Our great grandmothers were usually knowledgeable and adept at fermenting foods, i.e., allowing microbes to grow on food, thereby keeping foods, such as vegetables, fruits, and meats, from spoiling while increasing the nutritional value of the food and providing you with beneficial probiotic microbes. They may not have appreciated these benefits, but surely at least knew that it was a useful method of preserving food without refrigeration. Modern processed foods, widespread availability of home refrigeration, and convenience caused most of us to abandon this practice. But it represents yet another mistake we’ve made in healthy eating, coupled with blundering dietary guidelines, exploitative practices, and ignorance or indifference of food manufacturers.
Wife and mother, Donna Schwenk, struggled with health issues of her own and her family. Twenty two years ago, she stumbled on the idea of creating fermented vegetables. Adopting them into her lifestyle and that of her family, she witnessed transformations in health. Donna is a vocal advocate for the fermenting lifestyle and shares her wisdom in her culturedfoodlife.com website loaded with recipes and wisdom on how to put fermented foods to work to restore your emotional and physical health. In this episode of the Defiant Health podcast, Donna shares some of the most recent lessons she’s learned through her fermenting projects.
Learn about the surprising role of fermented vegetables in alleviating symptoms of SIBO and Candida overgrowth, as Donna details her daily fermentation routine. Be prepared to have your mind blown as Donna reveals her remarkable remedy for food poisoning, and even the surprising health benefits her dog has experienced! Beyond personal anecdotes, we delve into the controversial health topics, illuminating why some major health organizations haven't updated their advice despite new evidence, and the importance of strength training as we age.
Wrap up the episode by exploring the tantalizing world of homemade cheese. Hear her recount the incredible potential of probiotic yeast and the lasting health benefits her family has experienced from a diet rich in fermented vegetables. Whether you're a fermented foods enthusiast or just embarking on your journey, this episode promises to be packed with nuggets of wisdom and fascinating insights. Tune in to be inspired and empowered with the knowledge to transform your health through food.
For more from Donna Schwenk: CulturedFoodLife.com with lots of recipes, informative discussions, and products available for purchase.
_________________________________________________________________________
Get your 15% Paleovalley discount on fermented grass-fed beef sticks, Bone Broth Collagen, low-carb snack bars and other high-quality organic foods here.
For 12% off every order of grass-fed and pasture-raised meats from Wild Pastures, go
Books:
Super Gut: The 4-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight
Our great grandmothers were usually knowledgeable and adept at fermenting foods, i.e., allowing microbes to grow on food, thereby keeping foods, such as vegetables, fruits, and meats, from spoiling while increasing the nutritional value of the food and providing you with beneficial probiotic microbes. They may not have appreciated these benefits, but surely at least knew that it was a useful method of preserving food without refrigeration. Modern processed foods, widespread availability of home refrigeration, and convenience caused most of us to abandon this practice. But it represents yet another mistake we’ve made in healthy eating, coupled with blundering dietary guidelines, exploitative practices, and ignorance or indifference of food manufacturers.
Wife and mother, Donna Schwenk, struggled with health issues of her own and her family. Twenty two years ago, she stumbled on the idea of creating fermented vegetables. Adopting them into her lifestyle and that of her family, she witnessed transformations in health. Donna is a vocal advocate for the fermenting lifestyle and shares her wisdom in her culturedfoodlife.com website loaded with recipes and wisdom on how to put fermented foods to work to restore your emotional and physical health. In this episode of the Defiant Health podcast, Donna shares some of the most recent lessons she’s learned through her fermenting projects.
Learn about the surprising role of fermented vegetables in alleviating symptoms of SIBO and Candida overgrowth, as Donna details her daily fermentation routine. Be prepared to have your mind blown as Donna reveals her remarkable remedy for food poisoning, and even the surprising health benefits her dog has experienced! Beyond personal anecdotes, we delve into the controversial health topics, illuminating why some major health organizations haven't updated their advice despite new evidence, and the importance of strength training as we age.
Wrap up the episode by exploring the tantalizing world of homemade cheese. Hear her recount the incredible potential of probiotic yeast and the lasting health benefits her family has experienced from a diet rich in fermented vegetables. Whether you're a fermented foods enthusiast or just embarking on your journey, this episode promises to be packed with nuggets of wisdom and fascinating insights. Tune in to be inspired and empowered with the knowledge to transform your health through food.
For more from Donna Schwenk: CulturedFoodLife.com with lots of recipes, informative discussions, and products available for purchase.
