A woman named Dolores started working for me about a year ago. She had very sensitive skin with constant skin rashes that had been causing her problems for about five years. Her doctor had her quit dairy. She did many courses of antibiotics and took an antihistamine pill every day. Still, it just got worse.
Of course I told her I thought her entire problem was bacteria based, and she needed to stop doing antibiotics and start eating bacteria like crazy. She was more interested in drinking kefir than my fermented ginger beers or chicha, the fermented beverage native to her area, so I told her to go ahead and help herself to all the kefir she wanted as long as there was enough left over for me.
Long story short--she stopped doing antibiotics, started drinking a lot of kefir, and told me today she hasn't taken an antihistamine in four months because she doesn't need them any more. No rashes.
Just exciting! Wanted to share it!
Very exciting indeed! I am so glad you shared; it inspired me to research kefir and yogurt. I am going to try replacing our yogurt with kefir. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteYael, Scroll through my blog--I have many posts on kefir because the stuff continues to blow me away. My husband jokes that if our son gets a skinned knee, I will tell him to put kefir on it! I think it's important to note that the kefir we drink here at the farm is made from raw milk and our own kefir grains. Most store-bought kefir is not nearly as beneficial. Roslyn
DeleteAre you cured? What happened please?
DeleteWas this pasteurized kefir? Can you provide more details please?
ReplyDeleteThanks btw. I didn't even know about kefir. I'm seriously looking into it now.
I cannot recommend pastuerized kefir or most store bought kinds. Their bacteria content just pales in comparison. But also, when working with bacteria, I think there is something special about making your own. I imagine each persons kefir culture is a little different based on the bacteria in his/her own home environment. Anyway, we buy raw milk from our neighbors every morning. I got my kefir grains from the Culture Club 101 in Pasadena, CA about 5 years ago. When we lived in LA I bought raw milk and turned it into kefir. I brought the grains with me when we came to Nicaragua. Kefir is effortless to make once you get the hang of it, but getting the hang of it took a bit of effort. I was unable to do dairy for pretty much my entire life, and I initially tried kefir because I wanted to see if kefir would really "cure" my dairy issues as I had read. It did! And more! I will do a big post on kefir sometime. The Healthy Home Economist has some great posts about kefir, I believe. I think I read about its potential benefits for the first time in the cookbook Nourishing Traditions, but then I read about it again and again in books on the history of dairy. When I started drinking it, it was purely to cure my dairy issues, but today, I think it cures a lot more than that! If I ever get a stomach flu or food poisoning, a quart of kefir will cure it. I have done that experiment enough times between me, my husband, and my son to be completely unafraid of stomach flus. Currently I am testing my hypothesis that if I have a small glass of kefir with every meal I won't ever actually get a stomach flu in the first place. Results good so far! I like kefir mixed in a blender with frozen fruit. My favorite is mango with kefir, banana and cinnamon with kefir, and strawberries with kefir. The taste took a while to get used to. I think for the first two years, I added raw honey to the smoothies I made. Today I love it without honey. Look at me going on and on! Have a wonderful day! Roslyn
DeleteVery interesting, I never thought of kefir being so much health beneficial. In Lithuania on country side its very common to drink it and they do it naturally, but in cities even though they still sell it I don't see many people using it anymore. I don't think I saw it in any other western Europe shops, but good advice, thanks!
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome! All fermented foods are extremely beneficial. Bacteria are the future of health! Fermented veggies are fantastic too.
DeleteThere is also water kefir for those who prefer a vegan option.
ReplyDeleteThere is also water kefir! The Healthy Home Economist has some great posts about that as well. I cannot recommend a vegan diet though. For three months, yes, it's great! But longer than that and it will destroy your body. All of my friends who were vegans in college had serious health repercussions ten years later and were told point blank by their doctors to start eating, at the very least, dairy and fish. My obsessive studies of nutrition for five years led me to the same conclusions. Real Food for Mother and Baby, Nourishing Traditions, and Nutrition and Physical Degeneration are fantastic books on the consequences for your children of the diet you choose. Every diet claims that its followers feel better and have higher levels of health. The Weston A Price Diet is the only diet to offer visual proof of its effectiveness: Children born to parents who follow this diet will not have crooked teeth, cleft palates, or other physical deformities. Crooked teeth are NOT genetic, NOT caused by "soft" foods, they are caused by diet. Vegan diets lead to narrowed faces, deviated septums, and children with crooked teeth. So does the extremely unhealthy Standard American Diet. Anyway, I highly recommend looking into the Weston A Price diet if you are a parent. If you are not or don't plan to be, then eat however suits you!
