Fermented Foods

“anti-insulin resistance and other positive benefits. So I put kind of yogurt at the top and then maybe cheese and other fermented foods. And I think milk actually has anti-hypertensive peptides linked to lower risk of stroke. So milk is pretty reasonable.”

“how does that journey look? Like, where do you fall with practical things like probiotics and fermented foods? And what are the best practices for the gut? So somebody's watching this right now, and I love the practical example of just eliminating dairy, coffee, sugar, alcohol, and gluten.”

“It's so boring, but I eat the same thing every day. It's good. It tastes good. It's good for your gut.. I'm going to stick with those. Yeah. Okay. So, fermented foods, kefir, maybe, maybe, maybe raw dairy, sauerkrauts, those, those kinds of things.”

“I actually enjoy them. I just didn't eat them for years. So I put a lot of fermented foods and a lot of fiber back into my diet. And I actually really like it now. In fact, they're soft and kind of watery.”

“Yeah, me too. And I found that when I started to add sauerkraut, kimchi, and fermented foods and vegetables back to my regular routine. Now, I didn't have dysbiosis to begin with, but my gut was the most regular it had ever been in terms of bowel movements, in terms of noise, in terms of bloating gas, constipation, irritability, cramping.”

“Yeah, start off low and slow. I mean, that's fermented foods are high in histamines too. So, again, works great for some people, many people. I mean, I did great with it. You did great with it. But if it doesn't love your body back, check. It doesn't make that food bad. It just, you have to meet your gut where it's at.”

“I think doing it's better than not doing it. I still skip the breakfast. The topic of fermented foods, low-sugar fermented foods as a possible benefit for gut health has come up since Justin Sonnenberg and colleagues have published that study. There's a small number of people in that study, admittedly, but that taking in some low sugar fermented foods really helped lower the inflammatone.”

“But what are your thoughts on low-sugar fermented foods? So we're not talking beer. We're talking kimchi, sauerkraut, brine. I think they're important and they're missing in the Western diet, which is an issue.”

“And I think there's the study you referred to, actually, I think they compared it to fiber, right? It was fermented foods to fiber. And with the fermented foods, you had reclaimed some diversity in the microbiome, which was great, as well as the reduced inflammatory markers where the fiber didn't seem to do that.”

“So it stands to reason that we probably see that as well as we do more research in the fermented foods. They're beneficial for a variety of reasons. You know, one, they're prebiotic, right?”

“So it's sort of like when you're trying to grow something, you want to plant the seeds, but also have the fertilizer and whatnot. And this is what fermented foods do for you. So I think, you know, that's very helpful. And it's all about maintaining this kind of healthy microbiome that can produce things like butyrate, which have a lot of benefits we can talk about.”

“What else do you recommend to your patients as they start to move away from obesity? So obviously, fiber, some fermented foods. It sounds like resistance training might be in the list, given that they're at risk of becoming thin, but more jelly tissue than lean mass.”

“or maybe you just get two times a week to work out. Can you eat clean, mostly unprocessed, minimally processed foods, plenty of fiber, plenty of low sugar fermented, foods, get enough protein, et cetera. Whatever that means to you. If you're a vegan vegetarian or you're, you know, eat meat, you know, everyone has their different, you know, kind of regimens,”

“inflammation diet. And I mentioned there's one thing specifically that has been shown in the human literature to reduce inflammation, and that's low sugar fermented foods. Highly overlooked, highly beneficial. This has been shown in a beautiful study from my colleagues, Justin Sonnenberg and Christopher Gardner at Stanford University School of Medicine.”

“get your system acclimated to it.. You don't want to go from no low sugar fermented foods to tons of them, but slowly adding a few servings a day, one serving, two servings, up to about four servings a day, which isn't very much, by the way. A few spoonfuls here, some Bulgarian yogurt there,”

“for increasing fiber is going to benefit most people in terms of colon health and reducing inflammation. but the low sugar fermented foods is a recommendation that you know i've certainly adopted into my own life i eat bulgarian yogurt i eat sauerkraut it's you have to eat the type that needs to be refrigerated and the low sugar part is important so no we're not talking about”

“It can. Have you tried that with patients where you said you've not? One of the reasons why these are effective, the fermented foods, okay? Fermented food means you're eating rotting food.”

“much more and to include these fermented foods now on this point of being outside much more some people live in cloudy places you know i spent a lot of my life living in places like london in”

“more aggressive. Either change your diet and do fermented foods and change to a meat and plant diet and you're going to have to watch what your body does. And if you're not able, and my claim would still be the sleep that you have should still be your best measure of whether you succeeded in what you'd like to do.”

“but we want to try and do it through diet first and fermented foods. And then the other thing is sunlight plays a big role. You're smirking again. You're doing a fabulous job. Oh, you're so sweet.”

“or do you do it with herbs um yeah fermented foods a really good way to repopulate the gut except it tends to be high histamine a lot of people are having histamine issues mast cell activation”

“What's your general thought about low sugar fermented foods? I don't know if Kefir qualifies as low sugar, but based on Justin Sonnenberg's work at Stanford and others, I've been really bullish on this idea of sauerkraut, kimchi, full-fat Bulgarian yogurt.”

“Right, right, right, exactly. People get frustrated. Oh, that's an observational study. Well, I'm going to continue to eat low sugar fermented foods every day. I do think in a study like the one you described, occasionally there's just, there's, let me state this differently.”

“quackery associated with it. But of course, there are interesting things in different foods. I do think that the Sonnenberg and colleagues' work on low sugar fermented foods has been very informative for lowering the inflammatone even more than fiber. I mean, actually in that study, this is kind of the like, even Justin will kind of downplay this a little bit.”

“They ramped them up, but I have to say they ramped them up pretty high. Like even the low sugar fermented foods, I think they got them up to like four servings per day. Okay. It's a lot of kimchi. You're not familiar with it. Like it can be a little hard on the gut. Yeah. I actually take an enzyme.”

“But we lose out on the full spectrum of fats because we don't really eat a lot of fermented foods anymore. So we don't get the medium chain fats. And because we don't eat any much fermentation. Fermented foods, we don't get any short chain fats for the most part.”