Category: fermented food

More Benefits of Fermented Foods?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

At a regular dental checkout a few days ago, I was told my gums were in excellent shape — better than the previous checkup. The only difference between the two checkups I can think of is that now, but not then, I’ve been eating lots of fermented foods. My gums clearly got a lot better after I started drinking flaxseed oil (went from reddish to pinkish). Now apparently they have improved again.

After the checkup I went to Whole Foods to buy kombucha. The person behind me in the checkout line was also buying kombucha. She had learned about it from friends. “You drink it because your friends drink it?” I asked. No, she likes how it makes her feel. It gives her more energy. “Does any other drink do that?” I asked. She pointed to the coffee she was also buying: Coffee has the same effect, she said. Since kombucha is made from tea, it certainly contains caffeine. On the other hand, I noticed an increase in energy after I started eating more fermented foods that contained no caffeine, such as stinky cheese, wine, yogurt, and kimchi.

Another Benefit of Fermentation: Better Extraction of Nutrients

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Whole Health Source says:

Healthy grain-based African cultures typically soaked, ground and fermented their grains before cooking, creating a sour porridge that’s nutritionally superior to unfermented grains. . . .These traditional food processing techniques [soaking and fermentation] have a very important effect on grains and legumes that brings them closer in line with the “paleolithic” foods our bodies are designed to digest. They reduce or eliminate toxins such as lectins and tannins, greatly reduce anti-nutrients such as phytic acid and protease inhibitors, and improve vitamin content and amino acid profile. Fermentation is particularly effective in this regard.

For me the key word is sour (“sour porridge”) — another example of how our enjoyment of umami- sour- and complex-flavored foods drew us toward fermented food.

A paper showing that some types of fermentation increase iron and zinc digestion.

Thanks to Justin Owings and Tom.

“I Started Eating More Fermented Food…”

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Tucker Max, who got great results from flaxseed oil, wondered what would happen if he ate more fermented food. He emailed me:

I have been reading your posts about bacteria in food, so I decided to try it on my own. I HATE Roquefort and other stinky cheeses, and I am not about to eat fermented meat, so the best thing I could find in Whole Foods was Kombucha tea. It is basically normal tea, with bacteria cultures growing in it. Sounds weird I know, but it actually tastes pretty good, especially the ones with natural fruit juices added. It has a sparkly, almost champagne-like taste feel in your mouth. It takes a little getting used to, but I really like it now. I like GT’s brand the best, but I think there are others.

Anyway, after a week of drinking two bottles a day, I have noticed
these changes:

  1. My stool is…well, better. In every way. More regular, more solid, and something else very unusual–I only have to wipe once. For most of my life, I have to wipe twice, or sometimes three times, which I assumed was normal. But this week, the stool comes out and leaves virtually nothing behind. At least nothing that is showing up on the toilet paper. I am not sure what this means as I am not a poop expert, but I think it means my stool is “healthier” for lack of a better word.
  2. I have more energy. Aside from subjectively feeling it, I can see the difference in my workout logs, just in this past week I’ve gone up more weight on exercises than I normally do.
  3. I am feeling overall better. This could very well be placebo effect/confirmation bias as it is a very subjective measurement, but I just feel better. I feel generally healthier, if that makes sense.
  4. But, I am having trouble sleeping. I feel like I am getting less sleep, not much, maybe 30 minutes less. I don’t know if this is due to increased energy because it might be anxiety –we are about to sell my movie, and it’s an anxious time in my life, so the cause may have nothing to do with the tea.

Right now, I think kombucha tea greatly improves my health and I am
going to keep taking it to see if there are anymore changes or if this
persists. This stuff I buy is not cheap, like $4 a bottle [$3/bottle in one Berkeley store], but I am going to keep drinking at least two a day, I like it that much. Plus, once you get used to the taste and texture, it’s really delicious.

The brand he bought is GT’S. I’ll comment on this in a later post — but I’ll say now that eating much more fermented food didn’t have any noticeable effect on my sleep.

A Yogurt Experiment: Effect of Preheating

Seth Roberts7 Comments

All yogurt recipes I’ve seen say you should preheat the milk before adding starter (= yogurt with live culture). Reasons vary. Some say it denatures the milk protein; others say it kills bacteria that might compete with the starter bacteria.

It was easy to measure the effect of preheating. I make yogurt using about a gallon of milk at a time, divided into four trays. I preheated two trays for 20 minutes and did not preheat the other two, leaving them at room temperature. After that I treated all four trays the same.

The photo above shows the results after incubation for 36 hours. The clumpy yogurt was preheated, the smooth yogurt was not. There was not a vast difference in taste. For most purposes clumpy is better so I will preheat in the future.

I was impressed that the experiment was fast, easy, safe, cheap, and conclusive, showing a large and lasting effect of a 20-minute treatment that had no visible effect. After the heated milk cooled, it looked the same as the unheated milk.

The value of homemade yogurt.

The Staggering Greatness of Homemade Yogurt

Seth Roberts28 Comments

I don’t like that title but it’s true. As I will explain in a later post you can’t trust commercial yogurt makers to provide much bacteria in their yogurt — they actually seem scared of the stuff. So I made yogurt myself. It turned out a lot better than I expected.

I had made yogurt dozens of times. This time, however, I wanted to get as much bacteria as possible so I incubated it about 24 hours instead of about 6 hours. It came out far more sour (due to lactic acid) than ever before. But it wasn’t just really sour (like vinegar); it also had complexity of flavor, creaminess, and a pleasant consistency. It was more sour (tart and tangy are the conventional terms) than any yogurt I’ve ever had. I couldn’t eat a bowl of it; I had to eat it with other food. This may be why commercial yogurt is mild: So you will/can eat more of it at one time.