_________________________________________________________________________
Get your 15% Paleovalley discount on fermented grass-fed beef sticks, Bone Broth Collagen, low-carb snack bars and other high-quality organic foods here.
For 12% off every order of grass-fed and pasture-raised meats from Wild Pastures, go
Books:
Super Gut: The 4-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight
Our great-grandmothers were usually knowledgeable and adept at fermenting foods, that is, allowing microbes to grow in food, thereby keeping foods such as vegetables, fruits and meats from spoiling, while increasing the nutritional value of the food and providing you with beneficial probiotic microbes. They may not have appreciated these benefits, but surely at least knew that it was a useful method of preserving food without refrigeration. Modern processed foods, widespread availability of home refrigeration and convenience cause most of us to abandon this practice, but it represents yet another mistake we've made in healthy eating, coupled with blundering dietary guidelines, exploitative practices and ignorance or indifference of food manufacturers. Despite all this, wife and mother, Donna Schwenk struggled with health issues of her own and that of her family. 22 years ago, she stumbled on the idea of creating fermented vegetables. Adopting them into her lifestyle and that of her family, she witnessed transformations, dramatic transformations in health. Donna has become a vocal advocate for the fermenting lifestyle and shares her wisdom in her CulturedFoodLifecom website, loaded with recipes and wisdom on how to put fermented foods to work to restore your emotional and physical health.
William Davis, MD:In this episode of the Defiant Health Podcast, Donna shares some of the most recent lessons she's learned through her fermenting projects. Later in the podcast, let's talk about Defiant Health's sponsors that include Paleov alley, who provides fermented grass-fed beef sticks, bone broth, protein rich in collagen, organic super greens and low-carb superfood bars, and now 100% grass-fed and finished pastured meats. And our newest sponsor, BiotiQuest, who provides unique probiotics such as sugar shift to support healthy blood sugars and simple slumber to assist in obtaining healthy sleep, probiotics crafted with the unique property of combining synergistic microbes. Donna, thank you once again for always coming back and telling us all the things you've been learning. Every time I talk to you, I learn half a dozen new things. Do you have anything on the top of your mind right now that you've been playing with?
Donna Schwenk:Well, I've been making the L reuteri yogurt for a while now. A couple of things that I think I've told you this before. That, I think, is something kind of new. We have found that when you make subsequent batches and you're using the yogurt as a starter, that sometimes it gets extra sour tasting and it'll start to separate more. And what we found is if you cut back on the prebiotic whether it's we have a prebioplus that we sell or in your linterpotaster, whatever it is cut that in half or cut it all the way down to like a quarter and it'll calm down. I think it's proliferating so fast and creating such a high CF U count. That's why it gets so sour and so, because it's getting stronger, I think it's getting stronger. So we have found that with people cut back on that to like one tablespoon instead of two, it calms it down. You're still getting high counts, but we're actually going to test that too. But I think it helps it to keep it from separating into curbs and weight too.
William Davis, MD:So you know, those of you who are listening via an audio podcast, you can't appreciate just how incredible Donna looks, and I don't want to embarrass you, Donna, but I haven't seen you in about a year. And in the year since you've folded L reuteri into all your fermentation projects, your skin and your facial features have so dramatically changed. Tell us about the other changes you've experienced and what people have perceived in your changes.
Donna Schwenk:Well, one of the things that I think is helpful and I think it's not only helpful for my body but for my skin and that is I've always kind of lifted weights and I was able to double the amount of weight I was doing with zero recovery time, and of course that creates hormones, because you're telling your body you want to stay young, so that creates more of a youthful appearance. But the fact that I didn't have any recovery time was just phenomenal and I've seen so many changes in my strength, my energy level, the sleep oh goodness gracious, my sleep is fabulous and has been for over a year. There's been so many changes in my husband. He's more youthful. He thinks he's a stud now more than he did before. I think testosterone levels have increased and at first he just thought it was him and I said how much yogurt have you been taken? And he was like oh yeah. So he tested it. I said back off from it, see what happens. And he felt a little bit different.
Donna Schwenk:But I do think and this is a pretty new thing we're doing I do think there's a lasting effect from it. I don't seem to need as much as I used to. I took it every day almost every day for about a year and now I don't seem to need that as much. All of this stuff stays, all of the benefits I'm getting having a couple times a week, two, three times a week. So I think it took a while to get a good base going. And what I've seen with people who have things like SIBO, some Candida overgrowth and things that I had about three months of taking it all the time, that's when I really saw things change.
