Category: fermented food

Do Fermented Foods Shorten Colds?

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Alex Chernavsky writes:

I had an interesting experience recently. On Thursday afternoon, I started feeling a little run-down. Then I began to sneeze a lot, and my nose really started to run. I thought I was coming down with a cold. I took an antihistamine and felt a little better. I woke up Friday morning with a mild sore throat (the sneezing/runny nose had stopped). Within a couple of hours, my throat wasn’t sore anymore — and I haven’t felt sick since then. In summary, I believe I had a cold that lasted less than 24 hours. This almost never happens to me. Typically, my colds last at least a week, and usually more (and I usually get two or three colds per year). There is only one other time in my adult life [he’s in his forties] when I can remember having a very short-duration cold.

Maybe it’s the fermented foods I’m eating. After I started reading your blog, I began to brew my own kombucha, and I drink it every day. I also sometimes eat kim chee, fermented dilly beans, fermented salsa, umeboshi plums, and coconut kefir.

This was the first cold he’s gotten since he started eating lots of fermented foods in June. I believe the correlation reflects causation — the fermented foods improve his immune function. The microbes in the food keep the immune system “awake”. I also believe that Alex’s colds would become even less noticeable if he improved his sleep.

The New Yorker on Fermentation

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

Which is it, New Yorker editors?

Page 66 of the food issue:

Pickled cabbage is not romantic or fashionable.

Page 107 of the food issue:

“This [interest in fermented foods] is a revolution of the everyday,” says [Sandor] Katz, “and it is already happening.”

After zero recipes for sauerkraut in all previous issues of the magazine, this issue of The New Yorker contains two.

Thanks to Tyler Cowen and Dave Lull.

In-Flight Fermented Foods?

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I’ve tried taking fermented foods on airplane flights. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. The rules speak of “medicinal” exceptions to the no-liquid policy. In practice, this means: (a) You need a doctor’s note and (b) you must need the medicine during the flight.

2. The rules say no gels. It turns out that yogurt is a gel.

3. What about Japanese pickles in sake dregs? When they were in a glass jar, with a lot of dregs (50% dregs, 50% pickle), the answer was no: Dregs are like gels. When they were in a plastic package (98% pickle, 2% dregs), they were okay.

My Experience of Sickness

Seth Roberts12 Comments

I am at a hotel. Yesterday I decided to take a walk. A short distance from the hotel I started to walk uphill. It was surprisingly hard. I realized I was sick.

I think this is what happens when your immune system is working properly: Sickness stops being obvious. I think my immune system is working well because I sleep well and eat plenty of fermented foods.

I have never heard sickness described like this by anyone else. I have heard it described in terms of obvious suffering thousands of times. Which suggests a lot of room for improvement.

Fermentation Not Sexy

Seth Roberts6 Comments

From an NY Times article about the high price of kimchi (in Korea):

Michel Troisgros, the renowned French chef from Roanne, listened to a Korean official hold forth on the wonders of fermentation and an ambitious project to export Korean foods like kimchi.

“I think you have to stop talking about fermentation,” Mr. Troisgros told the man. “It’s not sexy.”

Via Marginal Revolution. I love that remark (“not sexy”). Good epigraph for book or article about fermented foods.

I considered making kimchi until I was in a Korean market buying some. The Korean woman next to me thought it was too hard.

A Unified Theory of Japanese Food

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I used to like Japanese food because it was less fattening than other foods — I lost weight eating sushi. Now I like it because the Japanese eat so much fermented food: miso, pickles, yogurt, Yakult, umeboshi (pickled plums), natto, vinegar drinks, and alcoholic beverages. A Tokyo food court might have 20 types of pickles, 15 types of miso, and 10 types of umeboshi.

Abundance of fermented food isn’t the only way Japanese food is unusual. I see Japanese food as an outlier on three dimensions:

  • Use of fish. More fish-centered than any other major cuisine.
  • Beauty. More beautiful than any other cuisine.
  • Fermented food. More fermented food than any other cuisine.

As I’ve said, lightning doesn’t strike twice in one place for different reasons. If two rare events could have a common explanation, they probably do. I’ve discussed before why a fish-centered cuisine could lead to better visual design: Because cooks can’t use complex flavorings to show how much they care (it would make all fish taste the same), they take pains with appearance to convey this.

What about fermented foods? Here’s an idea: In the development of Japanese cooking, lack of complex flavoring of main dishes increased desire that other parts of the meal provide complexity, which is what fermented foods do so well. For example, Japanese meals often include pickles. We want a certain amount of complexity in our food, in other words. Most cuisines provide complexity via complex spice mixtures (mole sauce, harissa, curry powder); Japanese cuisine provides it with fermented foods. (I love Japanese curry, but it isn’t common.)

