Category: eat

Self improvement

self improvement

 

There are some things I’ve been doing for a long time

  • gluten and dairy free,
  • sprouting seeds,
  • my own modified version of Pilates
  • occasionally visiting an osteopath and a
  • Feldenkrais practitioner,
  • acupuncturist and
  • craniosacral and shiatsu therapist
  • candida I’ve covered fairly thoroughly but

I need to get more organised in sharing some of these subjects.

look out for posts this year about getting more fresh veg into your diet and dealing with an addiction to sugar. At the moment I’m trying out various ways to get back to my low sugar time last autumn that my love of sweet things all around at christmas hit right out of the park.

Sugar free really was a revelation, I look forward to getting back there again and the improvement in mobility but won’t be beating myself up if the journey meanders here and there rather than its course taking an efficient, direct line!

I’d love to hear what you’ve found has helped you.

Ditching sugar… again, hasn’t been a straightforward A to B challenge especially whilst it gets given the plethora of names to hide its presence in packaged foods. The obvious thing to do would be to never eat packaged foods again but that’s an ideal to aim for not an overnight destination. Sugar acts like any other addictive substance in the brain – we’ll reach for whatever’s necessary to get that hit of dopamine unless we pause here and there to think about what we’re doing.

Foods that turn into glucose very quickly in the body also need thinking about. That baked potato that seemed so virtuous really isn’t unless mixed with a good source of protein and/or fat. Wildly fluctuating blood sugar and insulin levels don’t appear to be good for anyone whether you may be on your type II rollercoaster, waiting in the queue or just wanting to get the best from a poorly functioning body. Exercise and apparently apple cider vinegar can help a body deal with glucose, apparently.

Let’s all flag down the self-improvement boat and do our own research. I think it might present our best chance of feeling empowered about choosing the options we’re given. This power brings a range of immeasurable benefits.

We may not have consciously chosen to be here but we can consciously choose to have an ok time whilst we are here!

 

Chasing Wellness

sprig of holly with berries

Hope you had a good few days of enjoying friends and family’s company and perhaps definitely (for me, anyway) eating more than we normally would. I posted on christmas day the next post would be listing ways we could help ourselves through appropriate

  • eating,
  • moving,
  • sleeping and
  • being still.

I’ve put these 4 aspects of our lives in the venn diagram on this site’s front page as I truly believe when we get them right (whatever state we’re in to start with) good things will follow. I can’t promise a lottery win but better nights of sleep when they’ve been thin on the ground I don’t think could ever be considered a bad result!

For the beginning of the New Year mostly I’ll be coming down off an extended sugar binge. This will more than likely involve going cold turkey from the sweet stuff for four days (again). I Broke my sugar habit at the end of August at the beginning of my candida cleanse which I’ve posted about here, here and here.

This temporary reintroduction has highlighted that my body works better without this substance in it. Whether this is because I’ve been feeding bacteria and causing a boom in numbers of the wrong sort, that don’t help my day to day functioning or I’ve been creating blood sugar rollercoasters that are hard for my system to work around I probably don’t need to investigate further!

I believe, in myself at least and perhaps others that sugar (and to a lesser extent foods that quickly turn into sugar in the bloodstream) functions like a recreational drug eg cocaine in my brain and delivers a release of dopamine, the reward neurotransmitter (more to follow on this subject soon). It feels like my system over the past week or so has behaved as if functioning from underneath a warm, comfortable duvet. This is a nice state to be in when there aren’t things to do but when ‘things’ includes walking with relative ease it’s time to put down even the gluten free mince pie for another year. Saying goodbye to a slightly fuzzy ‘brain fog’ brain will be nice too!

I’ve dealt with addiction to other substances over the years but seeing some foodstuffs as having addiction qualities in this light rings many bells.

It may just be a disordered insulin response which can be addressed with a reduction in sugary, xmas foods and by doing some focused exercise like using a form of HIIT on my exercise bike which I’ve developed over the past year or so after reading other’s thoughts on the technique and through trial and error.

