The Essential Book of Fermentation (7 page)

Conventional medicine has too long been in thrall to the big pharmaceutical manufacturers. One of the chief problems caused by this liaison is the overprescription of antibiotics, even for viral infections like colds (antibiotics don’t work on viruses). If we aren’t getting our antibiotics from doctors, we’re getting them in our meat and milk. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the use of antibiotics if a person or animal comes down with a bacterial infection. Thank goodness we have them. The problem is their routine use on farms to prevent animals from becoming sick because they live in filthy, cramped conditions. Chickens crammed three to a cage in egg factories. Dairy cows slogging though their own manure in confined barns. Feedlot meat animals held in crowded pens. Pigs grown in huge warehouses so filthy you can smell them from miles away. All these animals are routinely given antibiotics so they don’t fall prey to illness. It’s said that nothing can live for long in its own waste products—unless it is kept on routine antibiotics. The result is that natural selection has created superbugs that resist most antibiotics, and these have become a huge problem in hospitals, nursing homes, and other institutions. Is the same true regarding the use of pesticides on conventional farms? You bet. Despite the applications of billions of tons of pesticides on American farm fields over the years, pesticide use continues because the resistant insects survive to breed. In some respects, though, American agriculture is changing faster than conventional medicine. The use of broad-spectrum pesticides (that kill whatever insects they contact) is shrinking in favor of less toxic compounds and more natural methods.

The answer is to eat and ferment organic foods and simply avoid the antibiotic problem altogether. If, for instance, an organic farmer has a cow with mastitis—an inflammation of the udder—that cow is removed from the organic herd, treated for its acute condition with antibiotics, and after the course of treatment has cured the cow and after a waiting period that allows the cow to eliminate the antibiotic from its system, the cow rejoins the organic herd. Antibiotics are a godsend, but only when used properly.

No discussion of the value of fermented foods for health is complete without an understanding of what probiotic science is just now revealing.

The intestinal flora defends the body against disease, primarily by colonization of the intestines by beneficial bacteria, thus preventing its colonization by pathogens. They do this by competing successfully with pathogens for nutrients, taking up the available attachment sites on the gut wall, producing bacteriocins, changing the pH of the intestinal contents to make it more acidic and less favorable for pathogens, and stimulating both innate and acquired immune functions.

While living lactobacilli are the most effective component of the flora for enhancing the immune system, yeast cell wall extracts that emerge as the cells decompose in the intestines encourage the body’s production of immune system cells. Additionally, cells that make up the membrane that lines your intestinal wall produce mucus that speeds digesting food along its merry way, communicate with your body’s immune system, have a two-way conversation with your brain, and perhaps most important, prevent the intestinal contents from penetrating the gut wall and entering your bloodstream.

There is a digestive disorder some call “leaky gut syndrome,” and it’s another one of those contested medical issues. Alternative health practitioners attribute many illnesses to the syndrome, but conventional medicine denies its existence as a valid diagnosis. The hypothesis holds that poor diet, an off-kilter intestinal flora, allergies to wheat gluten, parasites, and other dysfunctions create gaps between the cells that line the gut, allowing undigested food, feces, bacteria, and metabolic wastes to enter the bloodstream, where they can be carried to the farthest parts of the body.

The body’s immune system springs into action and attacks these foreign particles, which can set off an autoimmune response that leads to diseases like lupus, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and rheumatoid arthritis. Low-level inflammation from the leaking gut leads, in the opinion of those who believe in the leaky gut syndrome, to inflammatory bowel disease, heart disease, and plaque buildup in the arteries, as well as a range of other illnesses, including autism. While the leaky gut syndrome is not accepted by conventional medicine, it is at least a hypothesis that can be tested. According to the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. National Library of Medicine, conventional medical knowledge has no answer to the cause of autoimmune diseases, of which there are eighty types where the body’s immune system fails to distinguish between healthy tissues and antigens that cause disease. What causes the immune system to no longer tell the difference between healthy body tissues and antigens is unknown, the NIH says.

Once again, it may just be fermented foods and our cherished friends, the live bacteria and yeasts that perform the fermentations, that come to the rescue. As Dr. Loren Cordain, a member of the faculty of the Department of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University, and a leading expert on the Paleolithic diet, says, “When we have a healthy flora of bacteria in our gut, it tends to prevent leaky gut.”

FERMENTED FOOD CAN PROTECT THIRD-WORLD CHILDREN

Children in developing countries, especially in Africa, can contract many diseases caused by pathogens that infect the gut. Scientists at the Tanzania Food and Nutrition Center wanted to find out if food fermented with lactobacilli could help reduce the number and kinds of diarrhea-causing pathogens that infect children in Majohe village. They examined a group of 151 seemingly healthy children.

They found campylobacter, two strains of nasty
E. coli
, salmonella, and shigella pathogens in the children’s feces. They then separated the children into two groups. One group was fed daily with togwa (cereal gruel) that had been fermented by lactobacilli. The second group was fed unfermented gruel of the same kind, also once a day.

All the children were tested for pathogens the day before the feeding trials started to provide a baseline. Rectal swabs were taken on day seven and on the last day of the feeding trials, day thirteen, and cultured to see the types and amounts of pathogens present in the children. The scientists waited another fourteen days, then took another swab and cultured it, to see if any benefit from the fermented food persisted. Here’s the result:

Percentage of Children with Intestinal Pathogens

Day 0 Day 7 Day 13 14 days later

Children fed unfermented gruel 27.6 11.4 8.1 22.6

Children fed fermented gruel 27.6 7.8 8.2 12.7

The scientists concluded that the togwa consumed once a day for three days a week helped to control intestinal colonization with potential diarrhea-causing pathogens in young children.

