How kefir transforms your diet

I love the tangy, delicious flavor, creamy consistency and confirmed health benefits of live, probiotic-rich fermented beverages like kefir milk. Unfortunately, the kefir milk typically found at grocery stores tends to be an expensive, less healthy and fake version of the real thing.

(This is an excerpt from The Spartan Diet Journal email. Read it here.)

That’s one of many reasons why I recommend that you get and keep live kefir grains.

No, kefir grains are not grains like wheat grains — they’re a specific collective of friendly microorganisms that, when added to milk or just about any drink containing sugar, initiates a natural fermentation process.

In other words, kefir grains are like a sourdough starter, kombucha scoby or vinegar mother. They’re used, cultivated and shared for the purpose of fermenting foods.

Kefir grains are especially valuable in an industrialized food context, because they enable us to make fermented dairy products using pasteurized milk.

What’s wrong with industrial milk?

For many thousands of years, all uncooked dairy was both raw and fermented. Pasteurized and unfermented dairy is historically new to the human diet.

You can see sad echoes of the glorious past of cultured dairy in the supermarket dairy case, most commonly in the existence of product categories like “sour cream” and “buttermilk.”

Have you ever wondered why buttermilk is “cultured” and butter is not? After all, fermented buttermilk is a byproduct of fermented butter. So how is one fermented and the other is not?

In fact, supermarket buttermilk isn’t buttermilk at all — it’s not the byproduct of the butter-making process. When you see “cultured buttermilk” on the container, it’s skim milk inoculated with isolated starter culture bacteria and yeast to simulate buttermilk. “Sweet cream buttermilk” is a similar product, but with pasteurized cream used instead of skim milk.

Supermarket buttermilk is “fermented” in the same way that yeast-leavened bread is “fermented.” A particular and limited subset of microbes is applied to obtain a specific outcome. Yeast is used for bread to make it rise, but it’s an incomplete fermentation and doesn’t transform the dough into something amazing. Likewise, cultures are added to milk to result in a sour taste, but the resulting product doesn’t taste like buttermilk.

Store “buttermilk” also tends to contain flavorings, gums, thickeners, stabilizers, preservatives and artificial colors. The result is a lousy drink that isn’t buttermilk, doesn’t taste good and isn’t all that good for you.

Here’s how your great, great, great grandparents did milk. They milked the cow, goat or sheep. To separate milk from cream, the milk was allowed to sit at room temperature for a few hours, during which time the cream rose to the top, the milk sank to the bottom, and all of it fermented thanks to the microbes naturally present in fresh milk. (Fresh milk is loaded with massive quantities of healthy microbes designed to boost the immune system of calves with instant perfect gut flora.)

They might have kept some of the cultured cream for making other foods. Or they would use the cream to make butter, a process that involved agitating the cream until butter separated from buttermilk.

The raw milk, already fermented, might be consumed immediately. Whatever wasn’t consumed or made into butter, buttermilk, yogurt or cheese, would become “clabbered,” which means it was allowed to continue fermenting. When eaten as a dish, clabbered milk was called clabber. American farmers, especially in the South, used to eat clabber with brown sugar, molasses, nutmeg or cinnamon, or fruit. It occupied a similar place in the diet as yogurt.

The introduction of pasteurization, however, killed clabber and now this once-common food is essentially lost to history.

It’s not so much that our ancestors fermented milk. It’s that they had no way to stop it from fermenting. And they welcomed that fermentation because it preserved their milk in the absence of refrigeration and transformed milk into a dozen other foods.

Until refrigeration and pasteurization, all dairy was raw and fermented, from Ancient Rome 2,000 years ago to Ancient India 3,000 years ago and long before that.

Pasteurized and unfermented dairy foods are far less tasty and healthy than the real thing.

And that’s why kefir is so beneficial. Kefir is wonderful, because it enables us to ferment pasteurized milk and cream, making it similar to the dairy humans consumed for thousands of years.

Kefir grains enable you to easily make crème fraîche, cultured sour cream, cultured butter and cultured milk that are free of the additives you’ll find in supermarket “cultured” dairy.

In addition to enjoying kefir’s substantial health benefits, I love to keep my own cultivation of kefir grains because that allows me to make a variety of fermented foods, which are staples in my kitchen. Making my own fermented European style butter, for example, is more nutritious and delicious than regular organic butter. (That amazing butter from Normandy, France, is tastier because it’s fermented.) Natural fermented butter is typically made with raw cream from cows that are 100% grass fed their whole life. Grass fed raw cream is naturally rich in probiotics and other nutrients.

