Fermentation is healthy (?)
This has finally become a series. I feel the need to explain (even to myself) why I am so hooked up to fermentation. Even the definition of the word is confused and heterogeneous. For this reason, I will collect some posts tackling the subject from various perspectives. I will try to explain what fermentation is and why it is so important to me. The format, as you guessed it, will be called Fermentation is …
Is it? Spoiler: I don’t know and I don’t care.
Many people I met who are into fermentation do think it is healthy and I feel like it is the main reason they care about it.
I start from the fact that I am not an expert in nutrition or medicine and most hobbyists are not either. However many bloggers and self-claimed experts tend to ride this topic to gain more interest from the community. They like to link papers that prove the benefits of live cultures in food. Any brand selling fermented product have this statement somewhere in their advertisement. I could bet on it, that any kombucha producer has it written on its website. The same story with any other fermented product. Check it yourself. 1 This is the same as greenwashing. Companies blatantly lie just to sell more.
I know however that it is very hard to prove that some food has health benefits. Even common knowledge about nutrition is constantly debunked by a new study. Like for red meat 2 or saturated fats. These are studies that are very complex to make since they require to study a population over many years and usually, it is impossible to isolate all the correlations that are hidden behind the consumption of a given food. For this reason, science can’t say much about this topic and this opens the room for all the pseudo-scientific theories and conspiracies about fermentation and health.
I don’t want to deal with these topics, I don’t try to read scientific literature to understand if my kombucha will make me live longer or not. I don’t really care, but I hate to see people fall so easily into this kind of ideology trap.
I still have my 2 cents to share. I can only see how it can be indirectly healthy and unhealthy in different ways.
A positive effect of my fermentation experiments is the fact that I get to know in depth the production process of what I eat. Of course, most of the food I eat doesn’t come from my experiments, but since I started this journey I am more aware of what I know and don’t know about what I buy at the supermarket. I get very suspicious about foods I have no idea about how they are transformed and what are the ingredients, while before I didn’t care much and I bought stuff without thinking too much about what’s behind them.
On the other side, I also think that fermentation could harm me. It hasn’t so far, but I am aware that these are homemade experiments and I expect they may go wrong sooner or later. Sometimes the result is not exactly how I expected it, especially if it’s the first time I do it. In those cases, it is not easy to tell if it can be eaten or not and all the work I put in it usually makes me more disposed to ignore signs of higher risk. Of course, I am way more careful with the food I give away to friends and family. I never give away something that I made for the first time and I haven’t already eaten myself.
I think that it is a pity that fermentation can’t be appreciated for what it is (read other articles in this series 3 to see what I mean) and people need to lie about it to make it more interesting for the main public.