The yogurt I made is essentially a condiment, although it can be mixed with fruit. It improves almost anything: soup, meat, fish, fruit, string beans, scrambled eggs. (Because almost nothing we eat is sour and almost nothing we eat is creamy.) It is better than other common condiments, such as mustard and chutney, because of its creaminess. It is also far cheaper than other condiments. A small bottle of mustard might cost $3. The same volume of homemade yogurt would cost about 10 cents. (You might need twice or three times as much yogurt to get the same effect.) It is far easier to make than other condiments. And, above all, I suspect it is infinitely better for your health. Mustard has few bacteria. If you complexify and sour your food with mustard, you are essentially chewing ice.

Because of subsidies, milk in California is extremely cheap. Ordinary milk, to me, is nearly worthless; I never buy it. Now, with little effort, this very cheap product that I have completely ignored is the source of something like liquid gold — at least, if you like good-tasting food and health.

Recipe. I took a gallon of whole milk, mixed it with 2 cups of powdered milk, heated it at about 200 degrees F. for 10-20 minutes (I’m unsure if this step is necessary), cooled it down to 130 degrees F., added 1/2 cup of starter (from other yogurt), and then incubated it in my oven at about 110 degrees F. for about a day. I divided the mixture into four glass containers. Although the lowest possible setting on the oven is “WARM”, which was too hot, the thermostat actually works at lower temperatures. I set it below WARM and used a room thermometer to adjust the setting so that the temperature was about 110 degrees. (The photo above is not mine, incidentally. My yogurt is no longer photogenic.)

Thanks to Saul Sternberg for help with the recipe.

The Unfortunate Saveur 100

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Every year Saveur magazine has a list of 100 “favorite people, places, and things.” This year’s list is the “home cook edition” — meaning related to home cooking. Only one entry is about fermented food: making wine vinegar, which takes 2 months.

Given that there are hundreds of fermented foods, many much easier to make, this is unfortunate — just as bad as Paul Goldberger, the New Yorker‘s architecture critic, ignoring green buildings on his list of the top ten buildings of 2008. (A museum with a garden on its roof doesn’t count. Green building is about better houses and businesses.)

Salt, Fermented Food, and Black-and-White Speak

Seth Roberts4 Comments

In an informative op-ed piece in the New York Times, Michael Alderman, an epidemiologist, questions a government campaign to reduce salt in processed food. His piece raises two (wildly different) questions.

1. Several studies have correlated less salt with worse health. Why? Alderman writes:

Nine [observational] studies, looking at a total of more than 100,000 participants who consume as much sodium as New Yorkers do, have had mixed results. In four of them, reduced dietary salt was associated with an increased incidence of death and disability from heart attacks and strokes. In one that focused on obese people, more salt was associated with increased cardiovascular mortality. And in the remaining four, no association between salt and health was seen.

And in the one experimental study that Alderman knows of, “the group that adhered to a lower sodium diet actually suffered significantly more cardiovascular deaths and hospitalizations than did the one assigned to the higher sodium diet.”

Those are useful facts. Alderman gives a few possible explanations. Here’s another one: Several popular fermented foods, including sauerkraut, buttermilk, miso, and cheese, are high in salt, and fermented foods protect against heart disease. I haven’t read the experimental study Alderman describes but it is unlikely that the two groups in that study ate food that was the same in every way except for salt content. What probably happened is that one group was instructed to choose a low-salt diet and the other group wasn’t. The low-salt group ate less salt in part by avoiding high-salt fermented foods (such as cheese).

2. Alderman writes:

[Observational] research can justify action only when multiple studies produce consistent, robust findings across a wide range of circumstances, as the research on tobacco and lung and cardiovascular health has done.

The puzzle is why he writes like this, which I find irritating. Most of the editorial is good, which makes this lapse especially interesting. I call this black-and-white speak, talking as if something complex was black and white and — always associated with this — people on one side are better than people on the other side. In my professional life, I hear black-and-white speak from some statisticians, who divide analyses into “correct” and “incorrect.” According to them you should analyze your data by following a set of black-and-white rules. Here is a less-irritating version of Alderman’s statement:

Successful public health campaigns have been built on observational studies but in the best-known case — the danger of smoking — the findings were consistent and robust across a wide range of circumstances.

See: no need to moralize. Alderman’s statement, of course, is just one example of something very common.

Ben Casnocha on another example of moralizing in the Times.

The Comforts of the Umami Hypothesis

Seth Roberts11 Comments

What a difference an idea makes. A few weeks ago I came up with the idea that evolution shaped us to like umami taste, sour taste, and complex flavors so that we will eat more harmless-bacteria-laden food, which improves immune function. (I pompously call this the umami hypothesis.) It seemed so likely to be true that I started eating more fermented foods: miso, kimchi, yogurt, buttermilk, smelly cheese, and wine. To avoid stomach cancer and high blood pressure, I later cut back on miso, kimchi, and smelly cheese.

There have been other changes, too:

  • After buying meat or fish, I don’t try to get home quickly to put it in the fridge
  • I don’t worry that eggs have been in the fridge for 3 weeks
  • When buying eggs and other perishables, I don’t try to get the freshest
  • I don’t worry about leaving milk out

Bacteria and viruses from other humans pose a threat. This is why we find fecal matter so offensive. It’s why hand-washing by doctors matters. But I believe plant-grown and dirt-grown bacteria are harmless because the substrates are so different than conditions inside our bodies. As for meat-, fish-, and dairy-grown bacteria, I don’t think they are very dangerous. Has anyone gotten food poisoning from yogurt? I keep in mind how much stinky fish the Eskimos ate. Maybe I should do some controlled rotting experiments — leave meat at room temperature for varying lengths of time before cooking and eating it.