When Good Food Goes Bad, It Gets Better?
Fermented foods are teeming with probiotics, those little microbe-warriors who defeat viruses and other infectious invaders while providing bioavailable nutrients. Remember that before refrigeration foods preserved by lacto-fermention allowed our ancestors to survive long winters without access to fresh vegetables.
Fermenting food only sounds complicated because we’ve let factories sanitize our food for so long. Bringing live foods back to our eating style is actually quite simple. You only need vegetables, salt, water, a glass or ceramic container, and time. As you get into it, you’ll want to experiment with additional ingredients and methods to create your own signature recipes.
There are thousands of known beneficial bacterial strains and research in this field is expanding every day as we learn how crucial these microbiota are to our health.
Traditional cultures have their own popular fermented foods. The Standard American Diet sadly does not though we have been informed about the benefits of the bifidus and acidophilus cultures added to some yogurt. Most commercial yogurts are very weak from a microbiotic point of view, but homemade yogurt, milk kefir, Scandanavian viili, and Indian lassi are increasingly available in healthy markets and super easy to make at home.
The list of foods commonly fermented is long, but here are a few of the most popular:
sauerkraut
kimchee
kombucha
beet kvaas
unpasteurized yogurt
kefir
Sound too esoteric for you? No doubt you have been eating fermented foods all along: cacao beans are fermented in order to make chocolate, milk to make cheese, and grapes to make wine. We rely on other living organisms for these amazing processes.
Antibiotics are to us what pesticides are to plants. In a crisis, they may be necessary and effective, but used routinely, they become counterproductive, even dangerous.
Raw is real. The less you do to a food, the more is does for you.
How powerful is your food? Click below to find out.
