About eight months ago, I woke up with a pain in my throat that felt like strep throat.
It burned and seemed to radiate from my chest. I had just discovered heartburn, but I didn’t know it. I went to the doctor for the first time in years.
Was it something serious?
I even rinsed my throat with clotrimazole.
Finally, we ruled out fungal and bacterial infections.
Only to discover it was just indigestion.
I’d always thought that I had a stomach of steel.
A digestive system that could take anything. That sure seemed to be the case when I was a teenager and in my twenties, but here I was at thirty-four, with heartburn. Other men around my age said that’s just something that happens with age.
Something you just have to accept.
You know, you can feel something rising in your chest, and the fear that that burp is going to be a little flame in your throat. A flame that says those foods you enjoyed?
Cut those out.
But maybe not. Maybe there was a solution.
The Problem with Probiotic Supplements
An Ancient Solution
3 Fermented Foods
READING TIME: 6 minutes
The Problem with Probiotic Supplements
People sell all manner of microbiome improving products, now.
I didn’t know which one to get.
Should I buy this probiotic or that probiotic? It didn’t even seem like most of them worked. After all, it was not an area that was well studied. There’s a lot of snake oil.
How is someone to choose?
And even if you were to choose one of those probiotics, how would you know it worked? How could you then end up reliant on something that comes from a lab?
I know many people are reliant on things like insulin or nitroglycerin but to me, becoming reliant on something like that would definitely affect my perception of how close I am to mortality. I’ve always prized the ability to go anywhere and do anything for a little bit, you know, for at least a couple weeks or months.
The thought of going to a poor country with a very different microbiome and having to take pills just to get through a meal was not one I enjoyed.
So I thought about what people used to do and what the general idea of probiotics is. We know that with industrial monoculture farming, a lot of what we eat misses a few things. We’ve extracted one aspect of the food, maybe the sugars or something like that, and ignored all the rest.
There are consequences for breeding for one specific thing.
You lose a lot of other stuff that your body might have been used to. A certain balance in the diet comes from foraging. Variety.
So we know that humans fermented a lot of things. The fermentation we encounter most is something like beer, and that’s extremely controlled. It’s a giant lab, right? Just to get you a can of beer today, as opposed to something growing in a pot.
Where we come closer is sourdough or pickles, but modern pickles are kind of annihilated with sugar and vinegar.
I had a single clue.
An Ancient Solution
Kimchi.
You would think that spicy kimchi would be horrible for heartburn, but not for mine.
Every time I ate kimchi, my poops came out thick and smooth.
I didn’t suffer from indigestion.
What else might be like kimchi?
Modern pickles and sauerkraut had the whole sugar and vinegar thing going, sure, until the foodie craze.
In a quest for taste, the foodie craze that happened in the 2000s and 2010s led people back to brining.
And surely I thought, if brining made things taste better and more complex, probably there were living organisms in it that also helped with your digestion.
So not wanting to have to make a decision or do the kind of painstaking research I did with DIY soylent back in the day, I decided to stick with the basics.
To find slow fermented foods, and eat that.
Turns out, this was all pretty simple.
Brined pickles, like sauerkraut. Using salt water instead of sugar and vinegar.
Keffir yogurt.
Sheep’s milk yogurt.
Stuff you might get at your local health food store, or pickle at home.
3 Fermented Foods
Brined sauerkraut. Kimchi. Yogurt, keffir and sheep’s milk.
I ate these three foods every week.
And after about six months, it seems like my indigestion is gone!