  • I’ve found short bursts of getting my heart rate up that aren’t long enough to effect a change in body temperature (which can temporarily worsen some MS symptoms) work well for me. So far I’ve been doing this every other day to give muscles a chance to rest and repair but I may try daily with slightly less resistance to address the gluten free mince pies of the season!
  • doing planks a few times throughout the day.
  • Check with your doctor before starting any new exercise. Andrew Marr, a BBC journalist and presenter had a stroke after attempting a version of HIIT (high intensity interval training) exercise.
  • I’ve also been doing less Pilates type floor exercise the past week or so which can help with balance and all of this (extra food and drink and less sleep and movement) that the season brings is being remedied this month.

2015?

Bring on the super wellness!

Do leave a comment, I’d love to hear about what approaches you’re finding work well for you.

challenge, perhaps?

a challenge to let the right ones in

in this post I’d like to add a supplement that I’d left off my previous two yeast posts. You could argue it was one of the most important additions during an effective dismantling of an overgrowth of candida.

  • Permavite powder; I didn’t use it for the first two months of my candida clearout which I mention here and here while I focused on reducing the invasive parasite which itself, I’ve been told was causing holes in my gut. Intestinal permeability can be caused by many things including a bedded in overgrowth of the yeast candida. When the parasite has been allowed to multiply unchallenged its form changes and it turns into a fungus, creating a thread like structure called hypha which can burrow beyond the gut and set up home all over the body.
  • HCL supplements; as we age we naturally produce less hydrochloric acid in our stomachs. When all is working well this is our first line of defense against bacteria that comes into the digestive tract in and on the food we eat. If we eat a low salt diet this can also impact how much acid we produce as sodium is needed in the creation of this essential acid.

There’s a whole other post on the finer details of our salt consumption (table salt=bad, rock or sea salt=good) but here is someone else’s version for the moment. Processed (ie table salt) versions of sodium have been stripped don’t hold the minerals that our bodies were developed to ingest at the same time as the electrolyte sodium.

If you’re getting heartburn or recurrent UTIs consider looking into the benefits of taking an HCL supplement with every meal. It may be responsible for reducing tiredness/fatigue after eating. This tiredness could also be down to eating foods your system has an intolerance to or a disordered bloodsugar response which I talk about briefly here.

A number of naturopathic approaches say these holes, which are sometimes referred to as Leaky Gut Syndrome can lead to undigested food particles entering the bloodstream. When this happens the immune system sees stuff that is not ‘self’ and mounts an immune response.

‘Leaky gut’s’ very existence is hotly debated in certain circles but some of the people questioning the theory’s existence (in my experience) talk of mysterious triggering of auto-immune conditions but so far have offered no better alternative.

  • Gluten
  • Legumes
  • Nightshade family of vegetables
  • Long term use of antibiotics, ibuprofen and any number of other medications.

Having the troops on high alert, facing a challenge with every forkful and behaving in a twitchy, trigger happy manner, attacking anything that looks a little bit different to self (a little like some members of the US police force) is not a long term strategy for any body.

As I started to see signs the overgrowth was lessening including waking with a clearer head, not feeling so… puffy and swollen and the size of my potbelly reducing aswell as losing 7 pounds and counting (whilst not even trying to) I started to use Permavite with each meal to build up my gut lining.

Slippery Elm, Aloe Vera and Marshmallow root supplements, okra green foodstuff and chia and flaxseed all have mucilaginous properties (they go gooey with water) and soothe the GI tract by creating another barrier to protect the gut lining from bacteria in the belly.

 

I listened to a presentation by Suzy Cohen the author of Drug Muggers, a pharmacist and functional medicine practitioner in the US, recently. In the book she talks about the various interactions prescription drugs can have with each other and the food we eat (fruit juice and cholesterol lowering drugs don’t mix, apparently) and the side effects they can have on our bodies.

Ability to edit myself has slipped (you may have noticed) while dealing with a dying cat at home.

She’s no longer in pain so I’m hoping to get back to doing the things I do every day to feel a little bit better.

LOTS of advice givers!

 

advice aplenty

As patients of incurable conditions nowadays we’re surrounded by advice from mostly well meaning folk. Today’s post will look at a handful of these suggestions. Some of them I first heard in relation to lesseniing MS’s effect on the body but which now have a wider audience.

 

I asked my neurologist, about 15 years ago about what different sorts of foods should or shouldn’t I be eating?

It won’t really make any difference, came his reply, as long as you eat a sensible low fat diet; the same thing as everyone is encouraged to do. I can refer you to our hospital’s dietitian if it’ll make you feel any happier?

