So, fermented foods have been around for pretty much forever, but they seem to be even more in fashion now.
The rainbow colored selection of kombucha tea, the 'fridges full of miso, and kefir, and tempeh, and sauerkraut.
You can't toss a gluten-free cookie without hitting a "live and active cultures" label.
Those live and active cultures are actually a thriving community of probiotic bacteria living in the container.
Probiotic bacteria literally just means "good germs."
By definition, microorganisms that instead of giving you strep throat or gonorrhea or something worse are beneficial and maybe even make your life possible.
These bacteria help balance out the micro-flora foam party going on in your intestines and keep pH levels in check.
They block bad bacteria from latching on to your intestinal walls,
Help you produce digestive enzymes so you don't get all bloated after that third burrito,
And increase your nutrient uptake
and they do it, basically, by eating our food for us.
Essentially, the foods that these microorganisms feast on and the food that we buy them in
undergo a chemical transformation that's basically controlled rotting.
So, if you prefer, you can think of probiotic foods as being partially rotten, or predigested.
You probably don't prefer that.
Like it or not though, they're what turn milk into yogurt, soy into tempeh, and cabbage into sauerkraut,
a special kind of fermentation.
Fermentation is a type of anaerobic respiration where microorganisms feed on organic compounds,
often sugars, to get the energy they need, but they do it in the absence of oxygen.
While most of us are familiar with the fermentation that turns hoppy water into beer or grape juice into wine,
those kinds of cultures are usually yeasts.
And they produce alcohol as a byproduct.
The cultures in probiotic foods, by contrast, are usually bacteria, and they break down sugars to make lactic acid.
This is known as lacto-fermentation and the star of the show here, and by here I mean your intestines, is
Lactobacillus Acedophilus
It's a bacterium that lives naturally in your gut, but its numbers can dwindle if you've been taking antibiotics,
Had a nasty gastrointestinal bug, or if your innards are just generally bad bacteria farmers
What's particularly excellent about Lactobacillus is that they're salt-tolerant
Whereas, various bad bacteria like the kinds that spoil our food and make us sick are not
So by, say, submerging cucumbers in salty water for a few days
We can keep out the bad germs that would rot our "cucs," while still corking the good bacteria
Which partially digests those vegetables, converting lactose and other sugars into lactic acid
And turning the cucumbers into pickles
But, remember fermenting is not the same thing as pickling
Non-refrigerated food stuffs you find at the market, like those jars of pickles and sauerkraut getting dusty on the shelf
were just dumped into vinegar and never fermented
Fermented foods, many of which have that live and active cultures label are a lot easier to digest, precisely because they've been partially digested for us
And in a manner much cleaner than say, a mama bird, regurgitating a mouth full of worm mush to her babies
So, in addition to eating that semi-decomposed cucumber, you're also ingesting the friendly bacteria that so helpfully started the digestion process
That's the double benefit of lacto-fermentation
We spent a lot of time and effort trying to limit our exposure to bacteria but the fact is, we would die without them
Your body, glorious shrine to hygiene that it may be, contains about 100 trillion bacteria
That's more than 10 times the number of your own cells that you have in your body
Which sort of means that you're more bacteria than you are you
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Transcribed by Ethan M
