It seems like a lot of stuff in the modern diet is actually “dead” because of modern preservation along with being way over processed so I thought there may be others out there that are interested in sharing their views or ideas.
I’ve been tinkering with home made Kim Che for maybe 5 years. The store bought stuff is usually pasteurized which kills all the good flora. This morning I’ve been on the internet researching old methods of fermenting vegetables, not pickling in the modern sense and found that unpasteurized or real sauerkraut is out there in a lot of health food stores. The benefits of this stuff over the cheap stuff is that it is has the good cultures that we need for proper digestion along with a lot more nutrition.
As older persons we may pick up on all the advertising that bombards us daily in regards to maintaining our health. Maybe eating a well balanced diet that includes actual fermented vegetables as we’ve done for the past 4,000 years would be a good thing to bring back.
When I make Kim Chee, I’ve experimented by adding all sorts of stuff including garlic, carrots, sometimes beets, turnips, habeneros, onions, and probably other stuff I don’t recall. But I’m thinking that just about any vegetable could be used. On Bizzare Foods with Andrew Zimmer he visited Russia and he went to a farm market where they did it with tomatoes, cucumbers and just about everything they grew.
The nifty thing about fermenting rather than pickling is that fermenting changes the food in a way that increases it’s nutritional value along with adding the flora that helps in digestion… It’s also a really cool way to naturally preserve food which in itself is fascinating: Back in the day before refrigerators clever people figured out how to take their harvest and prepare stuff for extended periods without having it rot.
I ferment fruit. My main efforts are with muscadines and persimmons though I also do about any other fruit that comes availabe in sufficient quantities.
I grow my own muscadines both bronze and purple varieties and usually make about 50 gallons of muscadine / year.
The persimmon trees are comin of age and 'am creeping up toward the 50 gallon mark with them also.
Of course this is yeast fermentation and the thread started in reference to bacterial fermentation with some form of acetobacter.
When I lived in Detroit, my neighbor made home-made kraut with a lot of fennel seed in it and it was very good.
When I lived in Mexico the local people fermented barrels of chile Serrano with small onions and carrots also very good.
Exactly. It’s pretty scary how the modern diet depletes our ability to properly digest food. Anyone that watches TV can see the huge number of companies offering cleanses, along with other products to “keep us going” so to speak. In the greater scheme of things it seems like in our quest to eliminate little organisms from our environment, we’re ruining our immune systems and the simple ability to digest our food.
As a side note, I just heard a statistic that for ever 15 cases of sinus infections, only one can actually be treated with antibiotics cause the other 14 are viral.
What acid pH stomach doesn’t kill, base pH duodenum will
I dare anyone to mix hydrochloric acid (stomach acid) into anything with a live culture (like yogurt), for just 20 minutes (the minimum time it will spend churning in your stomach), then find any live culture in it to produce more yogurt or whatever.
Thankfully, your stomach kills that stuff.
If it survives the acid, it won’t survive the powerful base of liver-produced bile which it gets hit with next, in the duodenum, from the gall bladder.
A lot of people think when ya swallow your food it winds up in a pool of stomach acid, gets dissolved, passes into the large intestine and gets the good stuff squeezed out. Not really true. If we ate the way we were supposed to, the food we shovel down would be goofy with enzymes and some critters which can survive a trip through the stomach. By chewing properly and eating enzyme rich food, what you ate would start breaking down the majority of your feast BEFORE hydrochloric acid and pepsin are released. It’s possible that your food could be 75% digested before getting hit with the stomach juice.
Because the majority of food in the modern diet has been over processed and pretty much devoid of enzymes and beneficial biota, the food will just sit there and not predigest, forcing the body to produce an excess of stomach acid to break down what should have been predigested with the help of “living” food.
A person that doesn’t need excessive stomach acid to digest their lump of food probably has an easier time providing safe passage for; Lactobacillus rhamnosus, L. acidophilus, L. plantarum, L. salivarius, L. reuteri, L. casei, L. bulgaricus, L. acidophilus DDS-1, L. sporogenes, Bibidobacterium bifidum, Bifidobacterium longum, B. infantis,… But, even in harsher conditions, yes, Virginia, these critters can pass through our digestive system.
You make a good argument for living on fast food and high fructose corn syrup, but there may be a better alternative.
Even people who are strict vegans will churn hydrochloric acid into their stomach and food, though its only needed to digest protein/meat/fish.
Chewing food good is a great idea, but the only enzyme that gets mixed in from chewing is saliva, which only contributes to carbohydrate digestion. We only take carbs, fat and protein into our body from the digestive tract. While there is a useful process of physically breaking down the protein.fat into smaller peices so the acid and enzymes can have greater contact with it, only the carbs can begin digestion in the mouth.
(If you see what I mean!)