Tag: cultured-foods

  • The Many Ways Cultured Foods Detoxify Your Body

    Detoxification is an important component to maintaining health. It can be difficult for our body to keep up with the assault chemicals added to our water, food and sprayed in our air, applied to our skin – our bodies are inundated. In this article shared by Moms Across America learn the many ways you can use cultured foods to detoxify your body. 

    Reprinted with permission from culturedfoodlife.com

    I love my microbes and all they do for me. Not a week goes by that I don’t discover something new that my 100 trillion microbes are doing just for me. I used to think that my liver was mostly responsible for filtering and removing compounds from within my body including hundreds of toxic chemicals and extra hormones (like estrogen) that can damage cells and weaken my immune system, but this is only half of the story. Your bacteria in your gut are responsible for 50% of the detoxification that your body undergoes, but if you don’t have the right microbes and a lot of them, they can’t do their job. So, what do bacteria do to detoxify you?

    Chemical BPA

    The chemical Bisphenol A (BPA)  is found in plastics, paper money, and thermal printer receipts. BPA is a powerful endocrine disruptor and has been linked to forty different diseases. But interestingly, animal research has shown that the proper bacteria in your gut can help detoxify this chemical by reducing the intestinal absorption of bisphenol and speeding it out of your body.1 What’s really exciting is that many of the strains of bacteria you need are found in cultured foods. Eat them and they become a part of you!

    Pesticides

    When you make cultured vegetables, specific strains of bacteria go to work that have been shown to degrade many different pesticides in your vegetables such as chlorpyrifos, coumaphos, diazinon, methyl parathion, and parathion. They do this while fermenting on your counter, and the pesticides will be degraded by 83.3 percent in as little as three days. Give it a few more days and they remove them completely.2 The really cool part is that these microbes actually use these hard-to-break-down chemicals as sources of carbon and phosphorous food!

    Sodium nitrate and heavy metals

    The chemical sodium nitrate is used as a food preservative in cured meats because it contains powerful anti-microbial properties which prevent food spoilage, but it is also used in fertilizer, explosives, rocket fuel, and for enamels made of pottery or glass. Sadly, it’s even found in organic food. We can’t seem to hide from it and it’s been linked to a variety of chronic degenerative diseases, including cancer. However, Mr. lactobacillus and his many friends are capable of breaking down this toxic chemical 3  as well as breaking down heavy metals 4 and heterocylic amines 5 which are compounds formed when meat is cooked at high temperatures.

    Cultured Foods Reduce The Toxicity Of Foods

    Probiotics found in so many cultured foods, and even in my sourdough bread, possess the ability to reduce the toxicity of foods and help me assimilate many foods I otherwise would struggle to digest. Just as they called in special forces of microbes to degrade and remove the oil spills in the ocean, they’ll do the same inside of you and me. But you have to take care of them and feed them, then watch them grow in strength and number to do their jobs. We have just scratched the surface of all they can do, but I encourage you to make some cultured vegetables and keep them on hand. I hope you make kefir daily, and as you drink it you’ll feel the wonderful thing you’re doing to your microbiome. If you consume bread, make it sourdough that has the help of lactobacillus microbes to transform it. And last, but not least, have some kombucha when you’re feeling you need a pick-up. Let them do the work for you and you just take care of them. You’ll start speaking of yourself in third person . . .   “Would Donna’s microbes like this cultured food?  I think they would – time to eat!”

    This article originally appeared at: https://www.momsacrossamerica.com/cultured_foods.

  • Grow Your Own Probiotics In A Jar

     Forget everything you think you know about vegetables and let me tell you what happens when you culture them. Grow your own probiotics in a jar of vegetables, and you’ll be shocked and amazed at all they can do. I feel like I’ve been standing on the top of a mountain singing the praises of cultured vegetables for fifteen years and some have listened and others not, but I knew one day there would be a tipping point and that day is almost here. My life was dramatically changed from a jar of cultured vegetables that was teeming with billions of probiotics. It continues to amaze me and fill me with wonder but the help it provides can far surpass the things I have seen in myself and countless others. My everyday life is made better by eating a spoonful of these amazing vegetables. We keep a jar in our fridge at all times . . . okay, like at least six or more jars to be truthful. I like variety, what can I say? They will last for months on end.

