Category: fermented food

Rejuvenation Company (interview)

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I sampled four brands of kombucha available in Berkeley; my favorite was from Rejuvenation Company. They are in Emeryville, which is close to where I live. “Can I visit your manufacturing facility?” I asked. The answer was no, but they were happy to be interviewed. So I interviewed Chris Campagna and Jerry Campagna, who are the company’s two employees. Before the interview I discovered they also made the rejuvelac I’d bought after a reader of this blog recommended it (“When I was a database administrator at Whole Foods, I used to drink it daily and never felt better”). Those are their two products: kombucha and rejuvelac.

How did your company begin?

It was started in 1983 in San Francisco by Dennis Campagna [Jerry’s brother, Chris’s uncle]. He was a health-food fanatic, a die-hard vegetarian, and a hippie. Now retired. He is ten years older than Jerry, but , Jerry says, looks younger.] At the beginning, he sold several health-food juices, such as carrot juice and wheat grass juice, but he also sold Rejuvelac. That was the part of the product line that’s lasted. He made them in a shared kitchen. Back then, there were dozens of small health food stores in San Francisco. It was a one-man show. Dennis drove around to them.

What’s rejuvelac?

A fermented grain drink. We use wheat. You sprout wheat berries with water, ferment them for a while, then strain out the wheat berries. We’re the only company we know of that sells it.

Why do your products say “Keep Refrigerated”?

The Health Department wanted it. For years and years, they sat store shelves, not refrigerated.

When did you start making kombucha?

Five years ago. Dennis added it to his product line. It took a few years to catch on. He’d been making it for himself for years — making it, drinking it, giving it to friends. We’re tiny players in the kombucha market. Synergy is the big player. Maybe there are 10-15 manufacturers around the country, it’s hard to know the exact number. There’s no Kombucha Manufacturers Association. Some commercial kombuchas are pasteurized; look on their websites to find out which ones. [Kombucha Wonder Drink is pasteurized.] Our kombucha isn’t pasteurized.

How has the business changed?

It used to be lots of mom-and-pop stores. The people who owned the store ran it. They recommended stuff to their customers. The customer would come in with a health problem, the owner would say, “Why don’t you try this?” Now Whole Food dominates. The emphasis has changed. The buyers want to know: Will it sell? As opposed to true quality. Nowadays, the main way we spread is that someone buys our products on a trip to San Francisco and goes home and sends us email: Where can we get it? We say: If you really want it, go to your store manager and tell him. You have a tremendous amount of clout. They listen to you. It often works out that we get a store out of that deal. We don’t do internet sales.

Over the last five years, our sales have grown a lot. Five years ago, we were mostly in San Francisco, mostly in small stores. Around 20-30 small stores. Now we’re in roughly 100-120 stores. It’s hard to have a store locator on our website because distributors don’t want to tell us who they deal with. [Their store locator page.] In the Bay Area, we’re sold at Whole Foods, Berkeley Bowl, Rainbow Grocery, plus smaller stores. In Santa Cruz, at Staff of Life. We’re moving into Whole Foods in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland. Pretty soon you should be able to get it in any Whole Foods on the West Coast.

What do your customers say?

A year ago, we got a phone call from a woman in San Francisco. I’m moving to Utah, where can I buy your product? Eight years earlier, she’d been sick. [Digestive problems, apparently.] Her doctor had given her antibiotics. She didn’t get better. She was given more antibiotics. Still didn’t get better. This went on for several months. She couldn’t eat anything. Even baby food would make her gaseous. She was turning ashen, suffering from malnutrition. Then she got a small bottle of rejuvelac. Just 30 minutes after drinking it, she felt a little better. She’d been drinking it regularly for eight years, didn’t want to be without it.

The Wisdom of the Five-Year-Old Picky Eater

Seth Roberts16 Comments

Children are notoriously picky eaters. Could they be trying to tell us (adults) something? Such as how bad our diet is?

Alex Combs, a stay-at-home dad and equity trader who lives near Philadelphia, has a five-year-old son whom Alex describes as “a picky eater.”

