram while putting on weight for a film, and the brand has moved from cult object to investment target, taking on the reality-television personality Kristin Cavallari as a partner and releasing a limited-edition flavor with her.
Does probiotic yogurt work?
The registered dietitian Heather Martin eats Coconut Cult regularly and is still not willing to oversell it. “We are barely out of the Dark Ages on this topic,” she wrote in a review for Today. “We don’t yet know how or when to alter a particular person’s microbiome to get a particular result, and the data is often oversold. Sometimes the same probiotic will work wonders for one person but make another feel terrible, and I often liken the process of finding the right balance to trying to fix a watch with a hammer.” Her verdict on the category is not that probiotics do nothing, but that the evidence is strongest in narrow places and thinnest exactly where the marketing is loudest. “Some of the best evidence is for regularity, and probiotics in food appear to be a better bet than in a capsule,” she wrote, before landing on the sentence that no premium brand will print on a jar: “There is no single magic bullet, ever.”
The gastroenterologist Trisha Pasricha, of Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, goes further. “The marketing claims about over-the-counter probiotics largely do not match the evidence,” she wrote in a column reported by Fortune. Patients are routinely surprised, she noted, to learn “that’s part of the evidence-based guidelines: The American Gastroenterological Association does not recommend probiotics for most digestive conditions.” The clinical support for probiotics is real but small, confined largely to preventing a specific infection during antibiotic courses and to a complication of certain bowel surgeries, and even those uses rest on evidence the guidelines themselves rate as low quality. What Pasricha recommends instead is almost aggressively unglamorous: a high-fiber, plant-diverse diet, which she calls “one of the strongest-studied ways to promote and preserve a healthy microbiome.”
Is Coconut Cult worth the spend?
None of this has slowed the money. The probiotic yogurt market was valued at roughly $3.12 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $6.10 billion by 2034, according to Fortune Business Insights. The broader category of gut-health supplements sat near $20 billion in 2025, on its way to a projected $36.57 billion by 2033. Gut health has become a premium category, and a premium category needs a premium object, something that signals seriousness through price and inconvenience. A jar that costs $39 and must be shipped on ice performs that function beautifully.
The appeal is not only the microbes. It is the ritual, the singular daily tablespoon taken with intention, the sense that one is doing something precise and internal and slightly ahead of the curve. Curry, who also keeps a Tesla-coil energy device and does ice baths for her face, is candid that the sea moss may be doing nothing, and she takes it anyway, because the routine is the point and the routine is a form of care. There is nothing wrong with this, exactly. A spoonful of fermented coconut is not going to hurt anyone, and if the belief that one’s gut is “ready” makes a person feel more grounded before a 15-hour day on set, that is a benefit even a skeptic can respect.
The honest version of the advice is just less marketable. Martin, the dietitian who buys the stuff herself, keeps returning to the same unglamorous floor. “Since we can only culture a tiny fraction of the microbes found in a healthy person’s gut, one of the best ways to address the microbiome is still to eat a healthy, high-fiber diet, and there are thousands of foods that can help,” she wrote. Beans would do it. So would lentils, oats, and an unremarkable supermarket yogurt with live cultures, none of which should cost you anywhere near $39 a jar, and none of which will ever feel like being let in on a secret.
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