Fermented foods

Over a year ago, ever since I had an operation and had to spend a couple of weeks in hospital, I have had stomach and alimentary canal (gut) problems. I had stomach aches after eating, gas problems, general malaise and sometimes vomiting.  I lost about 20% of my body weight, I was down to skin and bones, and my doctor prescribed a laxative to at least keep my sluggish system working.  

Since it was my hospital stay that marked the beginning of my problems, I assumed that it probably was the antibiotics I had been given intravenously in hospital that had killed off some of the ‘good’ bacteria in my system. I started drinking a little kefir daily and I was mostly eating healthy, home cooked. vegetables that I could tolerate. 
Nothing seemed to help until one day while shopping at my favourite health food store, I overheard its owner talking to an older customer about how beneficial it was for elderly people to eat fermented foods.

Recorded history reveals that people began fermenting foods and drinks as long ago as 3000 BC to keep them from ‘going bad’ and the practice probably goes back much longer than that. Up until I started looking into fermented foods, I thought the process was only used  to make drinks like wine or beer but of course wild yeast is what is used to make sourdough bread.  What I have just learned is that when you use salt to preserve legumes – if you don’t overdo the salt – they too will ferment. 

That’s how vegetables were always 'pickled' before vinegar made it more convenient.  To give an example, the video on sauerkraut gives the idea [the caraway seeds are optional]. The amount of salt to keep the bad bacteria from growing is not crucial but should be between 1 to 2 tablespoons per pound.  All pickles including olives were once fermented this way.

Besides making the foods easier to digest fermenting foods introduces friendly bacteria [or probiotics] into your digestive system. What they do in food, they also do in the gut - they repel disease causing bacteria and help break down nutrients so you can absorb them more easily. I’ve been eating lost of fermented foods like non-processed aged cheeses, sauerdough bread, beer and wine, sauerkraut, yoghurt, kefir and etc.  And it's working! They have given me a whole new lease on life! I'm starting to eat normally and gaining weight!          

If its hard to get fermented foods or you don’t particularly like them – the best supplement is lactobacillus sporogenes - it's  a probiotic you can take as a pill and most people tolerate it well.  Next week I’ll tackle the big subject of the 4 or 5 pounds of friendly bacteria in our gut whose function and power are increasingly amazing scientists who study them.  Rie

Pasteur to Penicillin

When I was visiting a science museum in Paris in 1949, I remember being thrilled to come across the very swan neck flask that Pasteur had used in his famous experiment in 1862. He did that experiment to prove that the popular belief in ‘spontaneous generation’ - that life just starting up of its own accord - was not the reason why any food left open to the air ‘went bad’ or began to ferment.

The results of that experiment would be far reaching. One of the main reasons that science has been so successful is that experimental outcomes are openly reported and thus able to be used by other scientists with confidence as the basis for their own work. This post is about a chain of important discoveries affecting all mankind that started with the work done in the 1670’s by Leeuwenhoek, the Dutch scientist famous for making microscopes. He had reported that through them he could see a multitude of very tiny microscopic life forms. This knowledge subsequently convinced Pasteur that there were all sorts of microorganisms, mostly bacteria, viruses and fungi spores that you couldn’t see suspended in the air and that they were drifting down onto food and infected it.

To prove his point, Pasteur did a simple but very famous experiment. He put some nourishing broth in 2 identical long stemmed flasks boiled them both to kill any microorganisms they contained and one he left the top open while with the other, he melted the glass at the top of the stem and pulled it into a long swan neck shaped tube as shown in the picture. It was still open to the air but microorganisms could not fall into the broth and, as Pasteur predicted, it did not spoil as the other one did.

Influenced by Pasteur’s results and writings, Joseph Lister, a surgeon in Scotland, became convinced that the reason open wounds usually became infected was because the harmful microbial life forms from the air were similarly contaminating them. By 1869, he was sterilizing his instruments, cleaning open wounds and covering them with bandages covered with an antiseptic. His results were so dramatic with so many lives saved that he spread the word and medical science was revolutionized through reading about his methods and following his example.

The story of Alexander Fleming who discovered penicillin can also be connected to Pasteur’s work. Although it had been suspected for many years that disease could be passed from one person to another by being in close proximity, Pasteur proved that bacteria suspended in air could cause disease. In 1928, Fleming was looking for a substance that would not be harmful to the body but could kill the disease-causing germs a person had breathed in. He was growing a type of Staphylococcus bacteria in covered glass dishes and trying to kill them with different substances. By chance while cleaning up some discarded dishes, he happened on one that had been open to the air and a mold was growing in it. Observant, he noticed that the mold was killing the ‘staph’ germs all around it. Recognizing his ‘find’ as important, he had a colleague identify the mold as a Penicillium type and he called its active ingredient penicillin. His chance discovery opened up the whole field of antibiotics.

When you prepare food be aware, like Pasteur, that you are creating conditions for air born contamination. Cover and refrigerate. Rie

Probiotics

My children were born in the early 1950’s and, since my husband’s career was in a city that had no place where I could further my scientific career, the focus of most of my reading was on books about how to give my young ones the best start in life that I could.

It included reading books by nutritionist Adell Davis that were then just being published. I found them very readable and informative and was so convinced by her that I started following her recommendations at a time when paying attention to what you ate was scoffed at. My faith in her advice on healthy eating back then was not misplaced. Research today vindicates her science and I felt great satisfaction when in 2000 she placed sixth among her century’s notables - that included scientists like Edison and Einstein!

For one thing, Adelle advocated eating yoghurt long before it became the highly advertised popular health food it has become in recent years. Back then it was sometimes hard to get yogurt, so I made it myself in an inexpensive temperature regulator and found it simple, inexpensive and fool proof.

I was curious as to why yogurt was so healthful and found out that it’s all about the bacteria it contains. I also learned that these single celled organisms were among the earliest forms of life that evolved on Earth 4 billion years ago. It took 3 billion years for them to diversify and learn to communicate before they finally got together to form the first multicellular creatures that we have evolved from. And they are still everywhere – so small they are invisible - in the air, in the soil, in us and on us.

Actually, amazingly, there are 3 or 4 lbs. of bacteria in our intestinal tract and we couldn’t live without them. They play a large part in the digestion of food, making vitamins and generally assisting in keeping our body working well. Tampering with their well being as we do when we take antibiotics or are under unusual stress, can cause serious illnesses like persistent diarrhea and throat and genital infections for example.

In contrast to ‘antibiotics’ that kill bacteria, ‘probiotics’ promote the health of our trillions and trillions of intestinal bacterial. Yogurt, properly made, contains mainly probiotic good kinds of bacteria. Unfortunately, to preserve their shelf life, most commercial yogurts have been heated and contain only dead bacteria. I learned recently that to be sure you are getting the good live bacteria in the yogurt you buy, it has to be tested in human clinical trials. The only yogurt I know of that has been tested in Canada and has good live bacteria is Danone Activia.

As I mentioned, making it yourself with milk is not difficult. You can also get probiotics in pill form but they are dormant in that state and not as effective in adapting to handle sudden changes that affect your bacterial health. We take them when we travel to foreign countries and are encountering new kinds of bacteria that are sometimes toxic.

Here’s to a good healthy gut and long life. Rie