Donna Schwenk:I get a lot of emails from people saying the SIBO went away but it took some time. Their sleep got better and initially some people not everybody, but some people in the beginning. You know how. You say it creates oxytocin. Well, some people in the beginning had a little bit of the opposite effect and then they got the oxytocin and I think I read an article that you wrote about that. Can you explain that? What that effect is? I think you called it the Frankenstein effect. Was that it, or so? Don't you hold it? I can't remember that article.
William Davis, MD:The 6475 other aspect to at least the 6,475 strain of L reuteri that is known to provoke oxytocin release in the brain. It has many other effects, but one of the major effects is its peculiar capacity to colonize the small intestine, which is uncommon. Most microbes don't colonize the small intestine, they just pass through. Like most of our fermenting microbes, like Leuconostoc and Pediococcus, they just pass through and still exert all kinds of great effects.
William Davis, MD:Reuteri is unique in that it will stay put in the small intestine as well as the mouth, esophagus, stomach and colon, but in the small intestine it takes up residence and produces up to four bacteriocins, natural antibiotics, especially effective against fecal microbes like the E coli and the Salmonellas and the Campylobacters of the world.
William Davis, MD:That is the species of SIBO that you know a lot about. So I think that's why we're seeing a slow. So I was not convinced that by itself it was a sufficient or adequate response to getting rid of a solution to E coli and that's why I combined it originally with L gasseri, also an upper GI colonizer and bacterocin producer, and with a strain of Bacillus coagulans. But as you point out, like you, I'm seeing more people who just do the reuteri yogurt, maybe because they want smoother skin or be more youthful, but then they say you know what? All my gas, diarrhea and bloating is now gone, all my fat malabsorption is gone and my anxiety has got all the kinds of phenomena with SIBO. I wonder if they're experiencing, therefore, a little die off at the start.
Donna Schwenk:Yeah, because I've gotten a lot of emails from people who've had SIBO eradicated reuteri with and I was really surprised.
Donna Schwenk:It takes about three or four months and I told you this earlier in a podcast you did for me, where my daughter had terrible sinus problems, like always stuffy noses, always had trouble breathing, and that's been going on for years and she's 21. I think she's 21. And that's been going on since she was young and since she started taking out Rheuterite it's all gone, which makes me think that it might have been Candida, because I know it can live up there in the sinuses she doesn't have and it went away so gradually and so naturally that she didn't notice it happened until one day she kind of got a cold and was like, oh, this is what it was like all the time and I wonder I'm just it's just my, you know trying to figure stuff out things not really for sure, but I do think she had something living up in there, candida or something that was causing a lot of the sinus problems, and it's gone. And it's been gone for eight, nine months.
Donna Schwenk:So, that's exciting. I don't know. I mean, the only thing she's really done different has reuteri the and the gasseri, but mostly the reuteri. That's the thing she's been the most consistent at.
William Davis, MD:Have you seen other changes in her health?
Donna Schwenk:Yes, she is. Yes, actually quite a bit. The oxytocin seemed to really calm her down. She gets anxiety sometimes. She's young and she's got a lot of things going on. But that Ruder eye and we see it pretty dramatically. If she stops taking it, that she'll have those worried thoughts, those circular thoughts at night that keep you up because you start thinking about them. But if reuteri takes and she takes kefir with it too, it just calms it all down and just stops. They call it what "circular thinking, where you keep thinking about one thought and it just keeps going over and over and you can't go to sleep.
Donna Schwenk:I do think that she's really. I really noticed a calmness in her that she had not had before. She was a warrior. She's a natural warrior. She's like my mom. She's so much better now. She's happier. It's funny.
Donna Schwenk:I've seen that in all of my family. At first my other daughter, who's 38, I think she was fighting me on it, I don't know about this. One day she came over to me and she said okay, I don't want you to tell me that, you told me so but you were right, because she was having trouble sleeping. She said I sleep better, I feel better. I think it's really helping me. I've seen it in everybody in my family. Slight changes you know what I'm saying?
Donna Schwenk:Not slight, actually, big changes. The reason I know that it works is because they keep taking it and I don't have to convince them If they do it on their own. If my husband gets up in the morning and takes Ruder eye and I don't have to make it for him or tell him he needs to take it, then it's helping him enough that he'll do that. That's what happens with all my foods. Honestly, I just didn't expect this to happen quite dramatically as it has happened. The emails I get are astounding the people that have had increased muscle growth, people have had increased testosterone levels, who are older. So many people are really finding some help when they were having diminished things. But I was reading an article I think it was, might be when you wrote that they discovered a Ruder eye. Do you know what year the guy discovered it? I think he named it after himself, didn't he?