His utter lack of interest in the fuel we provide ourselves with I felt was shortsighted at the very least. I’ve never put diesel in my petrol car because I’ve heard the car wouldn’t run so well if I were to do so. I went to the appointment and was told the only evidence she could find after searching the available data was a diet high in polyunsaturated fatty acid was mentioned in a couple of studies as showing potential worth in following.

 

Things have moved a little in the intervening years – well, there’s more information to be aware of and a greater need to pick a path through the avalanche of data.

15 years later and one of those suggested approaches to eating is widely recognised as Paleo. The Western world and our cousin seem to be on some form of it. You could argue the rest of the world are still on it (assuming they’re not yet under the shadow of the golden arches).

This shifting and creeping nature of food advice I feel highlights the similarities between various chronic diagnoses and people in general. We’re all trying to slow the aging process or, at least  ensure our time on earth is as comfortable and productive as it can be. Chronic disease is just some of our bodies choosing to age differently.

As scare stories about our food sources and methods of commercial production are revealed even some perfectly working bodies are wishing to keep those bodies from unnecessarily deteriorating by jumping on the bandwagon of… essentially… not eating stuff from packets.

 

Saturated fat is no longer the devil in disguise but it is considered so to some MS diets (see further down for a link to the Swank diet).

So, it would seem not just the oil but the heating of the oil is relevant.

  • This is one that I found recently. I was under the impression that canola oil as a foodstuff was questionable? For a start, there’s no such thing as a canola plant that might produce canola seed (Canola is in fact, according to wikipedia, a creation of the main suppliers of rapeseed oil from Canada).

I include links from a variety of sources to highlight the need to keep our wits about us!

The image is a field of oilseed rape in high summer near my home  – when becoming rapeseed oil it can be extracted mechanically involving solvents and heat; Canola (amongst others) or it can be cold pressed like the best virgin olive oils and this process is likely to cost more.

Canola provides omega VI essential fatty acid (which sounds like it should be a good thing, right?) but if we eat a typical Western diet/SAD (standard american diet) we’re most likely brimful of VI but deficient in omega III.

In a perfect world/caveman times/paleolithic era before farming when we lived in small communities and hunted and gathered for each other (pretty far from where we in the Western world are now) we’d eat a roughly one:one balance of the two fats but we eat biscuits and other tasty and addictive stuff from packets.

  • This is another oil story  (olives this time) but it has good news!
  • We’ll save saturated coconut fat for another post (one of the paleo folk’s essentials).

Stuff from packets is made to make profit (nothing wrong with that) but using the cheapest possible ingredients often means using these cheap seed and vegetable oils that are extracted in ways that involve substances I wouldn’t want to eat before it even gets to our plate, mouth (or oven for that matter).

Omega VI tend to be pro-inflammatory which, if you have a long term health challenge I believe your symptoms could be exacerbated by inflammation brought on by consuming way more VI than III?  This is what the ‘avalanche’ link at the top of the page says, anyway. Even if you don’t have a chronic condition a body will be happier and function better with less omega VI.

Check with your care giver or do a search on google but inflammation appears to lie at the heart of many intractable conditions for which there has been no cure found, as yet.

  • Omega III is anti-inflammatory and found in raw nuts and oily fish. Inflammation, as I discuss in an earlier post happens in our body and it’s a smart method to get the organism to sit still and allow healing to happen rather than cause further damage (a vast simplification but you get the gist).
  • Here is another page detailing the issues we have with inflammation in the body.
  • Here is another ms specific diet from a doctor with MS.
  • We haven’t even got onto the SWANK or the
  • Best Bet Diet (which is a modified Paleo approach and reduces the amount of foodstuffs the body might potentially react unfavourably to.
  • There are now so many nutrition based approaches for dealing with a long term condition we have a flood of information and websites and folk offering advice.
  • Which I appreciate is what I’m doing but at least I have no bias; I’m throwing bits of all that I’m aware of at you!

I’ve been listening to a talk from Sarah Ballantyne (author of the Paleo Approach, auto-immune diet book) and she explained some of the reasons for avoiding legumes (beans, chickpeas, peanuts, peas) and nightshade family (potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants/aubergines, peppers).

Saponins somehow came into her explanation. They can contribute to making holes in your gut which allows food particles to enter the bloodstream and create things for your immune system to throw a hissy fit at. Fatigue can be one of the side effects. I’m putting together an article on the subject of a leaky gut at the moment.