    I’ve seen them help myself and countless people with stomach distress, be it food poisoning or a virus or stomach rumbles. I’ve used it on my whole family for years and years. Nothing works as fast or better than a spoonful of juice or the veggies. It will make you a believer if you just try it the next time you have stomach distress of any kind. But that’s not all it can do.

    Asthma and cultured veggies

    I’ve gotten letters and stories from people whose lives have been changed in dramatic ways. One such story was from a woman who found herself in a terrible wind storm. She had severe asthma and couldn’t get to her inhaler. She just so happened to have a jar of cultured veggies in a cooler in her car. She opened the jar and swigged the juice, and within minutes she could breathe again. She was so shocked and amazed that it worked and will never underestimate the power of these vegetables again. She became a believer in this food that works like medicine.

    Saving thousands of infants

    There was a new study done 1 on the special probiotic Lactobacillus plantarum (L. plantarum). These probiotics are made abundant when you culture your veggies. It has an impact on saving thousands of infants from sepsis, which is often a deadly massive immune response to bacterial infection that gets into the blood. Six hundred thousand infants die annually from sepsis, primarily in developing countries, and researchers have been trying to find a way to stop it for the last twenty years. Dr. Pinaki Panigrahi, a pediatrician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Public Health who led the study, was searching for answers.They screened 280 bacteria strains until one day they found the healthy strain Lactobacillus plantarum isolated in the diaper of a healthy Indian baby. They started giving infants Lactobacillus plantarum, the kind of lactic acid bacteria found in fermented vegetables and found in my veggies starter culture Cutting Edge Culture. They also added the prebiotic fructooligosaccharide (in Prebio Plus) “to promote growth and sustain colonization of the probiotic strain.”  After one week of giving the babies the cocktail of pro- and prebiotics, deaths and sepsis dropped by 40 percent, from 9 to 5.4 percent. 2

    Respiratory infections dropped

    But something else happened that they didn’t expect. The probiotics also began to help with other types of infections, including those in the lungs. Respiratory infections dropped by about 30 percent. “That was a big surprise, because we didn’t think gut bacteria were going to work in a distant organ like the lung,” Panigrahi says. They actually stopped the trial prematurely since it was working so well. “We were planning to enroll 8,000 babies, but stopped at just over 4,000 infants,” Panigrahi says.

    Pascal Lavoie, a neonatologist at BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia, says, “These beneficial bacteria can push out harmful bacteria in the baby’s gut by changing the environment or simply using up resources. They also produce a compound that strengthens the wall of the intestine. It acts as a barrier to prevent the bad bacteria from going through the wall into the blood. The probiotic bacteria can jumpstart a baby’s immune system. Probiotics can be much more powerful than drugs.”

    Something you should know

    These veggies are powerful, but here is something you should know – this particular bacteria (L. plantarum) is a transient strain of bacteria, which means it doesn’t last more than a few days in the body, so you’re going to need to consume them often. This is not a problem since one jar can last months on end in the refrigerator, perfectly preserved and getting more flavorful with time.

    Visit The Cultured Veggies recipe page.  

    All of them are loaded with Lactobacillus Plantarum. Make them, eat them, and they will make you a believer in their power! You’ve gotta have a jar in the fridge to give you the help you need. So let me teach you how easy and delicious they are to make.

    Don’t forget to get your basic supplies needed to make your own healthy probiotics.
    Mason Jars
    Thanks to Donna Schwenk for this amazing post! “Cultured Veggies ~ Saving Lives”, September 9, 2017.