Fermented Foods and Gut Health with Dr. Carolyn Griffin

10/25/19 • 28 min

The Functional Medicine Radio Show With Dr. Carri

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Dr. Carolyn Griffin explains the link between fermented foods and gut health.

Dr. Carolyn Griffin is a chiropractor and Certified Fermentationist. She created My Cultured Life which is a learning source to teach people how to make fermented foods and beverages on their own. This is where she shares what’s brewing in her kitchen and easy ways for you to do the same. Fermented foods and beverages are the best way to get your daily dose of a variety of healthy probiotics.

Main Questions Asked about Fermented Foods:

What is fermentation?
Why is it making a comeback?
Why should we be eating fermented foods?
What’s the difference between probiotic supplements and fermented foods?
What are some examples of fermented food?
What’s the difference between making your own and buying it at the store?
How do you make your own kefir or kombucha?

Key Points made by Dr. Griffin about Fermented Foods:

Fermentation has been around for thousands of years and is only recently making a comeback. It’s a natural process of preserving food.
When food is exposed to bacteria and yeast, the microorganisms convert the sugars to lactic acid creating an acidic environment in which fools will not rot or spoil.
I think people are reaching for more information and realizing that they need to be their own health advocate. And, fermentation is a healthy way of getting probiotics into your system, which is going to help your gut heal.
We already know that 70% of your immune system is in your gut, so if you’re eating foods that are going to healthier for you, and you start to heal that, a lot of other conditions that people may be suffering with are going to resolve.
I’m not 100% against probiotic supplements. I just think there is a difference between them and fermented foods. Probiotics are live bacteria. A lot of time in the process of isolating the bacteria to put them in a capsule, a lot die.
Because they’re live organisms, the best source is going to be from fermented foods that you create.
Sauerkraut for example is loaded with probiotics, bacteria, enzymes, vitamins, all kinds of things.
When you’re talking about a supplement, a lot can go wrong. You really need to learn to read labels. So, there’s more of a question mark about a probiotic supplement versus a fermented food.
Research is now showing that the more diverse the bacteria that live in us, the better. We’re finding that people in third world countries don’t have the same health issues that we do; for example, there’s not a lot of auto-immune disease.
One of the reasons is the diversity. We, in Western civilization, tend to live in a very sterilized environment. Dirt, dust and dander are our friends, but we tend to eliminate all of this, and it’s causing a lot of issues for us.
We take 50% of the medications on the market, yet we’re the 37th healthiest country, at least in the U.S. so we’re not very healthy; a lot of it has to do with our lifestyle and what we’re doing to our gut.
Kefir is one example of a fermented food. It’s a fermented milk product that has the consistency of drinkable yogurt. It’s loaded with probiotics, 36-50 different strains compared to the 7-10 strains you might find in yogurt.
The main difference between yogurt and kefir, is where we know yogurt will feed the good bacteria that’s already in your gut, kefir will actually colonize the gut.
It’s 99% lactose-free, so people who are lactose intolerant can actually benefit from it.
Kombucha is another, it’s a fermented tea. What’s really cool about kombucha is that it contains a yeast that is antibiotic-resistant. If you were in the hospital and given antibiotics you would be given a probiotic that contains this yeast found in kombucha.
And, of course, fermented foods like sauerkraut and other cultured foods that you make by creating a brine and/or immersing it in water.
Buying fermented food versus making it at home has the same issues as store bought probiotics – it’s manufactured in a plant, it travels to the store, it sits on the shelf, who knows how long it will sit, it’s going to lose some of its effectiveness.
Also, a lot of time store-bought kefir is flavoured because the plain is quite tart but you’re not in control of the sugar content – you could be getting more than you bargained for.
Kefir is easy to make at home; it’s the best way to start. You need kefir grains and cow’s milk or sheep’s milk or goat milk – it must have lactose, so it has to come from an animal. You leave it on the countertop for 24 hours, and it will ferment; strain out the gra...

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Dr. Carolyn Griffin explains the link between fermented foods and gut health.

Main Questions Asked about Fermented Foods:

What is fermentation?
Why is it making a comeback?
Why should we be eating fermented foods?
What’s the difference between probiotic supplements and fermented foods?
What are some examples of fermented food?
What’s the difference between making your own and buying it at the store?
How do you make your own kefir or kombucha?

