It’s all about community
“We ferment to be together.” Maybe you’ve heard us say that before. It’s sort of become our unofficial motto, our way of acknowledging the community around us.
And you know what? It’s true, in more ways than we could have imagined.
Elisa Caffrey is a Ph.D. candidate in Microbiology and Immunology with Stanford’s Justin Sonnenberg lab, where some of the most exciting and pioneering research is happening around fermented foods and gut health. (Just log in to Netflix if you don’t believe us.)
According to her, the buzz now in this rapidly evolving field is around the growing understanding of microbes not as individual organisms, but as communities, and how these communities interact with one another and how those interactions affect our health.
We’re thrilled to count Elisa as part of the VK community. And so, we wanted to take this chance to pick her brain about all things microbial and fermented, to answer some basic questions and maybe offer some clarity around what “gut health” really means and how fermented foods like Volcano Kimchi help get us there.
Interested? Read on…
What’s the link between fermented foods and personal health?
There are different ways we can think about this.
The first is that the actual fermentation process has certain advantages especially when it comes to things like detoxification. For example, fermentation of cassava has been really helpful in terms of decreasing the amount of toxins that are present (see fufu in Nigeria or lafun in Indonesia for examples). So, it makes something edible.
There are various studies looking at the increase in nutrients following fermentation. For example, with kombucha, it’s not that the antioxidants increase because of the microbes, but the microbes actually make antioxidants that are already in the tea leaves bioactive (meaning they have an effect on the surrounding tissues or cells).
A newer wave around health and fermented foods is this understanding of the actual chemical compounds that are made by microbes during fermentation. We see that things like lactic acid and acetic acid, which are produced by microbes that help acidify fermented food and decrease the potential pathogens… also seem to have some advantages in terms of the impact on the immune system and other benefits that we’re seeing in our bodies.
And then there is the increase in gut microbiome diversity. We know that as countries have industrialized there seems to be a trend in the decrease of gut microbiome diversity that correlates pretty well to this rise in what is considered industrialized diseases. So, the hypothesis is, if we increase gut microbiome diversity could we help to decrease the rate of these non-communicable diseases like metabolic disease or cardiovascular disease, etc.
What do we get right and what do we get wrong when it comes to our understanding of fermented foods?
It is still very much in its infancy. We really don’t know a lot about fermented foods at the end of the day. The general hypothesis has been that there are good microbes and there are bad microbes. That categorization is based on early fermented food research by the 19th Century French chemist Louis Pasteur who was trying to identify spoilage microbes and said these must be bad for you because they cause spoilage and these are good for you because they do not cause spoilage, or what he called “putrefication of the gut.”
Our understanding now has completely changed and it is all based on the community of microbes. And so, the way in which microbes might be metabolically active, or whether they produce toxins or not, it’s all related to where they are in their environment, what nutrients they have access to, and what other microbes are in that same environment. That is something that is a very active area of research and is driving the effort to understand this food to gut microbiome link.
“Understanding the interaction of not just individual microbes but between communities is going to be incredibly important to understanding what the potential benefit of a fermented food on the individual consumer is.”
Can you say a bit more about the link between microbial communities and gut health?
You might have microbes in your ferment that, if you isolated them on their own, you might say, “Oh, that’s not good.” But it’s not harmful for you at all because it comes with a full community. And then when you consume it it’s also interacting with your own personalized gut microbiome community. And so, understanding the interaction of not just individual microbes but between communities is going to be incredibly important to understanding what the potential benefit of a fermented food on the individual consumer is. Because your gut microbiome is going to be very different than someone else’s.
What should consumers know when it comes to fermented foods?
In this environment where a lot of people are pushing the health aspect of fermented foods as marketing you get a lot of labels that say gut friendly, and I look at the labels and don’t understand what it means in this context because there’s nothing in there that makes it any different from a can of soda. There is a paper I am writing now with some dieticians and nutritionists… outlining what is a fermented food, what does gut health even mean. Hopefully by end of summer we should have something to give to people as a guide. But the way I’ve looked at it is to be really mindful of the diversity of fermented foods and diversity of fiber consumption. Vegetable ferments are a good example because they are mostly spontaneous ferments (meaning no yeast or bacteria is added). Try different brands, or different ferments. You could try the same sauerkraut over different seasons and find different microbes from one batch to the next. And try to find producers that you trust and that you can speak to, to understand the process they use.
Finally, how did you come to study ferments?
My mom is Italian, and I grew up there. My grandmother’s family have been sauerkraut makers for 200 years and my grandfather was a cheesemaker. That was his whole life. So having that family history I was really interested in putting these pieces together.
Image: Elisa Caffrey (L) with Stanford alum Hannah Wastyk and VK Founder Aruna Lee