Destroying Misinformed Health Advocates With Nature's Occam's Razor!

I left this message after reading the article

Fermented Foods - The Myths Of Fermented Foods:

I wanted to reply to your article about fermented food as a junk food... as I always eat some sort of predigested food since I had cancer. My radiation therapy to my face destroyed my saliva glands, food was hard for me to eat until I learned about fermentation.

What really resonated with me about the utility of predigested food is the nature of a cow... or any other animal with a big fermentation stomach.

-- 70% of a cows energy needs are met with fatty acid substances like vinegar. Fatty acids are the brain's preferred food over glucose.
-- the microbial bodies themsevles become a high-protein food for the 900 pound cow!
-- The cow can go anywhere and eat the plentiful grasses growing everywhere and be just fine. All because of it's adaptation of its fermentation guts.
-- the cows last stomach is similar to ours.

So, with this adaptation the cow has. What can we learn about this magnificent animal? Fermentation of its food is vitally important to it. Why wouldn't the cows nature also apply to ours? Fermentation is our attempt to replicate the rumen.

I would enjoy your thoughts on my comment.

Sincerely,
Lewis Habben
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The fact of the matter is food needs to find its way into your bloodstream as fast as possible. Bacterial enzymes split food into smaller and smaller pieces similar to animals. Because of this, the enzyme load of predigested food has got to be less.

Something that I totally could not agree with in his article is his claim that vinegar is indigestible. It is a short chain fatty acid, according to the wikipedia, "Short-chain fatty acids, just as medium-chain fatty acids, are taken up directly to the portal vein during lipid digestion"

I think the guy who wrote the article just got some bad info. Couple that with a societal aversion with microbes in food and his raw foodist proclivity, hell I could even fall prey to my own skepticism. Thats why we all must continually critque ourselves.

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So, bye bye and sincerely I say,Keep your head out of the sand and feet in the water.

To eat for pleasure or eat for health?

Fine, ya got me internet.
I knew I'd get to blogging sooner or later. There's only so much you can talk, if you think you got the answers. So, I'll write them down for a microcosm of the world to see and scrutinize. Even there, I had to look up microcosm to see if I knew what it meant. Scrutinize if it applies.

Yea... Cut to the chase, what are you blathering about? In my head it is sustainability, but not in the form that is paraded around in the circus of our corporatized culture. Sustainability in its best 'classic liberal' sense means optimizing nature for individuals, which is not something the corporations and the govt they exploit can provide. I seek to help society by providing my insights to individuals...

Enough with the self-important introductions, what's your angle?
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So, I watched a movie "Julie & Julia Child" last night. The movie is about a gal who starts a blog and posts an entry for every recipe in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" The movie is right up my alley. Sort of.

The nagging idea in my head that compelled me to write is something that was glazed over in the movie. To be fair to the movie, Julia Child was more about the superficial aspects of food like taste, smell, texture, and presentation.

So I asked myself a question: Is food for pleasure or for health?

I suppose my mentality is skewed from the norm because of a consequence of my conventional treatment of the cancer I had at 15. Four 5 day Chemotherapy sessions with 5-Fluorouracil and Cisplatnin and the last session (the kicker) was combined with 7 weeks of radiation to my face, which destroyed most of my saliva glands.

Subsequently, loosing the first step of digestion, it became harder for me to eat. And I didn't enjoy food much. It was more a task. And I've found myself searching for easy to eat, simple to digest food. What a fable, eh? But, now the health in food will always be more important than its superficial aspect. Actually, I get pleasure from knowing how and what to eat, and how it will deliver us all from the weevils of the medical industry.

And it is easier than you'd think, but, will challenge much of what the norms of our incorporated, bureaucratic-controlled society dictate. That is my angle, this is why I'm putting my learned thoughts down here.

To leave you with a bit of meat to ponder as I cook up another entry, the root of my pursuits in nutrition come from the fact that all higher organisms are still mostly the primordial ooze we evolved from; that of all the DNA information on you is 90-99% bacterial. You are more bacterial than you are human. Bonnie Bassler has a good talk about the sheer numbers. My point is that the easiest, cheapest, best way to retain your health is to culture that reality the best you can, because you would die from malnutrition if your guts were sterile.

I believe a bigger answer can be found within the rumen of animals like cows. But, that will be for another entry.

This entry was easier than I thought. I hope I wasn't too lofty, and kept you engaged.
For further reading:
http://www.wildfermentation.com/
http://www.westonaprice.org/healthtopics.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=human-microbiome-change

So, bye bye and sincerely I say,
Keep your head out of the sand and feet in the water.