Category: fermented food

Worm Therapy

Seth Roberts5 Comments

One reason I believe we are vastly bacteria-deprived (and thus greatly benefit from fermented foods) is the efficacy of hookworm therapy: Hookworm parasites can reduce autoimmune diseases. Hookworms, like fermented foods, stimulate the immune system in a chronic, harmless, low-level way. Here is a good introduction to the subject:

Musician Scott Richards and artist Debora Wade are two Bay Area patients on the hookworm treatment. Richards and Wade both suffer from an inflammatory bowel disease called Crohn’s. When faced with using a parasite as therapy, both patients felt they had nothing to lose. . . . Both Richards and Wade say they didn’t have to wait long to feel relief. Richards [described] waking up and the pain suddenly gone. For Wade, she needed to be reinfected, but today said she can eat foods that patients with Crohn’s could never eat: pizza & Thai food for example.

Related story.

Yogurt Popularizer Dies: Note How Old He Was

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Daniel Carasso, who popularized yogurt worldwide via the Dannon brand, died on Sunday. He was 103. From the obituary in the NY Times:

In 1916 his father took the family back to Spain, where he [the father] became disturbed by the high incidence of intestinal disorders, especially among children. Isaac Carasso [Daniel’s father] began studying the work of Elie Metchnikoff, the Russian microbiologist who believed that human life could be extended by introducing lactic-acid bacilli, found in yogurt and sour milk, into the digestive system. Using cultures developed at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Isaac began producing Danone. . . in 1941 the arrival of the Nazis forced [Daniel Carasso] to flee to the United States. There he formed a partnership with two family friends, Joe Metzger, a Swiss-born Spanish businessman, and his son Juan, whose flair for marketing would make Dannon a household name in the United States. . .The little company operated at a loss until 1947, when, in a concession to the American sweet tooth, strawberry jam was added to the yogurt. Sales took off, new flavors were added to the product line, and Dannon yogurt made the leap from specialty product to snack food and dessert.

Thanks to Marian Lizzi.

What Causes Asthma? Not What the Tovars Think

Seth Roberts5 Comments

From Joyce Cohen’s The Hunt column:

For reasons unknown, Florida didn’t agree with little Noah Tovar. Since his toddler years, Noah, now 7, had suffered terribly from asthma. His parents, Jari and Selene Tovar, moved their family several times, trying to escape the mold or pollen or whatever it was that caused his breathing problems. Nothing helped much.

Noah’s parents didn’t know, I can tell, about a 1992 study of childhood asthma and allergies in Germany. Maybe childhood asthma is caused by air pollution, the researchers thought. Let’s test that idea by comparing a clean West German city (Munich) with a dirty East German one (Leipzig). Here’s one of the results:

The lifetime prevalence of asthma diagnosed by a doctor was 7.3% (72) in Leipzig and 9.3% (435) in Munich.

Less asthma in the dirty city! It wasn’t a significant difference but similar differences, such as hay fever and rhinitis (runny nose), were in the same direction and significant. Hay fever was much rarer in Leipzig.

Noah’s asthma cleared up, to his parents’ surprise, on a trip to New York. So the family moved to New York.

Even though “everyone was under the impression that New York would cause him more distress, it was just the opposite,” Mrs. Tovar said. “Not one doctor nor myself can explain what it is.”

Mrs. Tovar’s doctors are badly out of date. The hygiene hypothesis has been around since the 1990s, supported by plenty of data that, like the German study, shows that childhood allergies are better in dirtier environments. Noah is better in New York because New York air is dirtier than Florida air — that’s the obvious explanation.

In The Probiotic Revolution (2007) by Gary Huffnagle with Sarah Wernick, which I’ve mentioned earlier, Dr. Huffnagle, a professor of immunology at the University of Michigan, describes a self-experiment he did:

Could probiotics relieve something as tenacious as my lifelong allergies and asthma? I decided to take a probiotic supplement and make a few simple changes to my diet to my diet, just to see what happened. Yogurt became my new breakfast and my new bedtime snack. I also upped my intake of fruits and vegetables. Whenever possible, I substituted whole grains for processed ones. And I tried to cut back on sugar. [Why he made the non-probiotic changes is not explained. In another part of the book he says he also increased his spice intake.] No big deal.

Because I doubted this little experiment would work, I didn’t mention it to anyone, not even my wife. And I didn’t bother to record my allergy symptoms. . . My “aha” moment came after about a month: I’d spent the evening writing a grant proposal, a box of tissues at my side. After all these years, I knew to be prepared for the inevitable sneezing and runny nose caused by my mold allergies, which kicked up at night. But when I finished working and cleared the table, I realized I hadn’t touched the tissues. And as I looked back on the previous month, I could see other changes. This wasn’t my first sneeze-free evening; I hadn’t needed my asthma inhaler for several months. To my astonishment, the experiment had been a great success.

This is a great and helpful story. Only after I read it did I realize I’d had a similar experience. I’ve never had serious allergies but I used to sneeze now and then in my apartment and my nose would run a lot; I went through more than one box of Kleenex in a month. Maybe 4 in one morning. In January, I made just one change: I started to eat lots more fermented foods (yogurt, kimchi, kefir, etc.). My sneezing and Kleenex use are now almost zero.

