Review of Probiotic Foods: Bubbies Sauerkraut, Pickles & Kombucha!

Eating probiotic foods is a great way to improve digestive function. You know that your digestion is impaired if you experience any of the following: belching, bloating, gas, diarrhea, gurgling, or even constipation. Impaired digestion can also manifest itself in skin issues like eczema and acne: in fact, as early as 1909 researchers found that disruption of the digestive system and gut flora through worry, anxiety and depression could manifest itself in skin problems.

The Gut-Brain-Skin Axis: Back to the Future?

Probiotics are microorganisms that every human being has living in their intestinal tract. During delivery a mother sort of inoculates her child with beneficial bacteria as it passes through the vagina. Traditional cultures would eat fermented foods that were full of these good bacteria to get a dose through diet.

The microorganisms in our gut are essential to healthy digestion: they break down our food to help our bodies absorb vitamins and nutrients more effectively, help our gut and immune system to function properly, and even fight on our behalf against harmful bacteria that we might ingest (i.e. Salmonella). They might even improve asthma symptoms.

Research suggests that the relationship between gut flora and humans is not merely commensal (a non-harmful coexistence), but rather a mutualistic relationship.^[3] Though people can survive without gut flora,^[4] the microorganisms perform a host of useful functions, such as fermenting unused energy substrates, training the immune system, preventing growth of harmful, pathogenic bacteria,^[2] regulating the development of the gut, producing vitamins for the host (such as biotin and vitamin K), and producing hormones to direct the host to store fats. However, in certain conditions, some species are thought to be capable of causing disease by producing infection or increasing cancerrisk for the host.^[2][7]
         - Wikipedia

Check out Chris Kresser's article: Heal Your Gut
&
Diane Sanfillipo's Article: Bites I Love: Fresh, Raw Sauerkraut


Because most of us use or have used antibiotics, I believe that it's important to replenish our gut flora by eating probiotic rich foods or supplementing. There are many types of probiotic foods including: Kefir, Yogurt, Kombucha, Sauerkraut and Pickles. I set out to try out a few that have been popular in the paleo world:

Kombucha
- A fermented sweet tea with roots in China. I tried GT's Enlightened Organic Raw Kombucha Bilberry No 9 and Hibiscus No 7

Cost: $3.19 per bottle
Claims: 60 Calories per bottle, 14 grams sugar
              50% RDA Folic Acid
              40% Vitamin B2,  B6, B1, B3, B12
              * Bacillus coagulans GBI-30 6086: 1 billion
              * S. Boulardi: 1 billion
              Antioxidants: EGCG, Glucuronic Acid, Lactic Acid, Acetic Acid

Thoughts: Kombucha basically tastes like watered down juice with a little fizz. After a couple tastes my kids started fighting to drink the rest. But, they never have juice. I think that if your kids are drinking juice on the regular, they won't be interested in this. I thought it was ok. Not unpleasant. The folic acid content is pretty attractive to women of childbearing age that are constantly being told to eat their horse pills (I mean prenatal vitamins).

Pickles
These pickles must be found in the refrigerator section. Truly fermented pickles aren't just mixed with vinegar. The stuff you see on the shelves next to the ketchup is pasteurized (i.e. beneficial bacteria is killed). Great reason to eat pickles: Cleopatra believed that they contributed to health and beauty. I chose to go with Bubbie's. They are naturally fermented and have no vinegar.

Cost: $5.99 per bottle
Thoughts: These pickles had a bit of a spicy flavor. The boys didn't care for them. They took a few bites here and there, but otherwise didn't ask for them often.

Sauerkraut
Again, the stuff you find on shelves is pasteurized - you need to go to the refrigerator and check that they are naturally fermented. It is made out of finely shredded cabbage and lactic acid bacteria. I chose Bubbie's brand again.

Cost: $4.99 per bottle
Thoughts: I LOVED this sauerkraut. I generally do not like sauerkraut, blech. It had a pickle-y sort of flavor. The kids didn't care for it. I will probably buy it again or try to make my own!!



How much should a person eat?

The kombucha bottle claims you should have an entire bottle a day. I have read that a 1/4 cup of fermented vegetables a day is ideal. Up to you! I'll probably have 1/4 cup of sauerkraut a day, but the kombucha is too expensive to drink an entire bottle a day.. I may try to make my own and blog about it someday.

The Four Pillars - Part 1

I wrote last time that I'm working on implementing recommendations for optimal health for myself and children on a daily basis. I'm following first the recommendations in Deep Nutrition by Catherine Shanahan. She suggests that people should eat food from the Four Pillars of Nutrition (which are the foods all native/indigenous people have in common): Meat on the Bone, Organ Meats, Fermented/Sprouted Foods, & Fresh/Uncooked ingredients. I will show you how I incorporate these old, traditional foods into my life.

In this installment I tackled: Meat on the Bone/Bone Broth

I was already making bone broth somewhat infrequently, but I have since increased my intake to a mug of bone broth almost daily. If I do not have bone broth made in a given week, I'll make soup with chicken bones or beef soup bones.