William Davis, MD:1962 and other people named it for him. Yeah, oh they did.
Donna Schwenk:Yeah, I think we've been missing this strain over a long time because antibiotics kill it, and then how would you restore it? Do you know what I'm saying?
William Davis, MD:Donna, you're such a keen observer. I always impressed just how good you are at putting two and two together and making unique observations. But you're exactly right. In 1962, dr Gerhard Reuter in Germany isolated it from breast milk of a German woman. He made this observation too. He said that over the ensuing 40 years of his academic microbiology career he found it increasingly difficult every year to find it again, even though in the beginning it was easy to find in stool and breast milk and other places. That towards the end of his career he said it was very difficult to find, consistent with what is the published evidence where people have looked at average people's microbiomes and there's no reuteri. And of course, what I find remarkable is that if we look at the microbiome of indigenous hunter gatherer populations, they have it. Yeah, unexposed antibiotics they all have it, as do almost virtually all mammals have it. Deer zebra.
Donna Schwenk:They're different strains though. Right, the animals have different strains. Yeah, because people write me and ask me if they can give their animals that, and I'm like I don't think so because they have different strains than we do, and I just at this point, I don't think that's a good idea to you to. I mean, I don't know if it would hurt them.
William Davis, MD:But you know it's probably safe. But we can't say each each strain adapts to its host. There's a company who actually commercialized a dog reuteri and they believe they're seeing some of the same effects, but that's to my knowledge. It's not been. Cross species studies are far few and far between, so really don't know. But you're right, in an ideal world we get strains that are adapted to the host species. You really are such a great observer, have you noticed? So of course listeners should know, because these are my listeners motion. Your listeners all know that Donna Schwenk is the queen of fermentation, but a lot of my list may not know that, and so Donna starts this with 22 years right Experience and fermentation. Could you because some of my listeners won't be familiar with your work you want to just kind of give us an overview of what you've been learning these last 22 years?
Donna Schwenk:Well, I started out with kefer, which is, you know, got 50 plus different strains in it. Some of them are transient, so they don't last very long, but some of them do. But I started drinking that 22 years ago and actually I gave it to my daughter, who was young. She was struggling, she was premature, but she was about 10 months old and I started giving her just a little like a spoonful and I just saw such dramatic changes in her and I was taking it too, and at that time part of the reason that I'd had her early was because I had all kinds of health problems high blood pressure, gestational diabetes that came back and became regular diabetes. I have a lot of that in my family. I have a lot of type one, type two. So I know the effects of diabetes on the body and I was devastated.
Donna Schwenk:I was going to do anything I could, which, you know, most type two diabetes is very, you know, fixable with diet and exercise. And so I started taking kefer and I noticed that my blood sugars got better and better and got to the normal range, and so did my blood pressure. And I didn't know what had happened to me and I didn't know why my daughter, my young daughter, was just, her skin was glowing, she was sleeping through the night, she was feeling better. So that just started me on a journey to figure out what this bacteria had done to me, because there wasn't very much research, there wasn't very much stuff on it and I would just stay up at night because I had to get up a lot at night to feed her. And I would stay up at nights and research, and one by one I started finding these fermented foods and problems were starting to go away in myself, my family, and I was so grateful because I had felt so bad and I felt years younger. All my problems were going away and it was just food. It was shocking to me and it just.
Donna Schwenk:I started to slowly tell my friends because they thought I was nuts, but their kids got better and they got better and it just snowballed. And for 10 years I just told my friends and everybody was wanting me to do something with them and I was like, no, I don't want to. Finally, I just got so overwhelmed with so many people asking me to do stuff that I started a website and I wrote a book, really with my heels dragging, and before I knew it. People just needed the information and I was the messenger. The food speak for themselves, but I have such a grateful heart for what these foods have done for me and for what the bacteria in my life I mean, we're more bacteria than cells in our body, although now there's studies saying that they're not quite sure that's true. But I know that the bacteria does so much for us because it changed my whole life and it changed all my friends' lives and my family. And you know, 22 years later, I've still been doing it every day because I never want to go back to that other life.
Donna Schwenk:And I thought I hadn't a lot of it figured out until you started talking about Elruderite. I was like you can't possibly do that and I was wrong. It was the biggest shock in the last 22 years and I'm like well, what other strains are we missing? Do you know what I mean? Because I couldn't believe the difference. I feel really good, but when I took Elruderite I felt fantastic and I was like what is happening to me? And that's just one strain. So, anyway, fast forward a year, maybe a year and a half later, that I've been doing this. It's really. It's really rocked my world and I'm very grateful to have found the information through you and it's just so exciting to see so many people getting better from it, because there's some problems out there with SIBO and things that people couldn't address, I mean couldn't fix and this has been a great, a great help to so many.