The Tovars can live wherever they want, I’m sure, if they feed their son plenty of fermented food.

Previous post about childhood allergies and fermented food.

More After the column appeared, someone wrote to the Tovars:

Funny, same thing happened to me. I moved from England where I had chronic asthma, to New York City where I had none. Stayed in NY for twenty years asthma free, then moved back to England with my wife for the last ten years and my asthma has returned all the time I’ve been back.

Probiotics Reduce Postpartum Obesity

Seth Roberts3 Comments

From Science Daily:

“The results of our study, the first to demonstrate the impact of probiotics-supplemented dietary counselling on adiposity, were encouraging,” said Kirsi Laitinen, a nutritionist and senior lecturer at the University of Turku in Finland who presented her findings on May 7 at the European Congress on Obesity. “The women who got the probiotics [during pregnancy and until the women stopped breast feeding] fared best. One year after childbirth, they had the lowest levels of central obesity as well as the lowest body fat percentage.”

That’s a unusual way to look at the data. Most studies of weight control look at weight change so as to adjust for individual differences. Maybe pre-pregnancy weights were not avaiable.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

When Did the New York Times Start Asking Abusive Questions?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

“Increasingly, the biggest companies,” writes New York Times reporter Michael Moss, “that supply Americans with processed food cannot guarantee the safety of their ingredients.” To Moss, safe means sterile. I believe the opposite but the whole article leaves something to be desired. It focuses on Banquet frozen pot pies, made by ConAgra. A ConAgra spokesperson is asked a when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife question:

Pressed to say whether the meals are safe to eat if consumers disregard the instructions or make an error, Stephanie Childs, a company spokeswoman, said, “Our goal is to provide the consumer with as safe a product as possible, and we are doing everything within our ability to provide a safe product to them.”

Pressed to answer an unanswerable but fear-inducing question . . .

How Fast Do We Rot?

Seth Roberts21 Comments

Not as fast as we used to. A friend of mine, who went to college at MIT around 1980, had a classmate who was the son of an undertaker. His dad had told him that when he (the dad) had entered the business, you had to work fast. Bodies would start to smell quickly. But now — around 1980 — that was no longer necessary. You could wait a lot longer before they smelled bad.

Which I take to mean that around 1980 the average old person, where this classmate came from, had a lot less bacteria in their body than around 1960. All that concern about “the safety of the food supply” — preservatives, yes, but also sterilization, freezing, sell-by dates, food handling rules, food safety officers, and microwave food — seems to have had an effect. From 1960 to 1980 there was a big shift from homemade food to factory-made and restaurant-made food. The uniformity of the new food caused the obesity epidemic, I believe; its sterility caused a great increase in allergies and asthma, not to mention a bunch of other disorders.
Speaking of sell-by dates, at a Japanese grocery store recently I wanted to buy some Yakult. At check-out, it was pointed out to me that it was one day past its sell-by date. Half price. I bought two.

Probiotics and Resistance to Illness

Seth Roberts4 Comments

A 2005 study compared workers who did and did not consume a daily straw of probiotic liquid. During the 3-month study, workers who got the probiotics were sick half as often as those who didn’t. Here are details:

262 employees at TetraPak in Sweden (day-workers and three-shift-workers) that were healthy at study start were randomised in a double-blind fashion to receive either a daily dose of 100,000,000 Colony Forming Units of L. reuteri or placebo for 80 days. The study products were administered with a drinking straw. 181 subjects complied with the study protocol, 94 were randomised to receive L. reuteri and 87 received placebo. In the placebo group 26.4% reported sick-leave for the defined causes during the study as compared with 10.6% in the L. reuteri group (p < 0.01). The frequency of sick-days was 0.9% in the placebo group and 0.4% in the L. reuteri group (p < 0.01). Among the 53 shift-workers, 33% in the placebo group reported sick during the study period as compared with none in the L. reuteri group(p < 0.005).

The paper gives no reason to think the probiotic dose was optimal. (How the dose was chosen isn’t explained.) A larger dose might have had a bigger effect.

When science writers tell about the “miracle” of antibiotics, they tell stories like this one, from The Probiotics Revolution (2007) by Gary Huffnagle with Sarah Wernick:

When my daughter was five, she pricked her left hand on a rosebud thorn in our garden. . . . The next day she ran a fever. . . . Doctors diagnosed an acute bacterial infection. Half a century ago, a child might have died from such an infection. But my daughter received antibiotics. After a day of intravenous treatment, she was better. . . . Antibiotics are true miracle drugs.

What goes unnoticed in these “miracle” accounts is the possibility that the person got so sick because their immune system wasn’t working well. (It wasn’t working well, I propose, because the infected person didn’t get enough bacteria in their food.) A child gets sick from an ordinary plant scratch? That child’s immune system has a lot of room for improvement. Huffnagle and Werrick say nothing about this.

Dr. Huffnagle is a professor of internal medicine, microbiology, and immunology at the University of Michigan. If the child of such a parent — well-off, well-educated, health-conscious, specializing in immunology — has a weak immune system, and the parent doesn’t realize this is possible, there is enormous room for improvement.

