Micro-organisms in Health

Soon we will be talking about some ideas relating to fermentation and the value of micro-organisms in human health and nutrition. But my next post will focus on prevention of viruses and reducing allergic reactions. My approach as a general rule is observational, experimental, and speculative rather than entirely rigorous, tightly controlled and with documented results. But the Viral and Allergy Protection is now well proven and established. The results are outstanding and clear cut. If colds and flu and allergies are making you miserable each year, put off the rest of this thread for now and go to Prevention of Viruses.

We have been pretty pervasively conditioned to an extreme dislike and mistrust of organisms at the microscopic scale. We call them GERMS. We overlook all the good that they do. In terms of numbers, pathological organisms represent a minuscule portion of the microscopic domain.

The differences between the industrially produced wines and the natural ferments are great and may be of considerable importance. While a lot of people are brewing their own beer and making their own wines, not too many are looking at it from this perspective, and they usually use commercial yeast for the purpose. In my fermented beverages I use only wild yeasts. No commercial fungi or bacteria either. I have consumed most of the industrially supplied organisms in substantial amounts, for many years, in such things as yogurt and kefir and acidophilus milk and various cheeses, and did not stop doing so for the duration of this ongoing experiment. The so-called "probiotics" need not be purchased at inflated prices to get the nutritional benefits. Making your own yogurt, clabber or kefir is extremly easy.

In the past few months, I have done some experimental fermentation of such things as coffee, tea, purple grape juice and apple cider. In my production of these drinks, made generally a gallon at a time, I used only the wild organisms from the ambient air.

During this time, I have deliberately loaded up my system with these ferments, with a view to determining if dangers to health began to appear. The point is, if mistakes are easy to make and the average guy on the street might easily hurt himself fermenting while using reasonable methods and care, then it is not something I want to encourage other people to do.

As I write this I am eating a bowl of chilled stewed cranberries combined with raisins which have been fermenting for about a month. An hour or so ago I had a tall glass of fermented green tea mixed with Hard cider. It was entirely unfiltered, leaving the glass with a thin layer of whitish residue, a remainder of the wild yeasts and perhaps other airborne bacteria that grew during the fermentation. I even made some cheeses for the same purpose, also only using wild organisms, except for one batch which included a gram of chevre (goat cheese) culture. That had one notable side-effect. I ate a lot of it. I think it was mostly the cheese that caused me to gain perhaps ten pounds over the past few months. I have now reduced my intake.

All this fermentation is quite new to me and I am learning as I go along. But I have found that most of my efforts have turned out well. In the few batches that developed minor problems, I used only my own senses to detect them. No testing devices or instruments. I haven't even measured pH. I simply started with liquids I knew to be on the acidic side of the pH scale for wine.

Later on, I will be producing some sourdough starter for baking breads. The principle is the same but it will be on it's own thread because these yeasts and other organisms are not ultimately consumed while living. Here the objective was deliberately to load the diet with the live yeasts to determine their impacts on health and nutrition.

Anybody with any questions or comments so far? Or opinions, speculations or ideas?