DeleteHi Roslyn
DeleteI can and I do recommend vegan diet.
Me and my family (2 children, 5 and 16 y.o.) have been vegan for about three years now and nothing in our bodies is destroyed, quite the contrary.
I know long time (10-15+ years) vegans who are fit and healthy.
As far as I know there is no scientific argument claiming vegan diet is harmful to humans.
I like and recommend the work of Dr. Greger over at nutritionsfacts.org
Hi Peter,
DeleteI studied nutrition at Wesleyan University and then on my own extensively for five years before I considered myself qualified to sift through all the conflicting information out there on the subject and form an opinion. In the beginning, I read books and studies defending all the different nutrition positions, including vegetatianism and veganism. I also did science experiments on myself too, trying many different diets for six months and noting any health benefits. In the end I invented something I called Nutritionally Perfect Meals--meals that per 2000 calories would give the consumer 100% of his RDA in every vitamin and mineral required for the upkeep of the human body. I recommend that you input what you eat into this program or one similar as I found it impossible to create a Nutritionally Perfect vegan meal. I was able to pull off some vegetarian meals that could make it to 100% of the RDAs but only with disgusting quantities of eggs, dairy, and mushrooms. My nutritionally perfect meals were and are one of the best things anyone can do for their health as vitamin and mineral deficiencies create health problems that, over a period of years, kill you. Though they are never seen to be the cause.
My knowledge of nutrition is so extensive that I play nutritionist for my friends, family, and coworkers. I have cured: acne, hair loss, menstrual craps, two cases of infertility, eczema, and six cases of "incurable" arthritis. I had a baby that never had cradle cap, eye infections, or spit up, not had a cold, the flu--no fevers or coughs, before the age of 3, despite traveling with me constantly, including travel to Nicaragua. One of my friends who was infertile had been a vegetarian for fifteen years. Two years of expensive infertility treatments with doctors left her childless. Four months on the diet I recommended to her and she was pregnant. Before I studied nutrition I suffered from acne and terrible menstrual cramps and my husband (then my boyfriend) was rapidly losing his hair. Today, we have none of those problems. Today, I don't need to rely on second hand stories about nutritional cures as I have seen too many with my own eyes to doubt the conclusions I made so many years ago.
My friends who were vegetarian and vegan for 15+ years ALL ended up with serious health problems. I don't know your friends so they can't serve as evidence for me. Hypothetically if someone had great nutritional stores before they began, they may last longer than 15 years. I just don't know anyone personally who has, and, knowing what I know about nutrition, I would not expect it. Whether it's cavities, brittle bones, or hair loss, people rarely assume it's their nutrition that is the problem. It's simple math that you can do yourself on NutritionData.com.
Children who eat vegan (and vegetarian) diets will always end up with narrower faces than their parents and (depending on the nutritional status of their parents) will almost always end up with crooked teeth, poor bone development, and cavities. Soy, unless it is fermented, is toxic to the human body and if you rely heavily on that you will see health consequences sooner rather than later. Ditto with unfermented grains. Most vegetables are better for us cooked, not raw, and always should be smothered in fat--for me butter, for you coconut oil or olive oil. Almost all other vegetable oils are toxic in some way or another. That's just the tip of the ice burg.
Went to the website you recommended and here are my immediate reactions: "Cure" morning sickness? Anyone eating a healthy diet doesn't get morning sickness in the first place. The doctor recommending these diets is bald. If I had been his wife, he wouldn't be. Yikes, he recommends unfermented soy!
DeleteRemember that very little science is being properly done today--it is no longer part of the free market. Ayn Rand wrote something similar in one of her essays in the New Intellectual. Science wasn't even being done honestly in her day. Follow the money--any doctor recommending soy or corn products isn't paying attention.