Getting a bit of the ‘why’  has helped me knock legumes off my daily diet something I’d struggled with in the past (legumes and nightshades were verboten on the Best Bet Diet also).

I’m choosing to follow an adapted paleo diet (sweet potato in place of white potatoes but I don’t go quite as crazy for bacon as they seem to. It was a bit of a bind to avoid eating legumes after stopping gluten a lot but not all of the MS (and lifestyle paleo) diets agree that our bodies weren’t built to tolerate a grain which has only really been around in an evolutionarily noticeable quantity for not more than 10,000 years.

Farming and a steady food supply has brought huge progress to society if you are one of the consumers. If you have been one of the producers of grain, you have been tied to the soil and made a slave to this phenomenally successful organism.

I’d love to hear from you to find out what foods you’ve found worth avoiding or ones you really can’t imagine ever avoiding!

We’re all basically the same but slightly different beings.

Find your own path, I’d love to hear it.

I still don’t think I’ve settled on mine although this article (from a mainstream news source) is a help!

Candida Overgrowth Part 2 and/or SIBO?

two cups of hot drink on desk

This is the second part of my candida cleanse collection of posts.

What can we do after finding our spit sinks first thing in the morning? (please see the previous post for details on sinking spit here).

I’ve entered into this protocol with a bit more vigour than in the past and am now into my 3rd month of a daily diet of pretty much no sugar, booze, yeast and/or vinegar but lots of fresh veg (mostly greens less starch) and no sweet fruit (green apples and blueberries are ok in moderation). Recently I have reintroduced fermented vegetables (I describe the making of them here).

I checked my spit this morning as I’ve been feeling slowly, slightly a little better in a number of areas.

  • My limbs feel more… reliable,
  • my balance seems more centred (I don’t feel like I might overbalance and fall over as much and
  • my head feels clearer. I appreciate none of those statements sound like gamechanging successes but
  • I no longer crave sugar! That I consider to be a resounding success.
  • I treated myself with a square of 85% dark chocolate and there’s still a quarter of the square left this morning!

I’m still not great at carrying two cups of hot liquid in both hands at once (a few drops spilt but neither cup tipped) these are all tiny signs (to me at least) that things are changing. Grated ginger in one and loose leaf green tea in a yellow submarine in the other are both I believe, polyphenol rich and therefore, desirable?

I have a question mark as there are so many things I don’t myself have proof of and have to take it on trust that various people on the internet aren’t lying to me and as far as I know, I’m not lying here either but like I mention in various other posts, your best bet is to do lots of reading from lots of different places and become your own research and/or researcher.

Anyway, let’s get on to how these happy changes may have come about.

In the previous post I spoke of hugely reducing my sugar intake, stopping booze, vinegar and generally what could be considered as excess starch consumption. It’s not like I was a booze hound or I ate all the cakes every day but even a tiny amount was giving fuel to the yeasts that I felt had grown out of control in me resulting in recurrent UTIs, fatigue and fierce sugar cravings.

Along with those dietary changes I followed the regimen of antifungals as suggested by Christa Orecchio when talking to Sean Croxton (both of whom I believe I mentioned in the previous post. So, I’m hoping to try and get rid of

  • recurring yeast infections
  • remorseless fatigue
  • bloating and gas
  • poor memory
  • brain fog.

At every meal, I have been starving the yeast of its favorite food (by not eating those foods) aswell as, in 4 day rotations, taking two at a time of:

  • pau d’arco
  • olive leaf extract
  • oil of oregano (this one is cruel as the smell reminds me of Italian food!)
  • grapfruit seed extract
  • uva ursi

As well as my

  • Betaine HCL supplements with every meal (the dosing of this supplement deserves its own post – watch this space).

This supplement enhances the amount of stomach acid to help digest a meal. When things are ticking along nicely Hydrochloric acid should be your first line of defense in killing pathogenic bacteria from food but age, a history of disordered eating, antibiotic use, stress and low salt diets can all interfere with our body’s natural ability to produce it. Every morning, before food I take a spoonful of

  • Diatomaceous Earth and
  • Bentonite Clay mixed with water.