Key Points made by Dr. Griffin about Fermented Foods:

Fermentation has been around for thousands of years and is only recently making a comeback. It’s a natural process of preserving food.
When food is exposed to bacteria and yeast, the microorganisms convert the sugars to lactic acid creating an acidic environment in which fools will not rot or spoil.
I think people are reaching for more information and realizing that they need to be their own health advocate. And, fermentation is a healthy way of getting probiotics into your system, which is going to help your gut heal.
We already know that 70% of your immune system is in your gut, so if you’re eating foods that are going to healthier for you, and you start to heal that, a lot of other conditions that people may be suffering with are going to resolve.
I’m not 100% against probiotic supplements. I just think there is a difference between them and fermented foods. Probiotics are live bacteria. A lot of time in the process of isolating the bacteria to put them in a capsule, a lot die.
Because they’re live organisms, the best source is going to be from fermented foods that you create.
Sauerkraut for example is loaded with probiotics, bacteria, enzymes, vitamins, all kinds of things.
When you’re talking about a supplement, a lot can go wrong. You really need to learn to read labels. So, there’s more of a question mark about a probiotic supplement versus a fermented food.
Research is now showing that the more diverse the bacteria that live in us, the better. We’re finding that people in third world countries don’t have the same health issues that we do; for example, there’s not a lot of auto-immune disease.
One of the reasons is the diversity. We, in Western civilization, tend to live in a very sterilized environment. Dirt, dust and dander are our friends, but we tend to eliminate all of this, and it’s causing a lot of issues for us.
We take 50% of the medications on the market, yet we’re the 37th healthiest country, at least in the U.S. so we’re not very healthy; a lot of it has to do with our lifestyle and what we’re doing to our gut.
Kefir is one example of a fermented food. It’s a fermented milk product that has the consistency of drinkable yogurt. It’s loaded with probiotics, 36-50 different strains compared to the 7-10 strains you might find in yogurt.
The main difference between yogurt and kefir, is where we know yogurt will feed the good bacteria that’s already in your gut, kefir will actually colonize the gut.
It’s 99% lactose-free, so people who are lactose intolerant can actually benefit from it.
Kombucha is another, it’s a fermented tea. What’s really cool about kombucha is that it contains a yeast that is antibiotic-resistant. If you were in the hospital and given antibiotics you would be given a probiotic that contains this yeast found in kombucha.
And, of course, fermented foods like sauerkraut and other cultured foods that you make by creating a brine and/or immersing it in water.
Buying fermented food versus making it at home has the same issues as store bought probiotics – it’s manufactured in a plant, it travels to the store, it sits on the shelf, who knows how long it will sit, it’s going to lose some of its effectiveness.
Also, a lot of time store-bought kefir is flavoured because the plain is quite tart but you’re not in control of the sugar content – you could be getting more than you bargained for.
Kefir is easy to make at home; it’s the best way to start. You need kefir grains and cow’s milk or sheep’s milk or goat milk – it must have lactose, so it has to come from an animal. You leave it on the countertop for 24 hours, and it will ferment; strain out the gra...

Previous Episode

The Downside to Modern Skin Care with Dr. Sandy Skotnicki

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Dr. Sandy Skotnicki talks about the downside to modern skin care.

Dr. Sandy Skotnicki is the founding director of the Bay Dermatology Centre and is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, Department of Medicine in the Divisions of Dermatology and Occupational and Environmental Health. Dr. Skotnicki is a consultant Dermatologist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and is an expert in Allergic Skin Disease.

She is also the author of Beyond Soap: The Real Truth About What You Are Doing To Your Skin And How To Fix It For A Beautiful, Healthy Glow, which details her “product-elimination diet”.

Main Questions Asked about Skin Care:

Why is there such an epidemic of skin issues these days?
How does the alkaline nature of soap affect the bacteria on our skin?
Can you explain your product elimination diet?
What do you see as the future of skin care?

Key Points made by Dr. Skotnicki about Skin Care:

My interest is allergic reactions and just reactions to skin care and other things that touch the skin. It’s part of the reason I wrote the book.
It’s been shown both in the US and in Europe that reactions to skin care products and skin care ingredients, both natural and synthetic, have increased.
A lot of it has to do with how we take care of our skin, which is we do too much to our skin.
One of the most fun chapters to write was chapter two, where I kind of look at the history of cleanliness. How did we get to the point where we have a shower every day or sometimes twice a day? We use shampoo every day, even when our hair’s not dirty; and that’s to make a distinction between what it means to be clean and what it means to be hygienic.
Your hands are the thing that you really want to keep clean, because they’re the tools for transmission of disease; and most people don’t do it properly. You have to do it for two Happy Birthdays.
The other thing is that it’s more about pH. The pH of the skin is acidic, so that’s key to everything the skin needs to function, and if it isn’t acidic, it doesn’t work properly. The first soaps that came along in the 40’s and 50’s were alkaline.
We feel that the high pH cleaning of the skin has damaged our barrier and maybe led to the increase in eczema and allergies.
Then, there’s a further issue of just the sheer number of ingredients in skin care products, and the lack of regulation in North America in particular.
We don’t really know what the use of alkaline soaps for the last 50 to 60 years has done, we don’t have the science, but a lot of people are asking if we haven’t done something to our skin microbiomes over these decades.
If you think about your skin as a brick wall, where the cells are the bricks and your lipids are the mortar, and even just water and soap diminish that mortar so that you end up with a leaky wall; so, what have we done?
Shortly after my book was published, I found a link between food allergies and the skin barriers. There was a study that looked at mice who were sensitized to peanut allergy through the skin, once their skin barrier was disrupted with soap and water.
One of the really important parts of the book is where I write that the reason we’re so clean has nothing to do with health, and everything to do with advertising. We’ve been told that we need to wash every day to be healthy and beautiful, and I’m trying to show the opposite.
If you look at the evolution of humans, and homo sapiens has been around bout 200,000 years, and it’s only in the last 150 that we’ve been cleaning up.
So, we clean up, we’re damaging our microbiome; so, the marketing machine of beauty will latch on to this and say now we need products to repair the microbiome. There’s already a company that has a spray of bacteria that you can put on your skin.
There was study published in about 2012 showing that kids growing up on farms had less asthma. There’re also studies showing that kids that have animals have less allergies. You’d think it would be the other way.
Furthermore, the studies indicate that by adulthood your microbiome is stable and doesn’t change, which makes how we wash the kids in infancy and childhood critical.
Another reason I wrote the book is that I was frustrated with patients coming in with persistent reactions and saying,...