What, Why, How?

Instructional Bone Broth Videos:

The Primal Project

Lately I've been considering what optimal health is, what it really means to me and how exactly we can achieve it on a practical, everyday basis.

You read articles from the paleo/primal blogosphere about how many health improvements are made just ditching grains and eating more good fats and vegetable matter. But, you will also read articles espousing the benefits of fermented cod liver oil/bone broth/liver consumption/nature communing/etc., etc.

I read these articles and just thought that these people were kind of a fringe of the paleo community and though these ideas were intriguing, there was no way in hell I was going to eat liver! EW! Well, I have decided to pursue my bachelor's in dietetics, but because we'll be trying to open our gym next year it is something that will have to wait a couple of years. In the meantime, I've decided to attend as many paleo seminars and read as many paleo/primal books as I can to self-educate. In my book searches I stumbled across one called Deep Nutrition by Catherine Shanahan. Here's the description:

Deep Nutrition illustrates how our ancestors used nourishment to sculpt their anatomy, engineering bodies of extraordinary health and beauty. The length of our limbs, the shape of our eyes, and the proper function of our organs are all gifts of our ancestor's collective culinary wisdom. Citing the foods of traditional cultures from the Ancient Egyptians and the Maasai to the Japanese and the French, the Shanahans identify four food categories all the world's healthiest diets have in common, the Four Pillars of World Cuisine. Using the latest research in physiology and genetics, Dr. Shanahan explains why your family's health depends on eating these foods. In a world of competing nutritional ideologies, Deep Nutrition gives us the full picture, empowering us to take control of our destiny in ways we might never have imagined.




It never really struck home before this exactly what kind of impact food can have on our height, physical features and degenerative diseases. Since I have two growing boys, one of which has soft tissue problems in his leg from an early trauma, optimal health and wellness is extremely important to me. If you were told that you were genetically predisposed to getting xyz, check this book out. The first half of the book seems to be very focused on physical appearance, but further along in the book (especially when I got to The Four Pillars chapter) I had so many food revelations.


Because of this, and an article entitled Guts and Grease by Sally Fallon, I'll be attempting to actually consume these traditional foods and try to practically live other optimal health practices that are promoted in the paleo community. Just as an introduction:


I'm a 28 year old female, two kids, living a "normal" life in a city. I'm a stay at home mom with a husband in the military. We've been eating "paleo" with lots of ice cream for almost two years now. I grew up eating bowls of fruity pebbles for breakfast and spooning sugar over strawberries because they weren't sweet enough. I have been "dieting" or interested in losing weight since middle school. For the first year and a half of my first son's life, he ate puffs and I fed him turkey sausage because I thought the fat in pork sausage was bad for him. I've tried eating "clean" and low-fat high carb and the first year of my marriage to my husband we had a spaghetti night and a fried foods night where we ate mozzarella sticks, chicken fingers and french fries - because this was cheap and easy and I had no idea how to cook. If I can do this, you can too. 


Please join me on this adventure..

Paleo Kitchen Tools

If you are anything like me, you have/had a kitchen stocked with hard anodized cookware or some kind of teflon pans and cheerfully cooked with no-calorie PAM sprays. Would it surprise you to learn that in addition to all the chemicals you are exposed to from your carpet to your beauty products, the cookware you use can produce some of the worst? I'm not going to do a post on how bad crap like Teflon is to use, since Chris Kresser already did a great one here. What I am going to do is show you how much it costs to replace this garbage. Here's a little quote about Teflon from the article if you need a little convincing:

Teflon, made of the chemical known as PFOA, is the most persistent synthetic chemical known to man, and is found in the blood of nearly every person tested. (1) Animal studies have shown that PFOA causes cancer, liver damage, growth defects, immune system damage, and death in lab rats and monkeys. An EPA advisory panel reported that PFOA is a “likely carcinogen” in humans. (2)

Besides just leaching chemicals into the food, Teflon cookware has also been shown to release dangerous chemicals into the air during use. Toxic fumes released from heated non-stick cookware has been shown to be deadly to birds, with many hundreds of birds dying every year from “Teflon toxicosis.” (3) Even more scary is that DuPont’s own scientists have admitted that polymer fume fever in humans is possible at 662°F, a temperature easily exceeded when a pan is preheated on a burner or placed beneath a broiler. (4)

Avoid:
Aluminum
Teflon
Copper

Go For:
Enameled Cast Iron, Ceramic, Steel
Cast Iron - Everyday use
Stainless Steel - Good for quick cooking and browning meat


Things to remember:
Never clean cast iron with soap - wipe with a cloth, rinse with water and dry immediately. DO NOT SOAK.

You must use fat to cook with cast iron and keep food from sticking, however once you've used the pan several times, cooking gets easier and more tasty. Follow Chris Kresser's tips for cast iron.

Cast Iron can be a problem for people with toxically high levels of iron in their blood, but many of us (especially women) are iron deficient and cooking with cast iron can be beneficial.

Cook acidic dishes (i.e. tomato sauce) in an enameled dish or stainless steel. The acid can damage cast iron cookware.