The clay has a positive charge which can be lessened when it comes into contact with metal. Luckily the company I bought it from supplied a wooden spoon. The DE (food grade) has really sharp edges that scour out your gut and the clay clings to particles. Essentially the two products together behave like Harvey Keitel in any number of his roles as a ‘cleaner’ in films. Combined they remove the evidence of the bacteria’s presence in your body.

I think this subject could be spread into a third post but for the moment I’m stopping here. My spit was floating and I thought it might be safe to have a glass of wine, it wasn’t. So, I’m back to ensuring my spit doesn’t drown! I’ll keep you informed of changes.

I mention SIBO in the title and honestly have little idea of the difference in action of an opportunistc yeast and a Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth as I haven’t gone as far as sending my stool off to be analysed. I’ll see what I can do on my own for the moment as I understand there is some overlap between having an overgrowth of one organism when compared to another.

Candida Schmandida?

There’s regularly much mention in complementary/well being/alternative circles about troubles with candida albicans, its overgrowth and the many and varied symptoms it can create in humans. This post will be looking at just one strand of how to get a body working better by introducing how to see if it’s a problem for you.

My next post will go into greater detail about how to reduce it’s presence in the body. Have a look online there are many people who suspect it could be an issue for a great many people – not just those with MS or other auto-immune conditions.

  • Have you had what feels like fatigue out of all proportion to any exertion on your part?
  • Do you get aching joints not explained away by your activities?

These are just a couple of the symptoms attached to the actions of this opportunistic organism in your system. Fatigue and aching joints could be down to many other things so read on to find out how to rule this culprit out.

other beings

When I first started my ‘journey’ towards enhancing my wellbeing (soon after diagnosis) I spent the afternoon in a bookshop choosing which book to buy to tell me something about the condition, Multiple Sclerosis, a self help guide seemed to be the most positive in outlook and full of what appeared useful stuff.

This all happened in the days before I was introduced to the internet but it’s still a great book and the guidelines hold their own against many websites and blogs nowadays. I’m eternally grateful to the author Judy Graham for introducing me to an alternative way of looking at my condition before the tsunami of auto-immune journeys flooded the wellness side of the web.

I’ve hesitated to use the word empowering in previous posts but I think it’s an apt description of the book I read and how I felt after reading it.

Since then all the Ws have arrived and google helped the web become a place to go and find stuff out, whilst not even having to put your shoes on to leave the house… what progress!

Various candida cleanses are available so I thought I’d join in! Seems to me the best place to start is finding out if it might be an issue for you and could be contributing to existing symptoms you may have.

My thanks to Christa Orecchio for some of the detail collected from a talk given to Sean Croxton (I mention his JERFing mantra elsewhere on here). Just eat real food (his mantra) I mention in an earlier post and backed up by Dr Josh Axe and any number of naturopathic practitioners:

  • first off is candida albicans rampaging in your body?

After getting up in the morning, before you brush your teeth or have a cup of tea/coffee/hot water and lemon juice (helps alkalize your system, I’ll write about this in another post) pour a glass of water and work up some spit in your mouth then spit into the glass and leave it til after you’ve had some breakfast (not somewhere where someone might accidentally drink it!)

  • After half an hour or so has your spit stayed floating on the surface of the water or has it ‘grown legs’ and some or all of it has sunk to the bottom of the glass?

When everything’s in order and we haven’t been taking another curse* (sic) of antibiotics or been dealing with a range of different stressors on the body (including physiological stress from food intolerances as well as  emotional and/or mental stress) we manage to co-exist with an array of symbiotic hitchikers in our systems. These guys live in our gut and help to digest our food when all’s going well and communicate with other parts of us like our brains and fat storing departments.

*Don’t get me wrong, antibiotics have their place but it seems we, as a society have come to rely on them too much which has brought its own well reported troubles.

You may have noticed, as members of the western ‘developed’ world, most of us are pretty good at not allowing our bodies to reach calm. Buddhists consider our constantly gabbling brain to be a ‘monkey mind‘. this incessant internal noise can contribute to a poorly performing immune system which, in turn can pave the way for an opportunist bacteria to make a break for the big time in your belly.

Anway, I should stop showing you evidence of my monkey mind and get back to the detail of this particular candida cleanse.

  • Did your spit sink?

