Six Fermented Food Recipes

Did you know looking after your gut flora can help your joint pain? How is your microbiome? I'm loving these recipes!

Inflammation is a natural bodily response to stress, infection, or injury. However, prolonged inflammation caused by a self-destructive lifestyle is a harmful response that affects your musculoskeletal system, gastrointestinal function, cardiovascular system, vision, and hormone balance. It’s crucial to control inflammation (there are pain medications of course) but it’s even smarter to prevent inflammation. You can do this through daily exercise, stress management, healthy eating and avoidance of smoking and drinking. But there are many fermented foods and drinks that help reduce inflammation.

Fermented foods

Fermented foods contain natural probiotic's which have both direct and indirect effects on the GI tract, including modulation of resident bacterial colonies and vitamin production. There are also indirect effects exerted at sites outside the GI tract, including the joints, lungs, brain and skin. Indirect effects most likely result from an impact on immunity, via changes in inflammatory mediators such as cytokines. Modulation of inflammatory responses may be related to regulating or modulating the immune system both locally and in the GI tract.

For example it is speculated that inflammation associated with rheumatoid arthritis may be modulated by the use of probiotics (Marteau et al. 2001). When inflammed, the GI tract becomes permeable and serves as a link between inflammatory diseases of the GI tract and extra‐inflammatory disorders such as arthritis. Modulation or downregulation of the immune system and subsequent reduction in GI permeability can result from consuming probiotics. (Yukuchi et al. 1992; Vanderhoof 2000).

So eat up fermented foods people!

References

NCBI - Evidence of the Anti-Inflammatory Effects of Probiotics and Synbiotics in Intestinal Chronic Diseases 
NCBI - Clinical Evidence for the Microbiome in Inflammatory Diseases 

Photograph credit: Jonathan West for the Guardian