Fermented foods like sauerkraut can be fantastic for rheumatoid arthritis relief. Learn how fermented foods can reduce inflammation and increase the microbiome diversity.

In this episode:

• A study shows the positive effect of fermented vegetables on inflammatory markers and microbiome diversity
• Lipid peroxidation and oxidative stress
• What to do if we can’t tolerate sauerkraut, and how you can begin to eat these foods once again without problem
• Miso paste

Good day friends, Clint here with another video on reversing inflammatory arthritis symptoms. I’m going to show you how to reduce inflammation and how to improve your microbiome diversity and why that matters using good old fermented foods, in this case, sauerkraut. And before you say to yourself, I can’t eat that, I’m going to also show you how you can eat it if you’re currently having trouble eating this food, because the benefits far outweigh the small amount of challenge that’s needed to get it into your diet if it’s not already. So stick with us, I’ll show you how to eat this at the end of this video after we first of all talk about all the benefits of eating fermented vegetables.

A study that was done just a few years ago showed that the volunteers who ate fermented vegetables on a regular basis not only reduced their inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein, but they also increased their microbiome diversity. The American Gut Project a few years ago found that the diversity of our colonic microbes is associated with better human health. So a healthy human has up to a thousand different microbial species in their gut. And this is a wonderful thing. So if we eat lots of different plant foods, we can create lots of different happy microbes in the same way that your children, if you have them, might like to eat different things, so do microbes. And so if we give them lots of different types of plants, we end up with lots of different species of bacteria. And that bacteria work synergistically to make very important substances, one of which is short chain fatty acids. The short chain fatty acids are fuel or food for the epithelium cells which line your gut and protect you from this condition called leaky gut. In which the spacing between these epithelial cells increases and allows bacterial proteins or bacterial components like lipopolysaccharide, saccharides, or even whole bacteria themselves to translocate into our bloodstream. And as the studies have shown, to end up in our joints and trigger an immune response and localized inflammation.

We love the concept of eating fermented vegetables. Not only that, fermented vegetables are a very rich source of a certain type of molecule that can protect against lipid peroxidation. So another brief scientific lesson here. Oxidative stress is where we’ve got too many free radicals in the body to be able to be neutralized by our own antioxidants. And one of the biggest negative outcomes of this is that these free radicals can degrade our cell membranes and cause cell death. This can occur in the gut lining so that it exacerbates leaky gut. So fermented foods are one of the highest sources of molecules that can reduce lipid peroxidation and help protect our gut lining even further. So there are tremendous, valuable reasons to be eating fermented vegetables like sauerkraut, to increase our diversity, to reduce inflammation and to help reduce for oxidative stress on the cell membrane.

But what if we can’t actually tolerate the sauerkraut? And let me explain why that might be the case. So sauerkraut and all fermented vegetables are all a very high source of histamine. Now, histamine is normally broken down easily in the body by our microbiome and also by substance, which is an enzyme called DAO. Now in most people they just break down histamines trivially, just like we metabolize our food and we go about being oblivious to all the other activities in our body. Similarly, we’ll consume foods that are high in histamine and not even know the difference, that’s most of us. However, if we’ve got a gut that’s dysbiotic, if we’ve got too many pathogenic bacteria and not enough healthy species and a bad balance of microbes, then what results is a whole bunch of uncertainties around things that healthy people consider to be a given. And so with our patients, when we have a dysbiotic gut, we might have higher intolerance of histamine levels. So what do we do about this? Well, one thing we can do is, first of all, just to start with very small amounts. This way we can slowly increase the diversity of our gut, slowly reduce a little bit of inflammation. And with that rebalancing of the microbiome comes an ability to slowly improve our tolerance of intake of histamine. Now there’s another strategy, garlic and onion both control or regulate histamine levels. And so if we eat more garlic, eat more onions, then we might be able to slowly eat more fermented foods.

So putting this together, we know we want to eat fermented vegetables because they improve the microbiome diversity, they help to reduce inflammation, and they help to reduce oxidative stress. I should add, taste absolutely delicious on top of a salad or as a side to whatever meal you like and come in many different flavors and offer that moisture and taste diversity. I personally love the taste, so we want the fermented foods for all these different reasons. And then what we need to do is just be careful as to when and how we eat the fermented foods. We do not have sauerkraut in the reintroduction process inside our materials until after 60 days. So we want to rebalance the microbiome first, and then we come in with the hard hitting sauerkraut and then we’re able to really increase that diversity further and further reduce inflammatory arthritis. When you’re shopping for your fermented vegetables, make sure no pasteurization, which is flash heating by applying a high temperature like that, you’re actually defeating the purpose that we’re actually trying to achieve here, which is eating live bacteria. It’s best to buy local or buy one that has clearly not had that treatment applied to it.

And finally, if you’re a little nervous about eating the fermented vegetables, but you do want to get started with some fermented foods and you’re not quite ready for the sauerkraut then start with some miso paste. Miso paste is a wonderful, low reactionary fermented food that you can start with, almost like with training wheels on. If you’ve got a lot of dysbiosis and inflammation. And miso paste is actually the first fermented food source that we have people test in the reintroduction process inside our materials. So that’s a good place to start, and we have them reintroduce this food on day eight. So it’s early in the process just to start to get some bacteria in to augment what we’re doing with all of the fiber intake so that we can begin to increase the diversity and continue to reduce inflammation. Inside the miso paste those who are worried about the soy, the soy proteins are being broken down through the fermentation process into harmless amino acids. So even people who have had soy allergies I’ve seen have not had problems with miso paste. Not always, but just proceed with optimism when it comes to introducing miso paste.

So I hope you found this video helpful. If you like it, give us a thumbs up. Post a comment below. And if you’re looking for a program that can transform your life with inflammatory arthritis and help you take control back, reduce inflammation, build strength, and become as happy as you possibly can be, check out www.RheumatoidSolutions.com.