If it did that’s a sign there are too many things living in your digestive tract (the tube between mouth and anus). In earlier posts I’ve mentioned Hippocrates and him believing that all disease starts in the gut. Most, if not all functional doctors agree.

One of the first things to do is remove from your diet stuff that these rowdy inhabitants of our gut like to eat. Unfortunately it’s the same kind of thing we can be partial to, too:

  • sugar
  • vinegar
  • yeast
  • alcohol

Incidentally, this is how sugar effects our brain without any need for ‘outside’ help. Sugar it seems doesn’t do us or critters living in us much good.

There’s more to follow but try doing less of these things to start with and see if your body behaves a little better without their influence.

My next post will go into more about the symptoms and the 2+ month protocol involved in slowly removing this energy robber from your system.

I mention Judy Graham as she talked about candida and I read about it some 15 years ago and things might have progressed differently if I’d tackled this situation then.

I appreciate if, if, if don’t amount to a hill o’ beans suffice to say I’m two months in to the no booze or sugar protocol and I think it’s doing me some good but perhaps too early to tell?

 

 

Personalised help for MS and other long term conditions?

23andME

So, in the post “eat your greens” I mention the process I’ve just begun which involved sending some spit over the Atlantic to have my DNA sequenced by these folk. I had some reservations about finding out something in my genetic code that might be lurking in the future but, knowledge is power. I might be worried about how this data could be used if it fell into the wrong hands but having an ms diagnosis in the here and now has already made me dead to insurance companies. I’m perhaps being pretty naive not making myself aware of the details of unforeseen data splashing horrors but I prefer not to spend time thinking how awful life could be.

So, being an impetuous child I went ahead anyway!

This is lifted from wikipedia‘s explanation of SNPs “Variations in the DNA sequences of humans can affect how humans develop diseases and respond to pathogens, chemicals, drugs, vaccines, and other agents. SNPs are also critical for personalized medicine.[5]“

For folk interested in family ancestry this sort of data could be a boon for identifying where great, great auntie Val has most ancestors. So many possible starts of stories!

The flipside of this personalisation is that genes don’t represent ‘set in stone’ certainties. A percentage chance is expressed for which conditions your body could be becoming most primed for. Epigenetics is becoming a fascinating topic for speculation and research. It studies how we interact with our environments and how our grandparents did also. I think I’ve mentioned the 2ndWW dutch famine research elsewhere?

Instead with 23and me sequenced data, we have information to act on…stop smoking.. eat more veg… (which is pretty good advice for most people) but supplement specific vitamins and minerals because certain SNiPs are weak in your sequence and can’t do a certain type of processing which might help us get a bit of extra energy for example. I mentioned methylation in another post, it refers to how our bodies allow the process of making energy in all our cells. How we treat our bodies is far more defining than some paperwork as this particular article spells out.

I feel a need to do these things (or perhaps it’s straightforward desire – a coping mechanism if you will?) because no one cares about my health and wellbeing as much as me. Certain medical professionals care about the condition they’ve become ‘experts’ in but only in their specific research area. How a body functions doesn’t seem to concern say, a neurologist. I feel invested enough to look at all sorts of strategies and specialisms to try and get my body working a little better and I don’t have any affiliations that might stop me looking in a range of areas.

This is why I’m interested in the vascular dimension to a number of chronic conditions. Sometimes, it doesn’t feel like there’s enough curiosity in science. I believe sometimes healthcare professionals could do with getting a bit of distance from a disease shaped problem to get a chance at seeing the bigger picture in individuals.

Homemade Fermented Veg

Does having Ukrainian great grandparents mean I have homemade fermented veg in my blood?

I don’t know but it is a really easy process, becoming a little bit organised has been one of its happy side effects.

A search on homemade fermented vegetables will deliver many youtube clips on how to make sauerkraut, kimchi or get pickling to your heart’s content. They can show you better than I can describe the process of making our own, cheap alternative to probiotics. A lot of them show making industrial quantities but have a go yourself with smaller amounts first to see if it’s a habit that you want to get into.