Next Episode

Vagus Nerve Activation with Dr. Navaz Habib

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Dr. Navaz Habib explains the importance of the vagus nerve to our overall health.

Dr. Habib’s book “Activate Your Vagus Nerve” is a simple to follow guide to help you identify and address a major missing piece in patients dealing with chronic health concerns. By activating the Vagus nerve, we can optimize our productivity, focus and energy levels, allowing us to feel the positive effects of upgraded health.

Main Questions Asked about the Vagus Nerve:

What is the vagus nerve and why is it so important?
How do we know if our vagus nerve is working properly or not?
Are there specific signs to look for? Are there tests?
What about treatment? How do we fix this?
Are there exercises to help rehabilitate the vagus nerve?
What else do we need to know about the vagus nerve?

Key Points made by Dr. Habib about the Vagus Nerve:

The vagus nerve is one of the most important nerves in our body. This nerve is the only one that leaves from the cranium, which is where our brain is located, and goes to the other organs.
It goes to many different organs in our body; essentially, you name the organ and the vagus nerve goes to and innervates that organ.
The vagus nerve not only sends information to the organs from the brain, but also from the organs back to the brain.
Most of us have heard of the brain gut connection and the physical connection is the vagus nerve. It is the fastest and clearest direct path between the brain and the gut.
An easy way to check if the gut brain connection is working, and that the vagus nerve can transfer the information between the gut and the brain, is to see if our gut is working the way it should be.
Digestive dysfunction is one of the most important, most common signs of vagus nerve dysfunction that we see.
There is one test that I feel is a great way for anyone to just check to see how well their gut is functioning. It’s called the sesame seed bowel transit time test. Pick up a small bag of white sesame seeds, put a spoonful of these in a glass of water and drink it down, without chewing the seeds. Our body cannot digest the covering so they will show up in the stool. What we are looking for is the time it takes to see the first seeds in our stool and then when we see the last seeds to come out in our stool.
Anywhere between 12 and 24 hours is good. Anything more or less than that is a sign that our vagus nerve isn’t working properly.
There are other signs, as well. The vagus nerve has four different functions. One being a parasympathetic function, which is our rest and digest function – so one thing I look for is how well people handle stress. Inability to handle stress and/or recover from a stressful event means that their bodies are not very well adapted.
15% of the information passing through the autonomic nervous system (which is the system that controls all the things we don’t think about, g., digestion, heartbeat and breathing) is parasympathetic. If these things don’t function well and don’t allow for recovery, it means the vagus is not working well.
This is where a lot of issues with inflammation occur. If we’re not able to control our levels of inflammation, it’s because our vagus is not able to do its job.
We have a system called the blood brain barrier, which is supposed to keep inflammatory products, viruses, , out of the brain; but the vagus is a direct bypass.
If we start to have leakiness in the gut because our function is compromised, it’s easy for the inflammation to get through the gut blood barrier into the vagus nerve and bypass the blood brain barrier leading to the brain fogginess incidents where you are dealing with memory loss, walking into a room and forgetting why, and forgetting where you parked the car, for example.
This is a direct sign of inflammatory processes in the brain, especially when one had a good memory before.
Thus treating the gut issues are not always enough to resolve issues.
Travel is one of one of those things where our body is put under a lot of stress and that stress can be because we’re crossing time zones, for example, and our body is don’t know what time it is, and so we throw off our melatonin responses and our hormones get thrown off. And in doing so, when we change our schedules, our bodies don’t know whether they’re in a state of being awa...