I didn't keep track of what I read back then, so I can only remember the books that really stood out, here are some I recommend for you: Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance
Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and Diet Dictocrats
Cure Tooth Decay: Heal and Prevent Cavities with Nutrition
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects
Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front, The Untold Story of Milk
How To Get Your Kid To Eat... But Not Too Much
The 100 Year Lie: How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health
The Omnivore's Dilemma (especially the chapter on unfermented soy!)
Anyway, put in what you eat for a week at NutritionData.com and verify you aren't short in anything. That's the most important thing. There is no scientific argument needed against veganism, just math.
And watch your kids teeth and faces closely. At 5 they can have x-rays that will show wether they will need braces or not. If they WILL need braces, you still have time to fix it (maybe) with nutrition. Once they are past the age of 8 it's too late. At the very first sign of a cavity please assume your diet is the problem and get on that with the book recommended above. If you suffer from hair loss, know that I have cured it before and can do it again... the man you are following apparently cant.
Best wishes to you,
Roslyn
You are as scared of soy as I am of cholesterol.
DeleteDr. Price was bald.
Compare pictures of Sally Fallon with let's say Mimi Kirk and tell me who looks more healthy to you.
Obviously, we are not going to agree here. To me this sounds like an emotional argument (from both sides) not a rational one.
I love and appreciate you and your work and I wish you and your family best of luck and a lot of health. (And I am really not trying to imply here that you will need it).
Yes, one of my good friends from college who had been a vegetarian most of his life ended up with some major health problems about five years ago and doctors told him it was because of the soy. Fermented soy is fine--tofu and soy sauce. But the soy protein vegetarians often eat isn't. Omnivore's Dilemma has a great chapter on this. And lol, I do love cholesterol! I eat it like the French! But my understanding is that cholesterol is currently being exonerated, even in the mainstream.
DeleteDr. Price was bald before he began his research into how humans ought to eat. But also, I didn't read Price's research and choose his diet. I designed Nutritionally Perfect Meals (meals that per 2000 calories would give the consumer 100% of his RDA in every vitamin and mineral). This exercise in creating these meals taught me that ideal meals should be high in fat; they cannot be nutritionally perfect without a minimum 25% fat content, 50% being the norm. It was the numbers, that led me to this conclusion: a high fat diet is the only way to get all of our micronutrients. I was telling someone that one day and they said, "Oh, you should look into Price's stuff. He says the same thing." And I did. Perviously I had never considered him because in college I was taught that he was a "quack." But seven years of research later, I concluded that HE was not the quack.
But to clarify: I am not a Weston A Price "follower." I am not a Standard American who decided to "follow" a diet some friend recommended. I researched nutrition for SEVEN years AND studied it in college. (I am not yelling, there just isn't an italics option.) I clocked in over a thousand hours creating my nutritionally perfect meals.
Sally Fallon is a country girl who badly needs a stylist, yes. We totally agree on that one. She's not unhealthy looking--I have met her in person. She could be beautiful for an older lady, but not without a stylist.
I am sure you have done your research as well, and it let you to different conclusions, and we are not going to agree. This is fine. We are free people, and we get to do our own research and come to our own conclusions. But my conclusions are very firm in both diet and parenting--and this blog is about both of those things.
I did feel frustrated with your "don't forget the vegan option" quip because I would never go to a vegan blog and say, "Don't forget the meat options!" That would be rude. So I don't know why you thought it would not be rude to do that on my blog. My guess is that you did not realize how much time I spent studying nutrition in order to decide for myself and my family the best way to eat. My guess is that you think I am only an expert in parenting and never studied anything else. But parenting starts with the physical. That's where this entire blog starts. My "2-20 Years Before Baby" posts are all about health and what led me to the conclusions I made. And I still post rather frequently about health.
http://roslynross.blogspot.com/search/label/2-20%20Years%20Before%20Baby
I am glad you enjoy my work on parenting. I wish I could convince you that I put as much effort into my work on nutrition as I have into my work on parenting. I didn't want to just delete your thoughtless comment--that would be silencing you. But I would very much appreciate knowing if that is what you would have preferred instead of me arguing with you?
I also wish you and your family the best.
That's great because i have alleries to nuts and wheat and maybe milk.
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