The reason I started making my own sauerkraut apart from reading about its benefits online was it keeps you regular (this doesn’t present a problem for people who have delightful insides you could set your clock by but, if you haven’t got regularity you’ll know how miserable it can be and you’ll have a go at anything that might help!) and it looked a lot cheaper than regular probiotic supplementation.

homemade

I use the biggest, widest necked glass jars i can get (big jars of black olives from the supermarket have a good shape)

Fairly finely chop/shred

  • A red cabbage (peel off the outer two leaves before you start chopping and put to one side)
  • Bulb or two of fennel
  • 2 or 3 sticks of celery

Any veg that’s quite firm and holds a lot of water (but not potatoes) I’ve tried mushrooms and lettuce and courgette but they were too soft/water filled, I think and went to mush quickly

I find white cabbage a bit too sulphurous,

Leek gives a really zingy taste but after a week or two squashed in a jar outside the fridge its sulphurous smell is not for the fainthearted!

  • Beetroot (grated or sliced thinly)
  • Grated carrot is something to try chucking in: i think it and beetroot might be quite high in sugars (I’m guessing this is why they turned to a sticky mush on their own?) so probably they shouldn’t make up the majority of the chopped veg mix.
  • a bit of grated ginger or chopped fresh chilli adds another dimension!

Once the veg is chopped I use a big, ceramic cake mixing bowl and scatter over a good teaspoon of seasalt or Himalayan rock salt  (both hold more trace minerals which is a good thing apparently and are much better than table salt I’m told. The salt will stop nasties proliferating and draw water out of the veg. Perhaps also a teaspoon of caraway seeds (if you like that sort of thing)

After 24 hours of the veg sitting weighted down (I’ve inherited a big pestle and mortar but before that I was using bags of water which are quite heavy) it’s time to pack the jars up to an inch below the top.

Various places online suggest treating the jars as you would if you were making jam  ie putting the empty jars in boiling water or in a hot oven to kill off germs I did this once but, being one for the easier life I figured we’re after bacteria why does it matter if these jars are super, squeaky clean?

It is worth giving the jars a good wash tho!

Remember the outer cabbage leaves you put to one side?

Tear the leaves up to fit comfortably over the top of the veg and tuck the sides down the insides of the jar. You want to try and keep everything below the eventual waterline (mould can’t grow underwater). I’ve had a couple of furry tops of jars now and then and that’s when stuff has risen during fermentation and stuck out above the water. I’ve gotten rid of the first couple of inches of contents and the bottom half of the jar has been fine. You can gauge the consistency of the veg for yourself and decide when it looks like you might want to try eating it… or throwing it out!

It should taste sour (the bacteria already present on the veg make acetic acid) but the veg should still keep a crunch and should not go slimy.

My partner is far less gung ho than me when it comes to eating ‘off’ food so I appreciate this might not be everyone’s cup of tea but the only thing you can lose is a bit of time* so, why not give it a try?

Most of take advantage of the fermentation process when we eat, cheese, salami or yoghurt and drink wine or beer

In cooler weather (not necessary in the warmth of summer) you can try splitting up a probiotic capsule and mix it with water. I’ve used a kefir starter which has bacteria in as does VSL#3 the NHS approved probiotic (well, my mum got a prescription for it a while back). You’re going to top up to half an inch below the top of the tightly packed, veg filled jar (between half and one pint of water as a rough guide). I use filter water and the liquid from the last jar (this liquor also makes interesting vinegar for salad dressing). I imagine tap’d be fine too.

I get two jars at a time or thereabouts from a head of cabbage and assorted extra veg.

The addition of friendly bacteria from a capsule gets the fermentation process underway and the jars could be ready to eat in less than a month. Don’t forget to hold them in something that will catch any drips. We’ve created a living thing so the jars will breathe and ooze for want of a better word!

The benefits of cruciferous veg coupled with fermented food and the smug feeling we get for homemaking a ‘thing’ makes this activity worthwhile, for me. I’ve seen suggestions out there to not eat this straight from the jar as we harbour lots of pathogenic bacteria in our mouths that we probably don’t want to multiply. Keep the jar in the fridge once opened (it will still ferment but at a much slower rate).

I try to have at least a couple ‘brewing’ in the cupboard under the stairs at  at any one time.

*Go gently at this new way of eating veg, it’s undoubtedly good for us (please see my candida posts to rule out if you are one of the people that should avoid too much fermented food until you’ve rebalanced your gut bacteria). The microbes in our tums may need a little time to get used to all their new friends.

A wider group of friends for your gut microbiota can have positive effects on the body as a whole but especially so for the brain (microbes themselves are microbiota whereas microbiome describes their genes)