Letter Re: Intestinal Flora and Health

Hi Jim,
I have gotten a lot of information from SurvivalBlog and thought maybe I could contribute something in return. I recently also became a Ten Cent Challenge subscriber and urge all of your readers to do so.

I am not a big believer in doctors or drugs, except only when absolutely necessary. After all, doctors are the #3 cause of deaths in the U.S.!

There has been a lot of talk in SurvivalBlog about maintaining good health and nutrition and making sure to stock lots of vitamins and other supplements, and I heartily agree with this.

One thing that I have not seen mentioned a lot on your blog is how to maintain good intestinal flora. I am no expert in this, but have found a number of low-cost ways to do this. I am in my late 50s and over the last few years started experiencing a lot of heartburn and acid reflux and started looking for natural ways to handle this. What some people do not realize is that using antacids to handle heart-burn actually has the opposite effect in that the antacids neutralize the acids in the stomach, but also cause the stomach to produce even more acids to counteract their effect.

One thing that I have found that is very good for heart burn is garlic. There is a product called Kyolic that works very well and as garlic has many other benefits, it should be taken in some form, on a daily basis.

However, I found for the long term, the best thing to do is to take small amounts of raw fermented foods every day. I'm sure that one of your readers can tell us the physiology behind this, but I only concerned that it is workable. The following are a few suggestions:

The least expensive and easiest thing to do [to promote good intestinal flora] is to make naturally cured sauerkraut. I found a very simple recipe at this site.
This makes naturally fermented sauerkraut in about 3 days and it is excellent. My wife is German and she says it is as good as what she used to eat at home. In order to benefit from all of the beneficial enzymes and bacteria, I eat it raw.

There is another variation on sauerkraut called cabbage rejuvelac, which was developed by Dr. Gray many years ago. The recipe can be found at this site. Instead of eating the fermented cabbage, you drink the liquid that it was made in.

There are also a number of sites that have recipes for Ann Wigmore's wheat rejuvelac and I have not tried any of these yet, but I suspect they give similar benefits.

I also regularly make kefir [cheese], as this is easily made from cow or goat milk and does not require any special equipment. Kefir grains can be purchased from Marilyn the Kefir Lady. Kefir grains last pretty much forever, in fact they keep growing and I have to periodically give some away. Marilyn also has recipes on her site for making kefir cheese.

I also make fresh yogurt and buy the starter from Cheesemaking.com. My favorite product of theirs is the kefir culture. This sets up like yogurt, but I much prefer the flavor to the
other yogurt cultures that they sell. It also doesn't require any special equipment and can be cultured at room temperature. This differs from the kefir made with kefir grains in that the kefir
made with kefir grains is much more liquid than that made with kefir culture.

I also recently found an interesting site: http://bodyecology.com/ where there are recipes for raw cultured vegetables. While I have not tried any of the recipes yet, I plan to quite soon.
BTW, I do not have any affiliation with any of the above web site. I'm just a satisfied customer. I hope this is of interest. Best Regards, - Kurt