Sadly, finding raw cream is not always easy or simple, as raw foods are banned from sale in some parts of the United States and in many countries around the world.

When I can’t get my hands on grass fed raw heavy cream, I buy the best high quality organic heavy cream I can find (that comes in a glass bottle) and use kefir grains to ferment it. This process not only basically “unpasteurizes” the cream by fermenting it with cultures, a process that results in flavors and health benefits akin to what’s typically found in raw, lightly clabbered cream, but it will also allow you to make crème fraîche and sour cream. I can also use it as a starter in cheesemaking with rennet. And, of course, I use kefir to make probiotic-rich beverages including kefir milk.

Why homemade?

The kefir you make at home is healthier and less expensive than any kefir product you can buy readymade. You can also avoid the plastic bottles that kefir tends to come in.

Store-bought kefir drinks also have more liquid and less strain varieties of kefir cultures. Homemade kefir is more nutritionally dense, and has 40 to 60 different strains of probiotics compared to roughly 10 in commercially produced ones. You control exactly what goes into your kefir so you can choose the highest quality milk possible and make as small or as large a quantity you wish, making sure none goes to waste. And you can ferment it more or less to match your taste and what you’re making with it.

Additionally, when you keep kefir grains at home, you have the option to quickly make butter when you need it if you have some heavy cream in your refrigerator. You can make sour cream cultured with kefir as well. Even coconut milk and nut milks can be cultured with kefir making them far healthier and more nutrient rich for consumption.

What is kefir and where does it come from?

Kefir cultures probably emerged in nature somehow, were captured by humans, then disappeared from nature. It may have emerged in China, but has been cultivated in the Caucasus region (populated by people renowned for their longevity), later spreading into Russia, Turkey and then across the world. Now, kefir has been passed from person to person over thousands of years, and that’s how it survives.

Kefir grains are remarkable microorganisms consisting of bacteria and yeast that cluster together into a grain-like form. When larger clusters form they look like tiny cauliflower pieces. Kefir grains are made up of over thirty species of bacteria and at least one species of yeast that support one another symbiotically. And all we need to do to keep kefir alive is to feed it with milk or cream.

The human species enjoys a wonderful, mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship with kefir. We sustain and cultivate kefir microorganisms, ensuring their reproductive survival; kefir improves human health.

Kefir grains feed on the lactose sugars in milk and transform them into lactic acid. The bacteria and yeast ferment the sugars in different ways. The yeasts convert simple milk sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, which is what gives kefir that mild effervescent taste. Whereas the bacteria causes the cultured milk to become more sour as it converts the sugars into lactic acid.

We’ve grown suspicious as a culture about foods like bread and milk, and the industrialized versions of those foods caused health problems, leading to widespread gluten- and lactose-intolerance. Many people falsely believe that bread and milk is bad for you. But it’s just the unfermented, industrial versions that harm health.

Lactose-intolerant people can safely drink kefir dairy because the lactose is transformed, just as it is in natural raw fermented dairy. Evolution never prepared us to drink pasteurized unfermented dairy.

That’s why pasteurized, unfermented dairy is not part of The Spartan Diet, but raw and fermented dairy is.

One important note about raw dairy: We can’t offer a blanket recommendation for raw milk, unfortunately, because we can’t know your source.

Because raw milk can’t be industrialized, the industrialized dairy industry has made sure that raw milk is illegal in most places. That turns buying raw milk into a kind of shady drug deal in countries and US states where raw milk has been outlawed. If you can find quality raw milk that’s tested and regulated for safety, then we recommend that. If not, kefir milk is the next best thing. (Using kefir with raw milk is also great.)

Like other naturally fermented foods, kefir beverages have a tangy sour taste that doesn’t appeal to everyone, especially at first. Other kefir foods, especially kefir-fermented butter, however, would be preferred to conventional industrial butter in a blind taste-test by most people.

Either way, kefir helps protect against lifestyle illnesses because of kefir’s anticarcinogenic, anti-inflammatory and anti-pathogenic effects. Kefir is so powerful in fixing what makes certain foods intolerable for people to consume that those sensitive to the effects of certain foods such as lactose intolerant could slowly introduce kefir cultured dairy back into their diets again. Kefir even helps reduce high cholesterol.

