There's No Life Without Friendly Bacteria!

Among all the people that influenced my professional futureand left a profound impression in my life is Gaylord Hauser. Though I have never met him personally, he became my idol and mentor after I read his groundbreaking book Look Younger–Live Longer, published in 1950.I had just turned 17 when I started my apprenticeship in a health food store in my hometown in Germany. Gaylord Hauser’s book was the first book I bought with my hard-earned money.

What fascinated me most was the nutritional program he had developed for health- and beauty-conscious Americans, especially young movie stars in Hollywood. His program for both men and women actually centred around the waste products of the industrialized food industry. He offered the healthiest concoctions made with B-vitamin-rich brewer’s yeast, a leftover in making beer; mineral-rich blackstrap molasses, the waste product in refining sugar; and fiber-rich bran and wheat germ, loaded with vitamin E.

All this he mixed with yogurt, at that time a rediscovered source of lactic acid bacteria. As yogurt was not widely available, he taught his readers how to make it themselves at home.

Enthusiastically I followed his instructions and made a three-litre batch for our seven-head family to try. Unfortunately, my homemade yogurt, in spite of the exotic name, met with great disappointment. Everybody felt that old-fashioned homemade milk, straight from the farmer’s cow, unpasteurized and just fermented in a warm location for a day or two, tasted better. Pure, natural lactic acid bacteria was part of our daily fare.

Nevertheless, this experiment added another experience to my limited knowledge of lactic acid fermentation. Making sauerkraut from white cabbage was a yearly ritual at our home, which provided the family with valuable, nutritious lactic acid-rich food. Likewise, the salt-brine fermented dill pickles my mother made every August. Nowadays, dills are made with vinegar, most often white vinegar, which is made from wood pulp, a far cry from a healthy food.Our bodies, with their very complex and intrinsic digestive systems, were designed to function only with the presence of abundant lactic acid in our food. The advent of refrigeration changed the way food is now stored, and the preservation of vegetables through the fermentation method has disappeared. As a consequence, many health problems related to poor digestion and food absorption appeared due to the lack of lactic acid in our food.

Louis Pasteur made the greatest impact in food preservation with his process of pasteurization–once taught to be a blessing, now considered in the whole-foods movement to be the ugliest curse. Pasteurization kills ALL bacteria in food, the bad ones with the good ones, e.g., in milk, where the lactic bacteria turns the milk sugar lactose into beneficial lactic acid during the fermentation process, thereby creating naturally soured milk products.

Lactic acid consists of a multitude of friendly bacteria, each strain responsible for a very specific job in making such foods as buttermilk, sour cream, Camembert cheese, sauerkraut or sour dough. The absence of lactic acid in our modern diet has triggered a seemingly endless chain of digestive problems, including the weakening of our immune systems.

The most prevalent disorder produced by an under-colonization of friendly bacteria in the intestines, is the outbreak of yeast infection, Candida albicans. It is estimated that two thirds of the civilized population suffers from this disease. For the longest time orthodox medicine believed this nutritional disorder to be an incurable, sexually transmitted disease. In fact, a yeast overgrowth is preventable through an abundant presence and colonization of friendly bacteria on the walls of the intestines. The dreadful leaky gut syndrome is a direct result of an untreated yeast infection, where the intestinal walls become permeable to allow undigested protein particles to enter the bloodstream, causing all kinds of allergic reactions to food.

Antibiotics and Probiotic

Everyone knows antibiotics as the term used for medication to kill bacteria. By contrast, probiotics translated from Greek means "for life." This descriptive term includes a large variety of protective lactic acid bacteria. We carry billions of them in our intestines, about three pounds ofthem. As we go through our life cycle of birth, youth, adult and dying stages, so do these bacteria. That’s why they need to be replenished normally through the lactic fermented foods we eat, as already mentioned, including sour milk products, kefir, yogurt, sauerkraut, salt-brine fermented olives (the purple ones), even salt-cured meat. Throughout the ages, people ate plenty of fermented food. The workers building the great wall of China survived on fermented cabbage (sauerkraut). The Hunzas had their kefir, and the Bible refers to curd, a soured milk product similar to our quark or the laban of the Arabs, while the Balkans had their bulgaricus as yogurt.

Newborns get their first friendly bacteria as Lactibacillus bifido infantis.

As nutritionists recognized a general deficiency of lactic acid bacteria in the North American way of eating, the food industry responded quickly with the introduction of commercially made yogurt. Marketers soon discovered that more money could be made by “improvising” natural yogurt by adding sugar, artificial fruit flavour and gelatin as a thickener. The most ironic improvement is the pasteurization of yogurt, which is killing the friendly bacteria for the purpose of extending shelf life. Up to 90 percent of all yogurt in supermarkets fall into this category, rendering it inferior as a source of live friendly bacteria. Only a very few are marked as "plain natural yogurt."

Many supplement suppliers offer friendly bacteria either in powder or capsule form. Whether you take the dairy-based or dairy-free version is a matter of preference. The dairy-free types are usually grown on a medium of chick peas and cellulose or on rice flour with banana concentrate. Most manufacturers do not give details.

What you want to look for is the freeze-dried lyophilized form. They are stored in the cooler at your health food store. Lactic acid bacteria survives in a cool environment and deteriorates faster when the storage conditions are too warm.

One last word about the many species of friendly bacteria: all of them are beneficial. However, as Dr. Khem Shahani, the originator of DDS-1 acidophilus, explained to me when I visited him at his laboratory at the University of Nebraska, they are like dogs: they all belong to the same family, but some are more useful than others for specific tasks. A toy poodle cannot be used for watching sheep, while a dachshund will chase the fox out of its hole. He discovered the DDS-1 (short for Department of Dairy Science #1) acidophilus to be the most powerful strain, able to fight Candida albicans successfully and to even withstand penicillin. Many brands use this strain either by itself or in combination with other strains of lactic bacteria.

Bifidus is highly recommended for infants fed with formula, supplying them with the protective bacteria they otherwise would get from mothers’ milk.

If you have been on antibiotics, which kill the good with the bad, you want to immediately re-establish all the friendly bacteria with high doses of Acidophilus and Bifidus bulgaricus from natural yogurt, or Lactobacilus casei from cheeses made from soured milk such as Camembert or Brie. This is most important for the strengthening of the immune system.

Remember! There is no life without friendly bacteria.