His son will not eat rice, potatoes, and pasta. He will eat small amounts of meat.

Yet his son will eat pickles, balsamic vinegar, and old/stinky cheese (but not regular cheese).

This is a fair description of what I eat! No simple carbs, some meat, plenty of fermented foods. While lots of people advocate low-carb diets, only a few, including me, advocate large amounts of fermented food. His son’s counter-intuitive liking for such gourmet “adult” foods as pickles, balsamic vinegar, and old cheeses, all high in bacteria, puts the picky eating of children in a whole new light. They’re not picky — they’re smart.

The Hygiene Hypothesis (continued)

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In this NY Times Op-Ed, Jessica Snyder, author of Good Germs, Bad Germs, agrees with my comments about the hygiene hypothesis:

In 1989, an epidemiologist in Britain, David Strachan, observed that babies born into households with lots of siblings were less likely than other babies to develop allergies and asthma. The same proved true of babies who spent significant time in day care. Dr. Strachan hypothesized that the protection came from experiencing an abundance of childhood illnesses.

Dr. Strachan’s original hygiene hypothesis got a lot of press. . . Less publicized was the decade-long string of follow-up studies that disproved a link between illnesses and protection from inflammatory disorders like allergies and asthma. If anything, studies showed, early illness made matters worse. . .
Still, Dr. Strachan’s original observation was confirmed — as a group, babies in large families and day care are less likely to develop allergies and asthma than are children born into smaller families and kept at home. The same protective effect can be seen in children born on farms and in areas without public sanitation.

But the link isn’t disease-causing germs. It’s early and ample exposure to harmless bacteria — especially the kinds encountered living close to the land and around livestock and other young children. In other words, dirt, dung and diapers. Just as disease-causing microbes clearly bring on inflammation, harmless microorganisms appear to exert a calming effect on the immune system.

No mention of fermented food.

Thanks to Michael Bowerman.

History Repeating Itself: Fear of Bacteria

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In the late 1800s in the United States, babies started developing scurvy; there was a veritable plague. It turned out that the vast majority of victims were being fed milk that had been heat treated (as suggested by Pasteur) to control bacterial disease. Pasteurization was effective against bacteria, but it destroyed the Vitamin C.

From a history of nutrition. Now children are probably getting all sorts of immune disorders, such as hay fever, for the same core reason: fear of bacteria.

The Hygiene Hypothesis

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Here is a nice review of the hygiene hypothesis, proposed in 1989 by David Strachan. The hygiene hypothesis is that the increases in childhood allergies and asthma in rich countries were due to decreases in “infection in early childhood, transmitted by contact with unhygenic older siblings or acquired prenatally.” It was inspired by the observation that allergies and asthma were less common in larger families.

In the original, it was infections that were the crucial thing you got from older siblings. This idea ran into trouble when actual measurements of number infections did not show the expected inverse correlation:

When a composite index of exposure was generated by combining histories of illness due to measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, and pertussis, the tendency was for a slightly higher risk of allergic disease in children with multiple infections.

Also bad for the infection idea is that vaccination for measles didn’t protect against hay fever or eczema.

It looks to my perhaps-biassed eyes that it is dirt (= harmless foreign proteins and bacteria) exposure that matters, not exposure to human infectious agents. Living on a farm helps. Plainly you get dirty living on a farm and exposed to animal viruses and bacteria — but that you get human infectious agents from pigs and cows is unlikely. (In technical terms, they aren’t vectors.) Older brothers are more protective than older sisters. Boys are dirtier than girls; it isn’t obvious they are more infectious. Dogs are more protective than cats. Again, dogs are obviously dirtier than cats but the notion that they are more infectious — few infectious agents cross the species barrier — is less obvious.

An emphasis on dirt rather than human-infectious agents is more compatible with my belief in the vast importance of ingesting bacteria-laden food.

Scary Effect of Food Irradiation

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Continuing the theme that wiping out bacteria — as antibiotics do — might be a bad thing, here is a mysterious development:

The new study arose from a mysterious affliction of pregnant cats. A company testing the effects on growth and development in cats using diets that had been irradiated reported that some cats developed severe neurological dysfunction, including movement disorders, vision loss and paralysis. Taken off the diet, the cats recovered slowly, but eventually all lost functions were restored.