As you can see, while it took a couple of weeks for the children’s intestines to be colonized by enough beneficial flora to curb the pathogens, the presence of infectious pathogens was cut nearly in half two weeks after the feeding trials stopped.

It stands to reason that probiotic foods like kefir, sauerkraut, kombucha, and the rest not only stimulate the growth of proper microorganisms in the gut, some of these microbes colonize the gut, healing it and plugging the gaps in the intestinal wall until the body can make the necessary repairs. Scientists are now studying substances that encourage the growth of healthy intestinal ecologies in our gut. Prebiotics are fermentable but as-yet-undigested foods, usually starches like whole grains, that increase the bifidobacteria and lactobacilli as they ferment.

So, given all the benefits of an intestinal tract heavily colonized by microbes, what does that say about those so-called colon cleanses?

You hear people talk about colon cleanses—how the colon is supposed to be plastered with old fecal matter and needs to be washed clean of accumulated toxins to support glowing good health. The idea has been around for centuries.

But the American Medical Association proclaimed the procedure invalid a hundred years ago. And with what we’re learning about the colon these days, it seems sure that colon cleanses do more harm than good.

A review of twenty studies published over the past ten years shows that far from improving health and promoting weight loss, it’s actually associated with bloating, vomiting, cramping, kidney failure, and even death. The practice, which involves laxatives, herbal teas, and pumping water into the colon through the rectum and evacuating it back out, can harm delicate colon tissue. And as we’re learning in this book, our intestinal bacteria line the colon and communicate through the mucous lining with cells that function as part of the immune system. Why would we want to scour the colon of its natural layers of health-promoting bacteria?

About the only valid reason to clean the colon is to prepare it for a colonoscopy or radiological exam. And then it’s best followed by a tall drink of kefir.

The portion of the public that ferments its food is similar to the organic movement of several decades ago. It’s in the hands of aficionados now, sort of a countercultural thing, but it’s growing. More and more people are discovering how easy, healthful, and delicious it is to allow microorganisms to predigest some of their food.

People are beginning to wake up to the fact that the microbial world is at its strongest and most health-supporting when it is most diverse, and that strong, stable ecosystems of microbes are a major source of our own personal health around, on, and in our bodies. This is exactly what happened years ago when people started waking up to the fact that strong, stable ecosystems in garden and farm soils produced healthy, organic foods, and that those health benefits are transferable to the people who eat them.

It seems inevitable that in the future, more and more probiotic foods will become available commercially as companies rise to fill this niche. It’s vitally important that these companies follow the lead of the organic movement in promulgating rules for the production of these foods—no chemicals, no shortcuts, respect for the microbes that are our partners in health—and insistence on wholesome ways these foods must be produced and handled.

CHAPTER 3

Probiotics and Genetic Engineering

There is a fly in the ointment of probiotics as human and animal health enhancers. Genetic engineers are working hard right now to modify probiotic microorganisms to manipulate their functions. But attempts to isolate the health-enhancing parts of whole organisms and transfer them to other creatures have been and will continue to be fraught with danger. Remember
Bacillus thuringiensis
(Bt), the bacteria that produced a toxin deadly to caterpillars (and caterpillars only)? It was a potent means of controlling pests safely that was used by organic gardeners and farmers for years. Genetic engineers found a way to insert the gene for production of the Bt toxin into the DNA of corn plants. The result? Instead of being used as a spot remedy, it became a wholesale killer of any caterpillars that happened into the corn or ate the pollen that drifted into neighboring fields—including the larvae of monarch butterflies. Whenever a wholesale onslaught is made against one of her creatures, especially microbes and insects, nature rushes adaptations to reduce the threat. As long as Bt was used as a spot remedy for a small area of caterpillar damage, there was no strong pressure for caterpillars to adapt and resist the toxin. But now that the genetic engineers have implanted it into corn’s DNA, and there are 80 million acres of genetically engineered corn in the United States, there’s enormous pressure for destructive insects like corn rootworm and corn earworm to adapt. And adapt they have. New scientific studies report that insects that formerly died when exposed to the Bt toxin have now developed resistance to it.

You may expect similar results when any organism—a whole system—is torn to its DNA fragments and then reassembled as components of other organisms. Such monstrosities were never planned by nature. Much genetic engineering is now being done on
E. coli
, a pathogenic intestinal organism. Should some unforeseen and very deadly Frankenstein version of
E. coli
escape the engineers’ laboratory and head out into the public, we will discover how hard it is to track down every bacterium loose in a general population.

For example, Harvard Medical School researchers recently found many more genes that allow for antibiotic resistance in our indigenous gut bacteria than had previously been known to exist. They identified more than a hundred new genes that confer resistance to thirteen of the most common antibiotics. These new findings, along with previous tests, have now identified 215 genes conferring antibiotic resistance on gut bacteria. So of course the first thing the genetic engineers did was to stick these genes into
E. coli
to see if they transferred their resistance to the pathogen. And they did, at least in the lab. Could that transference to pathogens work in the gut? The study’s results suggest that the answer to this question is yes. In other words, our overreliance on antibiotics in meat and dairy production and in human clinical treatments could have the perverse result of breeding antibiotic-resistant pathogens within our intestines. Antibiotics are a godsend, of course, but doctors around the world have been warning that their overuse is breeding superbugs against which our current antibiotics are no longer effective. The new wrinkle is that it may be happening within our bodies.