William Davis, MD:The Defiant Health podcast is sponsored by Paleov alley, makers of delicious grass-fed beef steaks, healthy snack bars and other products. We are very picky around here and insist that any product we consider has no junk ingredients like carrageenan, carboxymethylsalos, sucralose and, of course, no added sugars. And all Paleo Valley products contain no gluten nor grains. In fact, I find Paleov alley products among cleanest in their category. One of the habits I urge everyone to get into is to include at least one, if not several, servings of fermented foods per day in their lifestyles. Unlike nearly all other beef steaks available, Paleov alley grass-fed beef steaks are all naturally fermented, meaning they contain probiotic bacterial species. And now Paleov alley is expanding their Wild Pastures program that provides 100% grass-fed, grass-finished pastured beef and pastured chicken and pork raised without herbicides or pesticides, and they just added wild-caught seafood caught from the waters of Bristol Bay, alaska. Among their other new products are pasture-raised fermented pork sticks, chocolate-flavored grass-fed bone broth protein and grass-fed organ complex in capsule form, and new essential electrolytes in powder form to add to potassium and magnesium intake, available in orange, lemon and melon flavors. And listeners to the Defiant Health podcast receive a 15% discount by going to paleovalleycom/defianthealth.
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Donna Schwenk:Yeah, I mean, I make kefir daily. I have grains, but I also have a product called Easy Kefir which I also make, so I have both of them because we all drink so much of it. I usually have a smoothie every morning. I usually put some Elruderi in it and I put kefir in frozen fruits and I put a little collagen in there and some red phenyl powder which is just ground up berries. I do that every day. I don't put Elruderi in every day like I used to. I do it probably two, three times a week. I don't need as much as I used to and so I do that. But I have a smoothie every single day almost. Maybe sometimes on the weekends I'll miss a day, but for the most part I will change it up a little bit.
Donna Schwenk:I don't always put the. I don't know if you're familiar with the red phenyl powders, but they're berries that are concentrated to a powder apple peel powder, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries and they're so powerful, not just for your microbiome but for so many things heart health, everything and I saw a real increase in energy when I started doing that. But I don't do that every day. I only do that two or three times a week. I don't really like to do something every day, except for kefir. I do do that almost every day. I've been doing that for so long because and I don't even have to do it every day because I think I've done it long enough, but I just feel better when I do. And it's fast food. It's like takes me two minutes to make it. You know what I'm saying. So it's like it's the perfect breakfast. I just don't have time.
Donna Schwenk:Kabucha also we make that and I have culture vegetables, but I don't have to make them all the time because they last so long in the fridge. Kombucha takes like a week, a week and a half to make Kombucha vegetables. I probably make them once a month because I make a big batch, maybe once every two months, because it will last nine months in your fridge. I just made some yogurt this morning or last night that cooled and we had it for breakfast and that was a yogurt plus starter that I sell that has the Fitto in it, and I made some homemade lemon curd that was sugar-free that I put in there with blueberries.
Donna Schwenk:That was breakfast this morning. My son was going to work and he said can I have one of those? Because I got a new yogurt maker and they make them in these like 13.5 ounce jars from Luvele. I just love it so I want to try it. But that's pretty standard for me and my whole house. I mean, we have a lot of fermented foods, so not a lot like daily, but everybody eats them pretty consistently. So that's kind of our end, that's kind of our routine.
William Davis, MD:One of the comments you made about a year ago when I last talked to you was your experience with the fermented foods and food poisoning. Could you share that?
Donna Schwenk:Oh, that is one of my biggest emails that I get from people. Okay, so in the very beginning I started with Kefir and then I had made some cultured vegetables. I didn't know that much about them, but I'd heard they were good. So I stuck them in the back of my fridge and I didn't even eat them. And we had gone out to dinner. This was 20 some years ago. We'd gone out to dinner and we'd had artichoke dip and it was bad.
