Fermented Foods Are Medicinal
Hippocrates, the father of medicine, claimed that “food is medicine”. In traditional Chinese medicine, there is a similar saying: “food and medicine have the same origins”. Food has curing effects just like medicine; medicine is the food you eat every day. Now, more and more, people are agreeing with this ancient wisdom. They understand that an important foundation of being healthy is to eat real food
providing real nutrition. Fermented foods are part of this. They are well-prepared real foods and can be used as medicine.
It takes some effort to find real fermented vegetables and fruits in stores. To extend their shelf-life, most of them are pasteurized and / or have chemical preservatives added to them. There are no live beneficial microorganisms existing in them. Store-bought fermented foods can have the flavors from the fermentation but have lost their healing values. Therefore, homemade is the best choice because they are raw, alive, and medicinal.
In the last 10 years, many studies have confirmed that fermented foods are good for gut health. They improve weight maintenance; reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes; improve glucose metabolism; improve lactose intolerance; and alter mood and brain activity, among other benefits.
Fermented foods and the gastrointestinal (GI) tract
Fermented foods are a vehicle carrying a large number of micro-organisms. They contain about 1 million to 1 billion live beneficial bacteria in every gram or milliliter. That means a very small bite of a fermented food contains a huge number of living cells. Some studies have demonstrated that a large percentage of these microbes survive the journey through the gut lumen. They increase the number of microbes by up to 10,000-fold. Consuming “living” fermented foods introduces new intestinal microbes.
Many people worry about whether these beneficial bacteria can pass through the GI tract. Actually, the fermented foods and micro-organisms do go through the whole GI tract but on the way, they experience challenges. In the mouth, they meet with enzymes and the anti-microbial constituents in the saliva; in the stomach, strong acidity, as well as the digestive enzymes, pepsin and trypsin are waiting for
them; in the small intestine, they are impeded by bile salts and further enzymes. A large number of microorganisms die on the journey. However, research evidence shows that some of them survive.
Nature published a study in 2018 on changes in gut flora after eating cheese and cured meats. The scientists involved collected the stool of all participants and did RNA extraction. They found the strain of lactic acid bacteria used to make cheese and non-lactic acid bacteria used to make fermented sausage. That means these micro-organisms not only passed through the digestive system but were also metabolically active in the gut (David LA, Maurice CF, Carmody RN, et al. Diet rapidly and reproducibly alter the human gut microbiome. Nature. 2014,505: 559 - 563).
Another study of fermented milk in 2014 revealed similar result. Thirty-two participants with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) were randomly assigned into two groups: a fermented milk products (FMP) group and an acidified milk product (MF) group. They consumed the fermented milk and acidified milk products twice a day. After four weeks scientists found bacteria from the fermented milk products in the stool samples of FMP group, verified through DNA extraction and sequencing. The participants in the FMP group with IBS reported that their conditions had improved, which suggested that these friendly bacteria, support
gut health for patients with IBS (Veiga P, Pons P, Agrawal A, et al. Changes of the human gut microbiome induced by a fermented milk product. Scientific Reports. 2014, 4:6328).