On the care and feeding of kefir

If you’ve got a friend with kefir grains, ask for some. They’re self-replicating and easy to grow, so your friend will be happy to share. Otherwise, you can buy kefir grains on Amazon, Cultures for Health, Etsy, Yemoos or any of hundreds of online stores available through a Google search.

If you order kefir grains online, they’ll be exhausted from the trip. Just place the grains in a glass jar of fresh milk, and change the milk every day for 3 to 5 days, or until the grains are successfully making strong milk kefir within that 24-hour period.

If you’d like to slow down the growth of your kefir grains, place your grains with fresh milk in the refrigerator and feed them every month or so.

I always keep kefir grains in a whole pint of cream. That way, I’m always just a few minutes away from fermented butter, fermented whipped cream, crème fraîche (cultured cream), Mexican crema espesa (cream fermented with buttermilk). It’s also ready to go for baking or hot chocolate.

I’ve kept kefir grains in refrigerated cream for up to two months without feeding and it’s always great. (The larger the volume of milk or cream, the longer they can go without feeding.)

No Spartan Diet kitchen is complete without wonderful kefir grains working their magic on whatever dairy foods and drinks you enjoy.

The easiest and most delicious way to add years to your life

A new study found that people who eat just a half tablespoon of olive oil a day are less likely to die from heart disease, Alzheimer’s or lung disease than people who eat less olive oil.

Specifically, people who consumed more than a half tablespoon a day (compared with people who don’t eat olive oil), had a 19% lower risk of dying from heart disease, a 17% lower risk of dying from cancer, a 29% lower risk of dying from a neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer’s, and an 18% lower risk of dying from lung disease.

The simple way to take advantage of this information is to simply use olive oil instead of butter, margarine or other oils when eating and cooking.

The Mediterranean Diet ranked #1 yet again

US News and World Report ranks fad and other diets annually. And every year for the past five years running, the Mediterranean diet came out on top.

The Mediterranean Diet isn’t a great diet compared with the truly healthiest diet in history, the Spartan Diet, simply because it’s vague about ingredient quality. But, like the Spartan Diet, it calls for olive oil and an emphasis on plant foods, it will always be healthier than whatever fad diets the nutrition industry comes up with.

The Spartan Diet is technically compatible with the Mediterranean Diet, but it differs in the Spartan Diet’s much higher standards for food types and food quality, cooking and baking methods, stronger emphasis on fermented foods and other details.

Why your diet should be 100% food

The best thing to eat is… food. Sounds obvious. But people eat all kinds of things that aren't food. (This is an excerpt from The Spartan Diet Journal email newsletter.)

In fact, almost everything that comes in a box, bag, bottle, carton, can and almost every pre-prepared food product that you buy in the supermarket contains things that aren't food.

In order to keep the product from spoiling, separating, showing its age, or revealing itself as the bland, stale industrial factory product that it is, manufacturers add preservatives, emulsifiers, stabilizers, thickeners, artificial flavors, flavor enhancers and artificial colors to create the illusion of quality and freshness. Examples from common bottled salad dressing include Xanthan gum, polysorbate 60, Yellow #5, disodium guanylate and disodium inosinate.

That’s what you’ll find on the label. What you won’t find on the label are all the non-food ingredients manufacturers are allowed by law to add without putting them on the label. They’re considered “manufacturing aids.” They’re not on the list of ingredients. But they’re in the package. And they’ll go into your body if you eat the food.

Sometimes literally in the actual package. The boxes, bags and cans that contain packaged foods are often permeated with all kinds of non-food chemicals. This is especially problematic because packaging itself is unlabeled, so it’s hard for consumers to choose less harmful packaging alternatives.

Canned food doesn’t just come in a can. That can is usually lined with acrylic, polyester or a lining that contains bisphenol A (BPA), which is an endocrine disruptor linked to cancer, reproductive and metabolic disorders. Produce wrapped in plastic or in plastic containers might also contain endocrine disrupting chemicals. Paper cups, like the kind you get with your to-go coffee, also tend to have plastic linings.

Takeout containers used by restaurants and supermarkets typically contain fluorine, which means they were treated with a group of chemicals called PFAS, known to cause reproductive and organ problems in lab animals.

And one of the biggest and fastest growing non-food substances in our diets is collectively known as micro-plastics. Because of humanity’s irresponsible use and handling of plastics, tiny particles of plastic are now everywhere — in the air we breath, the water we drink and the food we eat. Some people eat the equivalent of a credit card worth of micro plastic each week.

It comes in drinks sold in plastic bottles, including bottled water.