The Probiotics Revolution is 90% filler but the 10% substance makes it worth skimming.

The Dose-Response Revolution and Fermented Food

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Edward Calabrese, a toxicology professor at the University of Massachusetts, has pointed to the existence of U-shaped dose-response functions in a great many cases. Chemicals harmful at high doses are helpful at low dose, a phenomenon called hormesis. He reviews the evidence here and here. I didn’t know that a low dose of dioxin reduces tumors. Nor did I know that a low dose of saccharine likewise reduces tumors.

The theory behind hormesis is that a damage-repair system is stimulated by the toxin. This isn’t far from my idea that the average American’s immune system is woefully understimulated, with many bad consequences (allergies, cancer, etc.), due to too-sterile food. If the rats or whatever used in the hormesis studies — probably fed sterile lab chow — were given immune system stimulation (e.g., from fermented food), the hormesis effect might disappear.

Thanks to JR Minkel.

How Things Begin (Japan Traditional Foods)

Seth Roberts14 Comments

I eat natto (fermented soybeans) once/day. Most of the natto I see in stores is from Japan (soybeans from America) but I found one local source: Japan Traditional Foods, in Sepastopol, California. Like many people I believe traditional diets are far healthier than modern ones. How can such diets, now almost extinct in rich countries, become popular again? To learn more about this, I interviewed the owner of Japan Traditional Foods, Minami Satoh.

How did your company begin?

I started it in 2006. We started to produce product in November 2008. So far natto is our only product. I went to business school at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, a private business school in Arizona, and graduated in 1983. After that, I worked for DuPont in Japan, but I wanted to work in the US. At DuPont, I did marketing of Teflon and Silverstone (a sister brand of Teflon). Then I worked for my father’s company selling wholesale steel pipe and tubes. I was successful but felt it was boring. I thought food would be more interesting. I acquired a small natto-making company (Yaguchi Foods ) in Japan in 2004 or 2005. The owner had died. His relatives sold it to me.

In 2004, I came to America to meet Malcolm Clark. He’s the great-grandson of Dr. Clark, who is very famous in Japan. Malcolm Clark was responsible for introducing shitake mushrooms to America. He owns Gourmet Mushrooms in Sebastopol and lives in Occidental. Natto is an unusual food, like shitake mushrooms. I thought he could give me good advice about how to start making natto or other possibilities. That’s why the company is in Sebastopol. When I met Clark, he was thinking of retiring. I bought a stake in Gourmet Mushrooms; now Gourmet Mushrooms helps Japan Traditional Foods sell natto. I moved here in June 2008 to manage this company.

Why natto?

Americans already eat tofu, soy sauce, miso, edaname, and soy milk — but no natto. Natto is more nutritious than the other forms of soy that we currently eat. It’s more nutritious because of fermentation. It has more vitamins. A enzyme found in natto called nattokinase dissolves blood clots. In Japan natto is a traditional health food. It is usually eaten at breakfast.

How is natto made?

You boil the soybeans in a steam basket. Spray with bascillus. Put the soybeans in a paper cup. Put the cups in a fermentation container for 20-24 hours. Take them out and put in packages. Then give to the distributor. If you ferment more than 20 hours, natto bascillus start to eat themselves, which produces ammonia. Most companies stop fermenting at that point to avoid ammonia. If fermented longer, it may smell of ammonia. Japanese accept this, but Americans may not.

How big is Japan Traditional Foods?

One person plus myself. I hired someone from my natto company in Japan. He makes artisanal natto. He handcrafts it.. We put it in the paper cups by hand.

How did you get distribution?

It wasn’t hard. There are two distributors, one for Los Angeles, the other for San Francisco. They specialize in Japanese markets. Now it’s in close to 30 stores, including Korean and Chinese stores. The Los Angeles distributor wanted to sell his stuff in New York but the shipping costs would have been too high. This summer we will start going to farmer’s markets. We’ll have a booth there to sell and sample. The goal is to educate and share recipes. We’ll be at the San Rafael Sunday market and the Ferry Building Tuesday lunchtime market. It’s a kind of test. We’re talking to distributors about getting the product into non-Japanese grocery stores, such as Berkeley Bowl and Whole Foods. From the farmer’s markets we hope to get feedback to improve the packaging, size, and recipes. We want to find the best ways to make the Western market receptive to natto. For example, we can sample it in different ways. In Japan, the most popular way to eat it is over rice with finely chopped green onions, often at breakfast. I’ve come up with many different recipes: with rice or bagel or lettuce or crackers. With different sauces and toppings.

What were the hard parts?

It was difficult to find a good temperature control system here; I had to import it from Japan. I also needed a big steam cooker, which I had to import. This was hard because it is prohibited to export them from Japan to other countries.

Your promotional leaflet says “stir natto more than twenty times” before eating it. Why?

We do not have any valid research on this. But somebody says stirring natto creates the “Fifth Taste” we call “umami.” Somebody else said that it gets the natto bacillus awake again with oxygen because the bacillus was sleeping in the refrigerator.