“After being on the diet for three to four months, the pregnant cats started to develop progressive neurological disease,” says Duncan, a professor of medical sciences at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine and an authority on demyelinating diseases. “Cats put back on a normal diet recovered. It’s a very puzzling demyelinating disease.”

Do Americans have bacteriophobia? I believe we need to eat plenty of bacteria-rich food for best health (the umami hypothesis). If so, then irradiating food is like taking all the vitamins out of it. Of course, food irradiation is big business. From a list of FAQs:

4. Does eating irradiated food present long-term health risks?

No. Federal government and other scientists reviewed several hundred studies on the effects of food irradiation before reaching conclusions about the general safety of the treatment. In order to make recommendations specifically about poultry irradiation, U.S. Food and Drug Administration scientists reviewed findings from additional relevant studies.

Independent scientific committees in Denmark, Sweden, United Kingdom and Canada also have reaffirmed the safety of food irradiation. In addition, food irradiation has received official international endorsement from the World Health Organizations and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The International Atomic Energy Agency. It’s an interesting methodological question: Is Diet X (irradiated food) “safe” because it is no worse than Diet Y (ordinary food)? What if Diet Y isn’t safe?

Duncan, the researcher quoted above, said this:

“We think it is extremely unlikely that [irradiated food] could become a human health problem,” Duncan explains. ”We think [what happened to the cats] is species specific.”

Hmm. If you don’t understand what causes the effect, how can you make strong claims about it? I think food with too-few bacteria is already a human health problem.

Thanks to Peter Spero.

Fermented Good = Antibiotic Bad?

Seth Roberts14 Comments

If our bodies need a constant supply of bacteria-rich food to be healthy, as I have argued here many times, antibiotics — which kill the bacteria we already have — should be bad for us. Maybe so:

A team of researchers at the University of Michigan Medical School gave mice allergies by pretreating the animals with an antibiotic. The experiment provides support to studies hinting at a connection between antibiotic use and asthma. These epidemiological studies show increased rates of asthma wherever antibiotic use is common.

Asthma cases in the United States climbed 75 percent from 1980 to 1994.

So ignored are fermented foods (the easy way to get bacteria-rich foods), that an author of the study does not mention them:

To avoid the role that antibiotics may play in allergy and asthma, Mr. Huffnagle suggests people watch what they eat in the weeks following a course of antibiotics.

Avoid junk food, he said. Earlier studies on rats showed that animals fed a kind of junk-food diet had far different gut flora than animals fed well-balanced meals of rat chow. [This doesn’t make his point, since it isn’t clear that different = worse.]

He suggests the Mediterranean diet — with lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, beans, seeds, and olive oil, and low to moderate amounts of wine — may be protective of your gut flora. Countries where this heart-healthy diet is consumed also have lower levels of asthma and allergies, he said.

The Mediterranean-diet advice makes more sense than the junk-food advice. But again, we should ask: Have we properly described “the Mediterranean diet”? That is, what people in “countries where this heart-healthy diet is consumed” actually eat? As with the Inuit Paradox, I suspect the fermented foods they eat, such as yogurt, are ignored. If high consumption of fermented foods does reduce asthma and allergies then asthma and allergies should be low in Japan because of miso and natto.

Thanks to Oskar Pearson.

Fermented Food and Athlete’s Foot

Seth Roberts9 Comments

A few weeks ago I went away for a 3-day weekend. It was my first trip away from home since I became enamored of fermented food. I did not plan well and took along only 2 cups of yogurt.

When I got home — and resumed my usual high fermented-food intake — I seemed to have a very mild cold. That was unusual; I almost never get detectable colds. Even more unusual was that I had a small case of athlete’s foot. Uh-oh. I planned to but some anti-fungal cream. I forgot, however. The next day, to my surprise, my athlete’s foot was almost gone. The following days it cleared up completely.

