A friend writes:
As of today I’m getting over my fourth cold since I began eating lots of yogurt (maybe 1-2 cups a day, homemade), which was roughly in March of this year. So that would be a rate of about a cold every two months. On the one hand that sounds pretty terrible. On the other hand, a couple of things to think about:
1. I used to always get colds and other sicknesses as well. They just seem to be attracted to me. By my intuition, the current rate doesn’t seem particularly unusual, although I never kept track before. If anyone had a cold anywhere around me, invariably I got it. It’s been that way as long as I can remember, especially when I was traveling, as I have been during these last few months.
2. Each of the colds I have had in this last eight month period has been remarkably short. Really remarkable, so I will remark, by way of example, that this cold came out of the blue yesterday evening with a fit of sneezing. I hadn’t felt bad at all earlier in the day although in retrospect it’s possible I was a bit worn down (or maybe not: I took a half-hour swim in the late afternoon and felt pretty good). So I sneezed my way through an evening, nose dripping like a faucet. Before going to sleep I took some sort of medicine for cold symptoms (maybe something made by Bufferin maybe? Night/day something…), and in the morning I took the same thing (day version). During that whole time I was still pretty symptomatic: sneezing, nose dripping etc., but I guess the medicine might have been somewhat useful. Now here it is 2:30 in the afternoon and all of a sudden I realize my nose is dry and I haven’t sneezed for hours. I reckon this is about the end of the cold: less than 24 hours. The other three were like that as well: very quick onset, then disappearing almost before I could have time to realize I had a cold. For me this is particularly noteworthy because in years past I always seemed to get the worst of the colds, going on for days and often progressing into a hacking cough that would linger for weeks.
I suspect if my friend improved his sleep he would get see further improvement of these measures of illness. In this study, the frequency of sickness episodes went down for workers given a probiotic but their duration, when they happened, didn’t change — perhaps because it was nice to be away from work.
After I copy-and-pasted that, I got sick. It wasn’t sickness as most people know it. After an afternoon walk (1 hour) I felt tired; that was the first sign. After dinner, I felt really tired. That was an unmistakable sign. I went to bed early, slept about 8 hours (1-2 hours more than usual) and woke up rested. But an hour later I fell back asleep for 15 minutes. At that point I was sure something was wrong. I had a class that morning starting at 10 am. Should I cancel it? I got much more tired and, about two hours before class, was too tired to get out of bed to turn off the beeping yogurt maker. Okay, I’ll cancel class. I phoned the TA to cancel the class but he couldn’t — he had a bad cold. I phoned a student and she phoned the other students.
An hour later, however, I felt much better. By class time I felt well enough to go to class, although I walked rather than ride my bike. (The student did her best to uncancel the class.) In the afternoon I took a long nap (1.5 hours). The next day I was just barely more tired than usual. Today I feel completely well.
I was sick, yes, but without chills, runny nose, sneezing, sore throat — without any discomfort at all unless feeling tired counts as discomfort. And I felt distinctly more tired than usual for only about a day. I think this is what happens when your immune system works properly. You fight stuff off much faster than the five days or so many people take to get better. Before I figured out how to improve my sleep, I got the usual 4-6 colds per year. After I started to sleep much better, I never got sick in the usual runny-nose way so long as my sleep was good. The current episode is striking to me because I was more sick — that is, more tired — than usual. I do only two things to make my immune system work better: (a) improve my sleep in several ways (eat animal fat, get plenty of morning light, stand on one foot); and (b) eat plenty of fermented foods (mostly yogurt, but also miso, kimchi, natto, and kombucha).
How much yoghurt/day do you eat and how long do you ferment it?
Hi Seth, I forget how I found your blog, but I am experimenting with eating homemade/active yogurt, hoping to boost my immune system. I’ve had 3 staph infections this year, and chronic eczema – I tried doing the probiotic pills but ditched that in favor of the real stuff.
Have you found evidence of life extension with eating fermented foods? I’d be interested in reading about it.
Also, I liked your post about gatekeepers.
Seth, my experience since starting to eat probiotic yogurt 1-2 times per day is somewhat similar. I can’t remember getting actually sick in the last 8 months or so since I started. I can remember various times feeling something coming on, and thinking I was going to get sick, only to be surprised and not. (I have also stopped using an alarm clock during this time, and taking a nap in the afternoon if feeling tired – so, both factors could be at work.)
My experiences are concordant with all of the above reports.
I wonder if what your friend describes as colds are really allergies; in my early 50s I began getting day or half day “colds” where I would have all of the symptoms of a cold and expect to experience the usual 5 or 6 days of suffering and they would suddenly disappear in a day or less; these were allergies. I could generally not differentiate the symptoms from those of a cold.
How much yogurt/day do I eat? About 500 ml. Fermented for about 20 hours.
Re long life. This is a common observation:
Around 1900, a Russian biologist named Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov hypothesized that regular consumption of yogurt was responsible for the unusually long life spans of Bulgarian peasants.
I found that here:
https://www.flavormine.com/all_about_yogurt_history_culture.php
but it is common knowledge.
When I eat lots of cow’s milk yogurt, I get allergy symptoms. I’m thinking of trying goat’s milk yogurt instead. I don’t know what they feed the goats, though. Are goats in the US kept in feedlots like cows?
Seth, will frozen yogurt work well for this?