Category: fermented food

Eczema, Nighttime Cough, Antibiotics, and Fermented Food

Seth Roberts8 Comments

When Alex Comb’s son was an infant, he had pretty bad eczema. (Eczema is a reddish dry skin rash.) He also had a nighttime cough, a dry cough that started and stopped throughout the night. The cough lasted months. It turned out he was allergic to carragenen. The cough was mostly, but not entirely, eliminated by avoiding carragenen. Sometimes there were flareups.

When the son was 2 years old, he had a mild case of eczema. Doctors wanted to give him steroids. Alex started researching the causes of eczema and how to alleviate it. He came across research on the hygiene hypothesis. In a forum, he read that some people had tried probiotics for eczema with some success. Research on the subject had had mixed results but it seemed worth a try.

So Alex and his wife gave his son DanActive (a probiotic dairy drink) every day for over a year. After a week or so, he noticed improvement. The nighttime cough completely went away. The eczema went away 95%. This isn’t a use of DanActive I could find on their website.

When his son was 3 yrs old, Alex and his wife stopped the DanActive. They assumed his immune system was better. He had gotten tired of drinking it all the time. He drank it less. His diet got broader too; he started eating yogurt. He never really stopped drinking it, he just drank it less.

A few months ago, the son started a 10-day course of antibiotics for a nasal discharge. A few days later, the nighttime coughing mysteriously resumed. It lasted at least 5 nights, and ended around the same time the antibiotics did. It was an asthmatic cough rather than a respiratory infection cough. An asthmatic cough is much drier and shorter.

A few weeks ago, the son was put on antibiotics for an abscessed tooth. Two or three days after antibiotics started, the asthmatic cough started again. Was it the antibiotics? He had not been drinking the DanActive so Alex and his wife started giving it to him again. They gave him the antibiotics earlier in the day and the DanActive before he went to bed. The very first night they did this the cough went away. They kept doing that and the cough stayed away. He has had no cough since then.

What’s telling is the clarity of the correlations. They support the idea that we have a large need for bacteria-laden foods.

Live Food at Google? Nope

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I ate lunch in the cafeteria of Google New York. Being monomanical, I was struck by the absence of fermented food. No kombucha, kefir, kimchi, pickles, wine, beer, natto, strong cheese, sauerkraut. Not even yogurt! (Of course there was vinegar at the salad bar and perhaps the meat was aged.) The absence was especially glaring given so much conventionally-healthy food: raw food, twenty kinds of vegetables, fruit, fish, diet sodas, gazpacho, sugar-free jello . . . I am sorry to predict those talented Googlers will be sicker than necessary.

Previous visit.

The Yogurt Prize: Who Gets It Most Wrong?

Seth Roberts7 Comments

A vast scientific literature shows the positive effects of probiotic foods such as yogurt and natto. What book most completely ignores that literature?

Practically all popular nutrition books ignore it, but some more egregiously than others. (Just as in Animal Farm, some animals were more equal than others.) I’ve decided to give the Yogurt Prize to the worst offender.

The first winner of the prize, I am pleased to announce, to be held until an even worse example comes along, is The Wellness Encyclopedia of Food & Nutrition: How to Buy, Store, and Prepare Every Variety of Fresh Food (1992) by Sheldon Margen and the editors of the University of California Berkeley Wellness Letter. The Wellness Letter has an advisory board of Berkeley professors. The book has the UC Berkeley stamp of approval. Although it has five pages on yogurt — contradicting the title — the book treats yogurt as the nutritional equivalent of milk, which is so clearly false.

The citation reads: “For putting its ignorance not only in the text but in the title of the book; for reflecting the ignorance of not just one person but a whole team of writers; for being created under an advisory board of distinguished professors; and for carrying the stamp of a world-renowned research university.”

Would You Rather Have Lice or Eat Yogurt?

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Research on mice shows that those carrying the most lice had calmer immune systems than uninfested rodents, and they [the researchers, not the mice!] said their finding may have implications for studying the causes of asthma and allergies in people.

From Reuters. The research paper. The data analysis is much better than usual. Among its strengths are: 1. Graphs of main points. 2. Transformation of variables. 3. Principal components analysis.

This study is more evidence that a high level of foreign substances in our body to which the immune system responds is beneficial. The researchers say nothing about fermented foods, which are an easy and easy-to-control way to ingest such substances. It’s hard to vary your dose of lice but easy to vary how much yogurt you eat.

Thanks to Oskar Pearson.

Trying to Buy Expired Food

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I couldn’t resist. Shopping for kefir, I found a bottle two weeks past its sell-by date. Being the only person in the world who believes expired food is better than non-expired food, I thought it would be fun to see if I could get a discount. After all, it’s going to be thrown away.

Nope. “I’d rather not sell it to you,” said the store manager. “We can get a refund for these.” He apologized, took it, and I had to buy a non-expired bottle.

Dead Food = Always the Same

Seth Roberts12 Comments

If you have two hammers, how many nails do you see?

I’m in Boston. I had planned to give up fermented foods during this trip and see what happened. Too hard, it turned out. Sitting in a diner, I wondered: where can I get kombucha? The diner sold a bunch of bottled drinks: juice and soft drinks. Foods that taste exactly the same each time, which I call ditto foods and which I believe caused the obesity epidemic. (Because their taste — actually, their smell — is so uniform, a very strong smell-calorie association can build up, making them very tasty and very fattening. Ditto foods are the laser beams of food.) I realized these drinks were exactly the opposite of what I wanted. Fermented foods, because they involve growing bacteria, are inherently more variable than other foods. It is hard to keep constant from batch to batch everything that affects bacterial growth.

Funny thing: the growth in childhood asthma and allergies, now called an epidemic, started at roughly the same time as the obesity epidemic — around 1980. Around 1980, people started to eat a lot more fast food, snack food, and microwaved food (from packages). All ditto foods. All bacteria-free. In home cooking, I think fewer precautions are taken to wipe out all bacteria. You eat what you’ve made soon after cooking, whereas factory food might be eaten weeks or months after production. So factory food has preservatives — and I think the result is overkill, just like antibiotics.

Looking at the food I could buy in Boston was like looking at a post-apocalyptic landscape. Dead food everywhere. Supermarkets, diners, fancy restaurants. Dead food is uniform food; food manufacturers had bludgeoned their products into uniformity. At a Cordon Bleu cooking school, judging from promotional literature, not a word is said about fermented food. In advanced-thinking Cambridge, which you might think would support fermented foods, I found only two stores that sold kefir and only three that sold kombucha. Many people complain about what they call “processed food” but the actual problem is food not processed enough (by bacteria). A better complaint would be about dead food.

I suspect fermented foods are avoided by commercial food makers not only because they are more variable than other food and contain scary bacteria, but also because they are more expensive to make: They require more space and time. The stuff must sit somewhere, taking up space, for days or even weeks, while it ferments. At home, it’s easy: You make it and put it somewhere, and go away and do something else. In a factory devoted to making food, there is nothing else to do and no free space. The monoculture problem.

Another Reason to Eat Fermented Foods

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

To protect against C. difficile infection:

What is so frightening about C. difficile is that it is often spurred by antibiotics. The drugs wipe out the targeted illness, like a urinary tract or upper respiratory infection, but they also kill off large portions of the healthy bacteria that normally live in the digestive tract. If a person [who has just taken antibiotics] comes into contact with C. difficile, or already has it, the disruption to the beneficial bacteria creates an opportunity for the harmful bacteria to flourish.

The NY Times article doesn’t mention fermented foods.

Thanks to Ashish Mukharji.