PALEO KITCHEN ESSENTIALS:

1. Stainless Steel Utensils - $14.72 here
I recommend visiting a restaurant supply store or a Wal-Mart to check out prices if you can, otherwise you can find on Amazon.

2. Cast Iron Frying Pan - 16.99 for the one I have.

3. Enameled Cast Iron Dutch Oven - $70.99 for the one I have. Or splurge on Le Creuset for several hundred dollars.

4. Stainless Steel Frying Pan - 33.95 for the one I'd pick

5. Baking Dish - $59.95 for the enameled cast iron, or you could go less expensive and grab some glass pyrex for about half the price at Wal-Mart.

Anything else you probably already have and this is really all I would say you'd need other than a nice set of knives I hope you already got as a wedding present or something ;) Don't forget, it's ok to ask for gift cards for Christmas this year and GET RID OF THAT TEFLON!

Total Cost to redo the kitchen cookware: $196.60 + tax.

Optional:

Food Processor
Crockpot (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, especially if you are making bone broth)
    There has been some debate as to whether or not chemicals are leached from crockpots into the food  
     that is being cooked inside.. I'm not convinced there is anything to this, but I avoid brightly colored  
     anything that comes from China. I just ordered this one to replace my one that got all scratched up.
Pressure Cooker .. I personally don't cook much with this.

My new go-to "Paleo" cake recipe

Let me start this post by saying that if you are adding sweetener to anything, I really don't consider it "paleo." As I've read more and more about nutrition and spent time cooking paleo food, I've begun to think that things like coconut flour and almond meal aren't really paleo. In fact, I consider a bowl of fresh strawberries topped with freshly whipped heavy cream way more "paleo" than a grain/legume/dairy free cake, cookie or muffin.

That being said, I think there is a place for these  kinds of baked treats for families that just don't want to forgo baked goods at things like birthday parties.

So, for my son's fourth birthday party I decided to finally try baking a grain-free cake. My previous attempts at paleo treats were just ok. The best ones I've found come from Primal Palate's cookbook Make it Paleo. You can find a lot of the recipes that are in their book on their blog.. The pumpkin pie was great.

Anything I tried with coconut flour was extremely dense and required a nice cup of coffee or water to get it down. I had a ton of it in the pantry though, so I decided to give it one more try. I scoured the internet and finally found: THE BEST DAMN COCONUT FLOUR CAKE RECIPE EVER.

I made 12 cupcakes and made up a batch of frosting with whipped heavy cream (I was not impressed with my frosting and will do cream cheese instead next time). Rather than use regular food coloring, I went out the my local Whole Foods and spent way to much money on "all natural" dyes that were made from vegetable juice. I used India Tree food coloring.. if it was not super last-minute, I would probably not have purchased these since, I kid you not, they cost about $16.


I will probably never use a different coconut flour cake recipe I was so pleased with this one. Here's the cake (it's a dump truck, not a bus..):

My Husband's Before and After Paleo + CrossFit

I thought now would be a good time to share some before and after pictures of my husband with CrossFit plus Paleo. The family photo from 2008 and the summer 2009 were pretty much what my husband looked like up until Summer/Fall of 2010. Before this time we were eating the Standard American Diet, with a regular pasta night and a "fried food night" where we ate baked cheese sticks, chicken nuggets and french fries.



December 2008

Summer 2009

In the fall of 2010 my husband began to attend CrossFit classes at our base gym 4-5 days a week. I looked into this whole Paleo thing and around January of 2011 we went full on paleo with occasional ice cream cheats. These following pictures were taken within the last several weeks. He is now a Level 1 CrossFit instructor at our base gym, CrossFitting 4-5x a week. He eats Paleo and 2-3x per week has ice cream or has a meal like a burger and fries. He has not dropped any weight, but has leaned out quite a bit. During a recent Whole 30 we had our body fat percentages checked and the machine at our wellness center couldn't read his it was so low. Yay for CrossFit/Paleo!

Justin at CrossFit for Hope in Washington, D.C. June 9, 2012

Memorial Day Murph Challenge w/ a 20lb vest May 2012

Easy Paleo Meal: Kinda Pepper Stuffing

My plan for this meal had been to rice some cauliflower in the food processor to add to the sauce and stuff the beef/tomato/cauliflower mixture into halved bell peppers and throw them on the grill. That plan went out the window when my little man got sick. I needed a meal that was ready in 5 minutes and full of flavor because we were getting tired of sparsely flavored ground beef. I literally cooked this meal with my two-year-old in one arm and the spoon in the other.. my husband did help by opening cans and dumping them into the pan :)

Kinda Pepper Stuffing
1.5-2lbs ground beef
1 can diced green chiles
2 cans of diced tomatoes
Optional: Riced Cauliflower

Brown the ground beef and drain. Add chiles and tomatoes with all juices. Add salt/pepper to taste and serve. If adding the cauliflower, put in with browned ground beef before tomatoes/chiles and cook for an extra five or so minutes.

Optional: Serve over lettuce or with a bag of steamed veggies

Paleo is that easy people!