This explanation predicts that desire for complexity is like thirst: It grows over time and can be satisfied. Prediction 1: Eating one complex food will make a second one will taste less pleasant, just as drinking one bottle of water will make a second bottle of water taste less pleasant. Prediction 2: Over time, the pleasure provided by complexity grows. The same complex-flavored food will taste better at Time 2 than Time 1 if you haven’t eaten anything with a complex flavor between the two times.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Asthma and Probiotics

Seth Roberts15 Comments

In a long comment on an earlier post, JohnG tells how he failed and succeeded to get rid of disabling exercise-induced asthma. Lots of things didn’t work:

I tried Vitamin D; it didn’t work, but it did help my nasal allergies somewhat. I tried low carb dieting, and just like Dr. Lutz of “Life Without Bread” said, it made asthma worse while it practically cured my nasal allergies. I also tried the Dr. Sears approach of taking as much as 7.5g of EPA/DHA a day; no change at all in the exercise induced asthma.

The idea that asthma is due to lack of microbes made sense to him and he started trying fermented foods and probiotics. At first, nothing:

I re-reviewed the probiotic slant and found the Helminth story and all the trials that were going on in PubMed for them. With that logic in hand, I set about to find a probiotic that worked. I tried yogurt, kefir, fermented cabbage, and buttermilk to no avail. I then tried store bought probiotics one by one. I tried The Maker’s Diet probiotic and it didn’t help; but I do think it helped make a 20 year long wart go away. I also tried all forms of probiotics on the market; even LGG. Nothing.

Finally, success:

I bought this super high dose probiotic and took it along with a L. Sporogenes/bacillus coagulans. Voila, three days later I could really feel the difference during exercise. I continued that for 10 days. By the 10th day, I didn’t have to hit my inhaler at all during exercise. Wow!

First, I had to decide which probiotic did the trick. I didn’t want to spend a ton on that high dose probiotic, so I stuck with the Bacillus Coagulans and it continued working normally. So, I found my probiotic. Now, I needed to verify it wasn’t placebo. A close cousin to exercise induced asthma is the phenomenon of waking up sneezing and then promptly getting an asthma attack/or closure after that.

I went off my bacillus coagulans that I had been on for 14 days. By the second day, I noticed a little difference. By the third day, I had to hit my inhaler during the workout. By the 10th day (bacillus coagulans supposedly lives in your intestines 7 days), I was full-blown back to having to use 4 inhaler puffs and it wasn’t doing the trick. This was test phase one.

I then went back on the bacillus coagulans for 10 days. The same process repeated itself. The nightly asthma attacks abated after about 4 days and the same no-puff needed during exercise continued as well.

I then went back off the bacillus coagulans for 10 days. I got the asthma back at day 3.

I’ve now been back on 5 billion CFU’s of bacillus coagulans (duraflora) for 18 days. I don’t have to use my inhaler for exercise. I can feel the asthma come on very slightly and then go away.

Very impressive. Shows what can happen if (a) you think for yourself, (b) persist, and (c) have access to a lot of helpful information. I think he needed all three.

Vitamin K2 and Fermented Foods

Seth Roberts8 Comments

We evolved to like sour foods, foods with complex flavors, and umami foods, I believe, so that we would eat more bacteria-laden food. Why do we need to eat such food? Perhaps to get enough Vitamin K2. Vitamin K1 and Vitamin K2 are quite different. A brief introduction:

The term vitamin K refers to a group of compounds that have a 2-methyl-1,4-naphtoquinone ring in common but differ in the length and structure of their isoprenoid side chain at the 3-position. The 2 forms of vitamin K that occur naturally in foods are phylloquinone (vitamin K1) and the group of menaquinones (vitamin K2, MK-n), which vary in the number of prenyl units. Whereas phylloquinone is abundant in green leafy vegetables and some vegetable oils, menaquinones are synthesized by bacteria; therefore, they mainly occur in fermented products such as cheese.

A 2004 study found a huge protective effect of K2:

The scientists at Osaka City University gave 21 women with viral liver cirrhosis [which greatly increases your chances of liver cancer] a daily supplement of 45mg vitamin K2 (menaquinone) for a period of two years. A group of 19 women with the disease received a placebo for the same time. Liver cancer was detected in only two of the 21 women given vitamin K2 but nine of the 19 women in the control group, reports the team in today’s issue of JAMA (292:358-361). After adjustment for age, severity of disease and treatment, the researchers found the women receiving vitamin K supplementation were nearly 90 per cent less likely to develop liver cancer.

A huge effect, suggesting that K2 is necessary for a repair system to work properly. This recent article is more support for the idea that K2 protects against cancer. The effect is weaker, perhaps because there was less damage needing repair.