by Lawrence Wilson, MD

FERMENTED FOODS AND ALDEHYDE TOXICITY

Fermented foods have been used throughout human history as a way to enhance the vitamin and amino acid content of foods, acidify the intestines, support healthful flora in the intestines and resist intestinal infections, enhance the flavors of some foods, and as a way to preserve foods. The best known of these are cheese and yogurt. However, various human populations have fermented hundreds of foods, mainly vegetables and fruits, making various common food items such as sauerkraut, pickles, miso, natto, tofu, tempe, kvass, wines, beer, pulke, and others.

OVERDOING FERMENTED FOODS

Today, however, some people go overboard with fermented foods. We find this is not healthful and that for whatever reason, today almost all fermented foods are not as healthful for most people. The exception is raw cheeses, yogurt and kefir, and these are excellent. I am not sure why this is so, but here are some possible reasons for this clinical observation.

PROBLEMS WITH FERMENTED FOODS

1. Too yin for several reasons. Ferments, which are yeasts, are extremely yin organisms. They are often anerobes that use a glucose-based metabolism. This makes the food more yin, generally.

Also, the food is eaten in an essentially raw state. This also makes the food much more yin, in general, than if the food were cooked. It is true that some fermented foods are less sweet and more acidic, which adds some yang energy to them, but not too much in many cases. In general, fermented foods are much more yin, as a general rule, than the original food before it was fermented.

To read more about this very important aspect of foods, read Yin And Yang Healing on this website.

2. Aldehyde poisoning. Aldehydes are a type of organic chemical compound that are produced by most fermenting organisms, not just wine and beer. Aldehydes are toxic to the body, and this is a major problem with all fermented foods, bar none. To eat these foods in anything but small quantities is not healthful at all.

On hair mineral tests, we see the results of eating aldehydes. The person’s sodium/potassium ratio starts to decline and the vitality diminishes. This is a consistent finding. The more aldehydes one eats, the worse the problem.

The worst foods for the production of aldehydes are wine, beer, and some cheeses. The least are produced in foods such as miso, which is fine as a soup base, especially because one does not eat a lot of it.

3. Less nutritious than cooking vegetables. I recommend cooking almost all foods except dairy products, which are best eaten raw, unpasteurized and non-homogenized for best utilization. Meats and eggs should also be eaten only lightly cooked because cooking them a long time tends to damage their protein structure and the calcium they contain.

Vegetables, however, are best cooked because the minerals and other phyto-nutrients in them are bound up in the fiber, which is hard for human beings to digest completely. We simply lack the enzymes needed to break down the fiber properly.

Fermenting does not break down the food fibers as much as does cooking vegetables, so one may not absorb the minerals well enough. This is not an issue with dairy products, meats and eggs, as they do not contain much fiber and the nutrients are very available.

4. Possibly unclean. It is true that fermenting a food often kills harmful micro-organisms and affords some protection against intestinal infections. However, fermented food, because it is not heated or boiled to cook it, is still subject to carrying some unclean pathogens. Fermenting, in other words, may not kill all the parasites, bacteria and viruses that are found in many raw foods.

5. Other toxicity. Some people are basically allergic to, sensitive to or react to the ferments, which are mainly various types of yeasts and molds or fungi. One can argue that these are just healing reactions, and this may be the case. However, I also know people who have difficulty with ferments of various kinds.

6. Disadvantages compared to cooked vegetables. These include:

1. Cooking tends to break down the fiber better than fermenting, in most cases, and this allows one to absorb more nutrients from vegetables and fruits.

2. Cooking tend to concentrate most foods more than fermenting. This allows one to eat more of the food, which is helpful today to obtain more nutrition.

3. Cooking warms the food, which appears to be less upsetting to the digestion than eating cold fermented foods that the body must warm up.

4. As stated above, cooking makes the food much more yang than does fermenting.

For all of these reasons, I recommend avoiding most fermented foods except some cheeses, yogurt, kefir and perhaps a little sauerkraut and/or miso soup, if desired.

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