One of the biggest sources of mircoplastics is bottom-feeding seafood: mussels, oysters and scallops, and to lesser extent shrimps and crabs. These bottom feeders are getting second-hand plastic garbage that has sunk to the ocean floor, and collect it in their bodies throughout their lives. The oceans contain millions of tons of microplastics. Around 80% of ocean litter is plastic.

Microplastics damage cell health throughout the body, and can even pass through the blood-brain barrier. They’ve recently been correlated to inflammatory bowel disease.

Over the months and years and decades, we ingest an enormous quantity and variety of non-food chemicals and substances that nature never anticipated and that our bodies doesn't know what to do with.

The only solution is to make the effort to consume only food. Avoid packaged foods. Avoid food in containers. Avoid bottled drinks. Avoid consuming bottom-feeding seafood.

Here’s an example: Instead of buying bottled salad dressing, make your dressing in a ceramic or glass bowl using, say, organic extra-virgin olive oil; fresh squeezed organic lime juice; freshly pressed garlic; fresh dill, oregano and thyme; freshly ground pepper and salt. Now that's food.

Not only does a dressing made from such ingredients taste vastly better than any bottled dressing, it also nourishes and strengthens the body.

Why? Because it's food!

What to do AFTER your New Year's resolution

We write this on New Year’s Eve, the time of year when we make New Year’s Resolutions. These usually involve health: Drink less. Eat better. Exercise more.

Many of us will embrace the growing tradition of “Dry January,” where we drink zero alcohol during the first month of the year.

Others will jump on the fasting bandwagon, regularly going 24 hours or more without eating any food.

Whatever your resolution, you should consider what happens after your initial surge of motivation. What happens in February — after Dry January?

What happens the day after your fast?

What happens when you go OFF your diet?

The bad news about resolutions is that they’re made in a fit of motivation. But motivation never lasts. Never.

The good news about resolutions is that they actually lower your need for motivation. Let me explain.

We’re all governed by something called hedonic adaption, which is that our enjoyment of things is governed by recent experiences. For example, an average slice of pizza might be heaven for a sailor who’s been on a submarine for six months, but hell for someone who’s spent the last six months in Naples, Italy.

Anytime you engage in something that takes will power — say, fasting for a day — the difficulty of it has to be matched by your motivation. High difficulty requires high motivation. When your fast is over, your motivation might be lower. But so are your expectations for how much or how often to eat. Take advantage of that.

How? The best practice is to resume with half. So after fasting for 24 hours, start fasting every day for 12 hours. Or better yet, 15 hours. In other words, skip breakfast. You’ll have less motivation. But you’ll need less. The benefits of fasting for 12 of 15 hours every day are huge.

After Dry January is over, resume drinking only half the amount that you used to.

After training for (and running) a marathon, resume training at half the intensity.

Doing something that requires huge motivation gives you a gift, which is that it resets your hedonic adaption and enables you do to more than you used to with less motivation.

So after your New Year’s resolution is over and done, don’t go back to the old habit. Maintain half of whatever you did during your surge of motivation.

The miracle of home-made vinegar

Harvesting my own homemade, naturally fermented red wine vinegar fills me me joy. (I haven’t had to buy red wine vinegar for more than a decade.)

This vinegar’s mother created itself from the wild yeast in the air and from the wine itself. I was lucky (but also patient), as it took almost a year for this miracle of nature to happen.

And the rewards are endless, gratifying and delicious. No commercially produced red wine vinegar could ever taste as good as a homemade red wine vinegar made using the exquisite natural wine from Donkey & Goat (full disclosure: I am a small investor in the winery).

Spices lower inflammation (and raise flavor!)

New research shows that adding plenty of spices reduces inflammation. 

In a randomized, controlled feeding study, Penn State researchers found that when participants ate a meal high in fat and carbohydrates with six grams of a spice blend added, they had lower inflammation markers compared to when they ate a meal with less or no spices.

The researchers used a somewhat random blend of basil, bay leaf, black pepper, cinnamon, coriander, cumin, ginger, oregano, parsley, red pepper, rosemary, thyme and turmeric. 

It's likely that the most anti-inflammatory of these spices are ginger and turmeric. 

Most so-called lifestyle disease are associated with chronic inflammation, including cancer, cardiovascular disease and obesity, which affect some 72 percent of the U.S. population.

The ideal diet is the Spartan Diet, which starts with the highest-quality non-inflammatory foods that are flavored deliciously with plenty of herbs and spices for maximum health and deliciousness. 

