Cultured Kids

As in probiotics, active cultures, microorganisms that are beneficial to our guts not art museums, violin lessons, and cotillion.  I am not a scientist or a nutritionist, but I get the whole gut flora thing.  I don't always do things 100% right to keep ours healthy, but I understand why it's important.  If the little bugs that live inside you and keep things inside happy are not happy, that's no good.

There also exists a school of thought which says that generations of damaged/improperly balanced guts leaves us with an inheritance of weakened immune systems, allergies, infertility, and overall less health and well-being than those who ate optimally and did not have the environmental toxins we are daily exposed to no matter how "clean" we try and live.  The Weston A. Price Foundation has plenty of information about this.  Suffice it to say that if you know better about your gut, you should aim to do better.  Science is showing is that a healthy gut is more important that we might assume.

My first experience using a probiotic powder was when Isabelle was about nine months old.  She had a urinary tract infection.  It was asymptomatic until it was really bad.  With an infant who nurses on demand, eats some "real" food, and sips a little water from a cup, normal grumpiness from teething is hard to distinguish from other discomforts.  She had to have a very strong antibiotic, so I ventured into Whole Foods for the first time utterly lost and purchased an infant probiotic powder.  Even though the pediatrician didn't have anything very positive to say about probiotics other than, "It can't hurt," I needed to try it and know that I was doing everything (that I knew at the time) to help her get better.  It made sense to me she needed help rebuilding her good gut flora since antibiotics are broad-spectrum and kill the harmful and beneficial things in your system.  We used it.  It was fine.  It was not mind-blowing.

Fast forward one year almost to the day.  Again, we are at Whole Foods.  I am about 35 weeks pregnant and in search of the items on my list to kill Group B strep.  Isabelle's birth was completely hijacked by GBS and the antibiotics I thought I needed.  That's a whole other story.  I guess I'll share it soon, too, since Will's birth story has been floating around for a while now.

I had the same list of supplements/homeopathic remedies when I was pregnant with her, but I didn't have the scoop on GBS.  What you don't know can a) hurt you and b) dramatically affect your birth plan c) wipe out your baby's gut flora in utero if you have as much intravenous antibiotics in labor as I did.  I got everything on my list, took it twice daily until he was born, swabbed myself for GBS (my awesome midwives offered but said that given the choice, most women your rather do it themselves)at 38 weeks, and tested negative.  I'm beginning to be a little amazed.

Between then and now, we have used several different brands--some capsules, some powder, some even for the animals.  I think eating Activia is a complete joke.  When I buy a probiotic supplement, I want to know how many billion (yes, BILLION) active cells it contains.  Between all of the sugar and over-pasteurized nutritionally devoid dairy, yogurt doesn't offer much.  I'm not saying it doesn't taste good, but I'd rather have ice cream for the sugar (or aspartame which is far, far worse).  Sidenote--when you eat yogurt, please, please eat real whole-fat yogurt and put fruit and honey into it.  It's part of the "eat real food" plan.

I do think that probiotic powders have their place and are great for boosting your immune system when sick, traveling, run down, for infants and children, etc....  Not very long ago, I had a lightbulb moment.  Stupid,  really, but if the obviously lab-created powders are good for you, wouldn't foods that naturally contain various strains of live cultures be even better?  Just like how you can take a whole-foods based multi-vitamin but ideally we all get the needed nutrients from food and ditch the vitamins?

All of the "cultured" things in my fridge at the moment.  The cultures and fats in the butter and creme are delicate, so we use them as toppers since heat damages them.  Same for buttermilk and yogurt--I don't kid myself that cooking with them is the same as having them straight from the fridge.

Part of the reason I'm willing to try incorporate more cultured foods into our everyday eating is that my kids have opposite problems with the same end--one goes too much and too loose, one goes too seldom and it just doesn't smell right.  Yuck, I know.  Once you have kids, you'll be amazed how much you end up talking about poop.  It doesn't gross me out anymore--exploding diapers, catbox, doula work, whatever.  It's just poop.  With my kids, I honestly think of it as an indicator of how well I'm doing for them nutritionally.  There is actually a right and wrong look and smell for elimination.

Maybe I inherited crappy gut flora and passed it on, but I have that knowledge and some tools to help remedy the issue.  So, I started giving them kombucha, a nutritionally loaded fermented drink.  They also get plenty of that whole-fat plain greek yogurt.  I picked up some creme fraiche, cultured butter, and naturally lacto-fermented pickles.  I didn't set my cap on them eating the sauerkraut I struggle to choke down--"It's good for me.  It's good for me.  It's good for me," is my mantra as it goes down.

It helps.  Noticeably so.  I am impressed.  I like what what I'm seeing says.  One goes more often and it doesn't smell like stale airplane bathroom.  The other doesn't run from the table to the potty to have pine cone squiggle (you know the little brown things full of pollen that fall from the trees?) upset stomach.  Hallelujah!  I could easily digress into a Gargantua and Pantagruel style scatalogical moment, but I'll refrain.

Now, I'm not yet hardcore enough to try fermenting my own veggies or brewing kombucha yet.  I've looked into a SCOBY and read up on how to maintain a "mother."  The part about the mushroom blooming in Nourishing Traditions did me in.  I'm afraid I'll be added to a wierdo granola watchlist if I google "mother mushroom bloom where to buy."  I might be on one already.  I'm a bit seditious.  My grocery budget cannot sustain me buying it in quite the quantities I'd like, so maybe I'll get up some nerve and ask around for an extra SCOBY...and pretend I don't know that it's a 'shroom.

Fermented foods and foods with live cultures are important to maintaining wellness.  Not preventing illness or getting healthy.  Maintaining wellness or health and curing or avoiding disease are two very different paradigms.  Compared to even our grandparents (for my generation), our immune systems have to work even harder to keep us healthy. We of course have wider access to medical care when it's appropriate, and that does provide some counterbalance.  Honestly, though, so many of us are so dependent on medicine to patch us through, and I think that's our bodies crying for help.  Maybe just nutrition.

Most of us do not eat locally enough, grow/raise enough or our own food, or consume raw dairy products.  That's part confession on my part.  We could do better in those areas.  We don't "put up" vegetables as relishes or pickles to ferment.  A large percentage of what we eat does not come from near enough to our everyday paths to be considered part of our microbiome--ie their microorganisms are part of our body's flora.  It's really interesting to think that with the technological advances that came from people moving from their family farms into the city and suburbs we lost a lot of nutritional wisdom.  That loss is really catching up with us.

I'm glad to know about these building blocks of health if you will, these supplements that make up for our lacking diets, lacking knowledge, and GMO foods whose purported nutrients are not really bioavailable.  I'm glad to know that I can run to the store and buy a probiotic, some good fish oil or D3 when the days shorten, and beef that I didn't have to do in myself.  I'm also glad to be learning more about how to get what we need from incorporating more cultured and fermented foods into our daily routine.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and amidst my culture increasing this little gem appeared in my inbox.  I subscribe to her blog and am always drawn into her writing.  I've read several other places about gut flora related to birth, breastfeeding, babies going long periods without a bowel movement.  It's all fascinating and admittedly over my head.

We mothers have the power to reverse if not prevent this in our children.  How empowering and terrifying.  The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby and Child Care puts it into layman's terms and even lays out an ideal way of eating preconception and prenatally to put vitamin and mineral stores and gut flora into their best working order.  I do feel overwhelmed by this.  On the other hand, looking at the sicknesses that hopefully will pass them over and the vastly improved cognitive function healthier guts can give them, how can I not try and do better for them?