Donna Schwenk:There was something we all got poisoning from it and I was pretty sick, I felt delirious and I was falling in and out of sleep and in the dream I was dreaming. And I was dreaming about chickens, of all things. And when I woke up I thought what in the world was I dreaming about chickens? And I thought about that was around the time the bird flu happened Do you remember that, that thing? And there was all these studies on them that they had given the bird, the chickens, like kimchi or cultured vegetables, and they found that lactobacillus panterum had destroyed the poisons in them and made the chickens better. So I could barely walk cause I was so sick. So I dragged myself to the kitchen and found that jar of cultured vegetables in the back of the fridge and swigged it. I didn't even get a spoon cause I was so sick. I swigged some juice. I didn't even eat the vegetables, I just took the juice and, I kid you, not 20 minutes later I felt completely, nor I was in the kitchen doing dishes and everybody else was still in bed and one by one, I gave it to them and they got better and that made me start researching it. There's all kinds of research that it helps with any kind of intestinal issue. But I have gotten, oh, hundreds of emails from people who've had the same effect cultured vegetables and just the juice, just a spoonful of the juice. And it is fast, it works, it's fantastic. I guess they're doing some things in Africa. They're putting that particular bacteria in some porridge because it's helping with food poisonings and things like that, keeping down the bacteria that are harmful. And there's a lot of research. I have some, a lot, quite a bit of research on it.
Donna Schwenk:But if and you know what, what is there on the market that really works very well for food poisoning? There really isn't a whole lot of things you can take, you know, without a doctor's prescription, but this stuff, if you have a jar in your fridge which can last nine months and it's just vegetables. You take a spoonful of that juice. It is powerful and I've had this happen with my family probably four or five times.
Donna Schwenk:It's worked with somebody either getting a gastrointestinal, any kind of virus or something like that that is really upset their stomach, and it will calm it down, stop the vomiting, stop the. I've seen it work with asthma attacks. I've seen it work with so many. These are emails too, but I've seen it work with so many. It just stops it dead in its tracks. It is absolutely amazing. You can get culture vegetables at your health, which we're now in the refrigerator sections. But that is. It's a naturally occurring bacteria that occurs when you ferment vegetables and we have a starter culture that makes it even stronger so it lasts longer in your fridge and you just make a jar and if you got it in your fridge, you got a remedy.
William Davis, MD:So are you? Do you prefer starter cultures or are you happy with some of the microbes resident on the surface, naturally, or both?
Donna Schwenk:Some of them work good. It just depends on how old the culture is. The reason I like the starter culture is because it stays at a very high level, and we tested that at Cutting Edge Cultures. They tested the culture stays at a very high level with lactobacillus plantaraminate for long periods, whereas the other ones diminish rather quickly because they run out of food and so the bacteria diminishes where the ones with the starter cultures stay very high. We even have a little graph on the back of our thing and I have found like my web manager's little girl got sick and she got some vegetable a culture vegetable in the store and I said, do you have any? And your figure was well, we have some carrots that we fermented with the thing. The one from the store didn't really knock out the vomiting, but the ones he had made homemade did, because it was stronger and they had recently made it. But I've had it be in the fridge for a long time and a month and it still works to.
Donna Schwenk:Really, you know what you ever get, that where you just you have diarrhea in your vomiting. You can't stop that stops it. So, though, it seems to just stop it dead in its tracks, and it's kind of cool how it works in the body. It's a transient bacteria, so it doesn't last super long. But what it does is it won't let the pathogens adhere to the walls, the mucosal lining won't let it attach, it'll tract it to it. It'll be reacting like it's its friend, steal its metabolites and then in three days it'll exit the body and take out those pathogens with it. So it's a very interesting bacteria how it works. So it acts like a friend but it's a foe. So it's kind of cool how it keeps you healthy, you know. And so they were naturally occurring in cultured vegetables. The only thing is it doesn't last as long If you don't use a culture and you need to use a lot of salt and pH to make the fermentation safe.
William Davis, MD:You have vegetables that you prefer that are more fermentation friendly.
Donna Schwenk:Cabbage is fabulous Right now. I just made some blueberry cabbage so I throw blueberries in there with the green cabbage and I think I put some. I can't remember if I put. I put something else in there. I put some seasonings in there, let it ferment for six days and it tastes like a mouthful of blueberries when you eat it. You don't use a lot, but it flavors the cabbage Absolutely delicious and the juice is just as powerful as the cabbage itself.
Donna Schwenk:Now, when you ferment cabbage, cabbage has 60, raw cabbage has 60 milligrams of vitamin C per cup. When you ferment it, it has 700 milligrams of vitamin C. So it's fabulous for, like seasonal allergies, asthma, things like that, because the bodies always need an extra vitamin C because you know it goes away so fast. Cultured vegetables just skyrocket. The B vitamins as well. Phylic acid goes through the roof. It's really kind of cool how it increases the vitamins during fermentation and that's well documented. It's very interesting and it also makes the food safe. It keeps out pathogens, because the large amount of good bacteria is keep out all the pathogens. And it also one of the coolest things that this bacteria does is diminish pesticides and chemicals and in six, five to six days 90% of them are gone just through the process of fermentation. So think about that. If you eat that, it helps you do that too. It gives you that bacteria that can degrade heavy chemicals, peptide, inside of you and the foods that you eat. That keeps you healthy, so it's kind of a win-win.