(The picture shows the glorious spices I once bought in the Marrakesh Medina in Morocco.)

How to make Spartan Muesli

Forget about that stale, sugary old industrial cereal that comes in a box. For a healthy start to your day, a delicious bowl of Spartan Muesli gives you incredible flavor and all the nutrients you need for total energy. It's easy to prepare, and you can make plenty in advance. We recommend you have it with Spartan Cashew Milk.

INGREDIENTS

3 ½ cups rolled old fashioned whole-grain oats
½ cup raisins
1 cup sugar-free, sulfur-free dried fruit bits (date, fig, apricot, prune, apple, pear, cranberry, peach, cherry, pineapple, coconut, etc.)
¾ cup ground yellow or brown flax seeds
½ cup raw chopped walnuts
¾ cup raw whole almonds
2 tablespoons raw sunflower seeds
1 ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon
Spartan Cashew Milk
Fresh fruit (sliced banana, peaches, apples or blueberries)

INSTRUCTIONS

1. In a large bowl, combine all dry ingredients well with a large fork.
2. To serve, in a bowl, combine ½ cup to ¾ cup of muesli mix with ¾ cup to 1 cup of cashew milk and top with 1 cup sliced fresh fruit or berries or a combination thereof.

NOTES

Store in a large glass jar or bowl with lid. Place it in the cupboard to last a week, or in the refrigerator to last several weeks.

How to eat for mental clarity and energy

Diet and lifestyle can affect your ability to think, pay attention and concentrate, both in the long term and the short term. 

Now, a new study from Ohio State University tested 51 women on attention after feeding some of them them a meal high in saturated fat and others the same meal made with sunflower oil, which is high in unsaturated fat. 

Unsurprisingly, women who at the saturated fat meal scored worse on the test. 

Researchers claimed to be surprised by this outcome. I'm surprised that they're surprised. Isn't extreme mental fogginess obvious, clear and conspicuous when you eat junk food? 

The scientists pointed out another obvious point, which is that even the control group at a high-fat meal, and that women who ate a low-fat meal might have score even higher on their attention test. 

Mental clarity and energy is a major outcome on The Spartan Diet. It's major because this diet exists to enable you to live the best possible life. And doing so means that you can experience life more fully, succeed in your career and passions and learn, grow and enjoy deep relationship. All this needs your attention. 

The best kind of meal for maximum mental energy in fact is not a super low-fat meal, but a meal balanced in the highest-quality fats, carbs and proteins. For example: baked wild-caught salmon on a big salad of seasonal greens and vegetables and a dressing home-made with extra virgin olive oil, vinegar or lemon juice with fresh herbs (maybe with some mushrooms on top). This kind of meal will actually increase your mental clarity and focus, not decrease it. 

In general, the secret to a mental focus-enhancing diet involves food quality, and balanced quantity. Small amounts of dietary fat, mostly in the form of extra virgin olive oil, nuts and avocados. Complex carbs in the form of naturally leavened home-made ancient grain bread in small quantities. Seasonal fruits and vegetables. High-quality nuts, seeds and legumes. 

The best part is this: The more you eat healthy, high-quality Spartan Diet foods, the most sensitive you get to foods that make you feel mentally foggy. Your mental attention after a meal becomes a solid point of data about the quality of the food you just ate. 

How the pandemic is improving our culture with healthy habits

In the short term, the coronavirus crisis is a disaster. The deaths and hospitalizations. The social distancing and economic catastrophe. It’s almost all bad news.

The good news is that the crisis is upgrading our culture, and that will help everyone in the long term.

People are learning the joy of baking home-made, sourdough and sometimes ancient-grain bread.

Reducing trips to the store means, for many, planing vegetable gardens and preserving those foods with fermentation.

For the first time ever, a large number of people are getting into the habit of washing their hands right, which will prevent countless deaths and hospitalizations for as long as lots of people do it.

People are walking and biking more and driving less.

Restaurant trips are almost non-existent now, as many people are learning to cook — some for the first time ever.

As we learn that COVID-19 is more likely to kill people with lifestyle diseases, like cigarette smoking, obesity and diabetes, the incentive is greater than ever to maintain a healthier lifestyle. Until we get a vaccine, our best defense against the worst outcomes for people who do get the virus appears to be a strong immune system, which is something that can be achieved through diet, exercise and stress-management practices, like meditation.

The coronavirus crisis isn’t good, obviously. But the healthy habits it’s nudging us to adopt are very good, and will serve us for decades.