Sorry I don't quite understand your question...
I've tried following the recipe with only the spices, oil and water, then drinking the resulting "paste". This did not give me a good night's sleep.
I was just trying to puzzle out wheather it was chiefly a matter of what was passed on to the gut, or chiefly a matter of what was being absorbed.
The thing is that I have mostly sorted my gut out, after about 12 yrs of dysbiosis. So I am a bit wary of asafoetida. I used to use it as a matter of course in cooking indian food, and adding it to dishes that contained a lot of pulses. And know of it as both a garlic and onion alternative for Jains and Hare krishna devotees, and as a thing that is meant to reduce flatulence.
When I started eating a lot of pulses to try to feed my microbiome I did not add asafoetida, because I wanted the bacteria to thrive. But even though most of the info I have read has just being fibre = good; more fibre = better. Or rather that this is the case if you do not have a known pathogen. I have wondered about the randomness of this adding food and just hoping the right internal ecosystem establishes itself.
It looks from the abstract that adding spices like asafoetida will prune that ecosystem, so I was wondering if it was just the spices then it might be chiefly about gut changes.
I know that a lot of theses spices have constituents that are bioactive, so if it was a matter of getting the right spices and the right method I thought it would be more likely to be about you absorbing the spices, or their bioactive constituents.
Of course the method could also be making the spices more active on the bacteria.
I don't know, I'm just going to try making a 1/5 version of the recipe to see how it works.
Oh and re the potatoes, it could be something about glycaemic load. You probably know that there are a lot of people who write about diet who are concerned about how food changes the glucose and insulin levels in the blood.
From what I have read adding fat and fibre really slow down the release of the glucose. So it may be that when you add potatoes to all that fibre from the rest onions etc and the oil that you get a very slow release of glucose into your blood.
Potatoes have are of course higher in carbs than the zucchini/courgettes, so there would be a larger slow release load.
I am reminded of a suggestion that Myhill made suggesting that a lot of people wake because they are have low blood glucose (hypoglycaemic).
But don't know. Shame that.
Thanks for the recipe Cigana.