Cooking culture: tangy, tasty, and teeming with health benefits, fermented foods are the new stars of a wholesome diet - Healthy Appetites

Natural Health, April, 2004 by Jill Neimark

When you think of 24-hour eateries, burgers and fries come to mind, not good-for-you, organic food--especially not fresh, fermented foods. But R. Thomas Deluxe Grill in Atlanta, which offers a fermentation-rich menu, is said by health-oriented locals to be a "dining paradise." no one's more surprised than owner Richard Thomas. "I used to be president of the Kentucky Fried Chicken operating company," he says, "and now I drink kefir and eat cultured red cabbage every day!"

The grill's kefir, a fermented dairy beverage teeming with healthy probiotic bacteria, is served up in fruit smoothies that are both sweet and tart. The homemade cultured cabbage, seasoned with dill, garlic and lemon, is so popular that local supermarkets and health-food stores buy it for resale. "We put it on almost everything," Thomas says.

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Cultured dairy is the rising star of the milk industry, according to Dairy Foods magazine. In 2003, yogurt was a $2.1 billion business, and once-exotic kefir is showing up alongside it at supermarkets everywhere.

Fermented foods are "found in every traditional culture around the world," says Sally Fallon, author of Nourishing Traditions. And because America is a culinary melting pot, many of us dine frequently on fermented foods, though we may not know it. These range from Japanese miso soup to Korean kimchi to that staple of every ballpark: German sauerkraut.

steeped in tradition

The tart flavor of most fermented foods makes it popular with some people and an acquired taste for others. So you may be surprised to learn that ketchup was originally a fermented food--and that chocolate, coffee, tea and traditional Italian sausage are fermented as well. "I haven't been able to think of a single food that doesn't have a tradition of fermentation," says Sandor Katz, author of Wild Fermentation, a book that he calls his "song of praise and devotion to fermentation."

The process probably first arose as a way to preserve foods. In the 18th century, the English explorer Captain Cook loaded 60 barrels of sauerkraut onto his ship for a 27-month voyage, and not one sailor came down with scurvy, an ascorbic acid (vitamin C) deficiency in which the muscles become weak and the gums turn soft and spongy. It turns out that fermentation increases cabbage's already naturally high content of vitamin C.

The primary benefit of fermentation comes from nutrients created by the active bacteria. For example, bacteria in the gut regularly synthesize vitamin K, which is important for blood clotting. When milk is fermented, lactic acid bacteria synthesize folate, an important B vitamin, and the lactobacilli also produce healthy short-chain fatty acids, essential for immune-system function.

"These nutrients promote the health of the entire digestive system," says Richard Sarnat, M.D., co-author of The Life Bridge: The Way to Longevity With Probiotic Nutrients. "It's the process of fermentation that unlocks all these wonderful nutrients."

A study in the International Dairy Journal found that drinking fermented milk may reduce hypertension. Peptides produced in the milk during culturing seem to inhibit chemicals that constrict vessels and increase blood pressure.

Miso soup, which is made from a fermented soy paste rich in isoflavones, has been found to reduce the risk of breast cancer. In a 10-year study of 21,000 women, investigators at Tokyo's National Cancer Center Research Institute found that subjects who are at least three bowls of miso soup a day cut their risk of breast cancer by 40 percent compared with those who are less than one bowl a day. Eating two bowls a day reduced the risk by 26 percent.

live food

Perhaps the greatest advantage of fermentation comes from those foods that are "alive"--that is, foods that are still teeming with the lactic-acid bacteria that fermented them in the first place. Heating cultured food kills these bacteria.

"Live-culture foods are the true probiotics," explains Fallon. Probiotic bacteria are those that have a positive effect on the body. For example, women who suffered from recurrent candidal vaginitis had three times fewer infections during the six months they ate daily portions of live-culture yogurt, according to a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Researchers at the Juntendo University School of Medicine in Japan found that subjects who drank fermented milk for three weeks had a significant increase in natural immune cell activity that lasted three weeks after they stopped consumption. And a study in the British Journal of Nutrition found that goat's milk fermented with a special strain of lactobacillus increased antioxidant activity.

fermentation made easy

If you're curious about live-culture foods, it's not hard to make your own, according to Katz. "If you spend half an hour chopping cabbage and pack it into a crock or mason jar with salt, you can be eating homemade fermented food for weeks," he says. The taste will be pleasantly tangy and low in calories.

What's amazing about fermentation is how natural a process it is: Friendly yeast and lactic-acid bacteria are already on the surface of your vegetables. Washing them in water won't destroy them, says Donna Gates, author of The Body Ecology Diet.

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Cooking culture: tangy, tasty, and teeming with health benefits, fermented foods are the new stars of a wholesome diet - Healthy Appetites

Natural Health, April, 2004 by Jill Neimark

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