William Davis, MD:I know you have a deep history with fermentation project. Have you ventured into fermentation of meat or cheeses?
Donna Schwenk:I've done a lot of cheese but I haven't done meat. I've had a lot of people ask me about that, but that's like really a lot of it is lack of time, but you know what I'm saying. Lack of that's one more thing. I got a plate to do. You know what I'm saying. So, plus, I know a lot of people who do it. There's a book out on it. I think somebody in Washington wrote one. That's right. I think they sell meats. Do you know of that? Somebody does it and I think there's a book out on it. Some people do it, but I have not done that.
William Davis, MD:I haven't either. It's kind of scary.
Donna Schwenk:Yeah, it bothers me just a little. I'm not ready for that, although I know they do it. I'm in Alaska. I know they bury things in the ground and ferment them for long periods of time and it's a delicacy, but I don't know. I'm not ready for that one.
Donna Schwenk:I do do cheeses a lot. I make hard and soft cheeses. I make cheeses all the time and you just simply draining out the way out of the yogurt, routereye makes a wonderful cheese. I've got a recipe. Oh yeah, it's so good and I just you just strain out the way you can put it in a. You know, get a strainer and put a coffee filter in it, pour the Routereye in it and then cover it and sit in your fridge for like a day and all the way will strain out and you get a cheese, a soft like, kind of like a cream cheese, maybe a little bit firmer depending on how long you ferment it. You can do that with Kiefer, you can do that with all the different yogurts and I do it all the time.
Donna Schwenk:I love the cheeses that I make because I'll use them in things that requires more of anything that requires cream cheese. I use Kiefer cheese or yogurt cheese. It works the same so, and it's just a great way to get probiotics. I made an ice box pie the other day with Routereye that had like it was delicious and it was just. I used Routereye cheese in it and it made a wonderful pie. I had strawberries and just something that I didn't have to bake in the oven. So for you know, summertime.
William Davis, MD:So all you did was strain it in the refrigerator for 24 hours and you got a soft cheese out of it.
Donna Schwenk:Yeah, and you can strain it for longer and get a hard cheese, and you can also. I also have some contraptions that will press it down. I have a link to this one cheese maker called Cefirco. They make a good one. It has a spring in it. You pour the cheese in there, it has a spring on top and it will press down on the cheese and make more of a semi hard cheese. And the longer you let it strain you can keep it in your fridge the more firm the cheese gets. It makes a really lovely cheese. What a terrific idea, donna.
Donna Schwenk:I'm gonna put that in my blog and attribute to you. Yeah, it's really good and I can give you I've got all these recipes that are free on my site for that. Oh great, you can see it and it makes it's really fun to do and it's really not that time consuming. I mean it's it just sticks in your fridge until it drains all the way, and the way is good for other things. You know, mm-hmm, you know you can use the way for other things, but it's kind of fun to do.
William Davis, MD:Oh, you mean like using it as a starter culture for other fermentations?
Donna Schwenk:Yeah, you can make like a. You can use part of that to make. I haven't tried this, though Some of the time, usually way like Cefirco, you can make a soda with it. I haven't tried it with a yogurt because I don't know that it has enough good yeast in it to make a bubbly soda paste and you can use it like anything that you would put water in in a recipe. You can just use the way and I eat a lot of vitamins and minerals that you normally wouldn't get in water and it really doesn't taste any different and so I do that. I put it in my smoothies. I do a lot. I have. I think I have a blog that says 20 UAs to use your extra way, so I never throw it out.
William Davis, MD:Don't you cringe to think what our lives would be like if you and I hadn't stumbled on these sorts of lessons?
Donna Schwenk:Oh goodness, I just I wouldn't be who I am. I really worried about that because I had a daughter to raise and I was like, when I had all these problems I was 41 and now I'm 63, but I wasn't doing very good and I knew it and I knew what my life was going to be like because I had, you know, I had a lot of knowledge about it and I had to find a way to feel better for my daughter because she was a baby and you know, what's really cool about that is that I did all of this to help her and it turned around and saved me. So that was really cool for me because I did it from her mother's love you know what I mean Because I wanted her, because she was a preemie. She was born like three pounds and that was because I was having all these problems.