I had not had athlete’s foot for a long time. In the past, however, it did not go away by itself. I had had to use antifungal cream. Now, apparently, my immune system was working much better.

My interpretation is that during that weekend away, my immune function took a sudden dip. Perhaps part of the reason was that I did not sleep as well as usual but I suspect most of the reason was the decrease in my fermented-food intake.

Whatever the reason I got athlete’s foot that weekend, the fact that it went away without any special treatment suggests that all that anti-fungal cream in the drugstore implies that many Americans have suboptimal immune function. The Wikipedia entry for athlete’s foot says nothing about good immune function as a means of prevention. As if the hundred-odd people who wrote the article had no idea that what happened to me — it went away on its own — could happen. We are in the pre-John-Snow era here. The most basic practical point about athlete’s foot — you won’t get it if your immune system is working well — isn’t widely understood.

If you read Example 5 of my long self-experimentation paper, you will see that I used to get ordinary colds at an ordinary rate but after I started sleeping much better they stopped. Which points to the same conclusion as the incident I described here: A large fraction of Americans have suboptimal immune function. Some people will say: “Of course!” But they will go on to say, “The average American eats so much junk!” And I think that’s wrong. I think the problem is 1. Poor sleep. 2. Too little fermented food. The self-confident nutritionista will never mention either one.

Natto Shopping (continued)

Seth Roberts9 Comments

I found some natto not made in Japan. It is from Japanese Traditional Foods, in Sebastopol, California. It comes in one-serving containers with tiny shoyu and mustard packets, just like frozen natto. It costs more – 50% more — than the frozen stuff, to my surprise. Since Japanese Traditional Foods was founded in 2006, and the Japanese natto makers are huge, I suppose it makes sense. It tastes almost the same as frozen natto, although I plan to do side by side comparisons just for fun.

The package had a curious statement:

Natto is a fermented food product, so it is best to consume it as soon as possible.

Huh? I think this is basically false: the fermented bacteria prevent other bacteria from growing. Sure, you can overferment but that won’t happen soon. Just as you can leave cheese at room temperature for quite a while, nothing bad will happen.

The Nutrition Lesson Hidden in a Bowl of Miso Soup

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Tyler Cowen is the only person I know who talks about the great value of travel. Schools should teach it, he says. I agree. If you’ve read The Shangri-La Diet, you may remember the turning point was a visit to Paris when I inexplicably lost my appetite. You don’t know that my belief in fermented food — to be healthy, we need to eat lots of fermented food — also began with foreign travel: A trip to Japan.

When I got back to Berkeley from Beijing a few months ago, I looked around my kitchen: What should I make? I came up blank. Huh? I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t think of anything. (In Beijing I had never cooked.) The first few days back in Berkeley I made grilled fish. The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. Then I went to the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco. At a Japanese food booth, including miso soup packets, I suddenly remembered: For my last nine months in Berkeley, after a trip to Japan in January 2008, I’d been eating a lot of miso soup. Every day. Which I’d never done before. Nine months was long enough to block out what I’d cooked before January 2008 yet short enough to be forgotten after three months in China.

Why did I start eating so much miso soup? In a Tokyo supermarket I had noticed they sold a lot of miso paste. Maybe there were ten types for sale. When I got home from Japan, that experience inspired me to buy a tub of miso paste. I’d add one or two tablespoons to a few cups of water, along with vegetables and thinly-sliced meat (plus vinegar and hot sauce). It was so delicious and easy that I started making miso soup every day. I went through five or six tubs of miso.

The miracle was how easy it was — that one ingredient (miso) should so easily produce such a delicious result. No one spice will do that. Garlic alone won’t do that. Ginger alone won’t do that. One ingredient was so compelling, pulled me so far from my previous cooking that I completely forgot about it after a three-month absence. During those nine months, while I was eating all that miso soup, I didn’t wonder why miso made such a difference. But when I finally thought of the umami hypothesis — we like umami, sour, and complex flavors so that we will eat more bacteria-laden food; bacteria tend to produce those flavors — all of sudden it made sense. Miso was so tasty because it was fermented. It was so tasty because it was so missing.