Donna Schwenk:My liver was shutting down. It was not good and I was really scared. I'm like I'm 41 years old and I have this childhood raise and I used to tell this story. And when she's 20, I'm going to be 60 and now I'm 63 and that's already happened I was like, oh, that's happened, I can't tell that story anymore, but like, what a blessing that sickness was for me. What a blessing those ailments were. It cost me to look for answers that I otherwise wouldn't have found, and it's changed everybody.
William Davis, MD:So it was a podcast. Listeners can, because if they see you say I'm 63 and they say oh, come on, you're exaggerating, you're not 63, because you do not look 63 Donna.
Donna Schwenk:Well, honestly though, I feel better than I have I did in my 20s because I wasn't healthy. I didn't feel good in my 20s and 30s and 40s, but once I found these foods and started, you know, it's really funny too, because before I got pregnant in my 40s, I was running like five miles a day and I was on the fat-free diet craze that just so messed up my triglycerides because I was eating a lot of simple sugars and I thought so proud of myself because I thought I'm a five miles a day, I'm sure my cholesterol is, so it was awful, it was terrible. I was horrified. I was like, what am I doing wrong? You know what I mean. And that was when I really delved into health and I started feeling better. And then I got pregnant and so then that took me downhill for a while, but after that came, then my whole world turned upside down with this little baby that's now 22. Yeah, she's 22.
Donna Schwenk:So what a difference it made for me to understanding is a lot. You know, I mean I like learning stuff I really enjoy. I have a lot of medical people in my family, so I really enjoy the banter that we have, the things we talk about. My sister's a scientist and I was an MD and my other sister's a nurse. But I really enjoy learning how it all works, and when I realized that most doctors only get like a couple of weeks in nutrition, I knew that that was a really key component, because the body's made up of what we eat, right, and it's made up of microbes that are outnumbering our cells and there's some significant things going on that we don't know about.
Donna Schwenk:You know, I wanted to know why I had high blood pressure, why everybody in my family had high blood pressure. I wanted to know why it wasn't simply medicate me. I wanted to know what was going on, what was causing that? And I figured it out. You know what I was saying. What was causing the diabetes? What could I do? And, one by one, those problems went away and I started living like never before. You know, and when you feel good, you cannot keep it inside. It just spills out of you, because you want other people to feel good too, because you know what it's like to be there. And when I began to help people because I really felt a lot of compassion for them, because I knew what it was like to suffer, I wasn't really living. I was laying on the couch just kidding for the day.
William Davis, MD:I learned my lessons the hard way, just like you did too. Very similar experience, minus the baby. Yeah, yeah, I gained a bunch of. I went low fat, vegetarian and, of course, this is way before any thought of the microbiome or fermentation as part of the conversation. Me too, but I became a type. So I'm like you. I was jogging three to five miles several times a week, biking, playing tennis. This is my 30s and my belly grew big. I became a type 2 diabetic, hypertensive, triglycerides 390, HDL 27, oodles of small LDL particles and, like you, I felt awful. I went what? How can this be? I'm on a perfect diet vegetarian, low fat.
Donna Schwenk:So we all had to make that mistake.
William Davis, MD:And what was me, Donna, is, despite all this and the huge experience and the published evidence that low fat diets are destructive, we still have agencies that have not retracted that message and not apologize for the huge blunders they've made. I don't think we're ever going to hear the USDA or the American Heart Association or the American Diabetes Association or the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. I don't think we're ever going to say, hey, you know what, given the most recent evidence over the past 30 years, we made a big mistake and our advice contributed to the worldwide epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes and other health issues and we're sorry, we take it all back. We don't think we're ever going to hear that.
Donna Schwenk:We're not going to hear. And the funny thing was you and I were both running. I was running five miles a day and you were running three or five, whatever, and it wasn't help. I think exercise is extremely important, but I don't. It wasn't making the difference. I'm thankful we were doing that. We're probably helping something lead up some of those massive amounts of carbs I was eating that were spiking my blood sugars. But honestly, I just I didn't have enough information. I remember feeling so devastated because I thought I was doing so good and he just looked at me. He goes Donna, your triglycerides are like 400. And I was like what? I couldn't believe it. You know what I mean. So anyway, long met was many, many years ago and I feel better now than I ever did then.
William Davis, MD:Great, I know you're a fan of strength training and you've been a keen observer at what happened. What's happened to your body composition? You want to tell us about that?
Donna Schwenk:Yeah, strength training, especially as you get older. I mean you're losing muscle as you get older and you know it creates. When you strength train, you create hormones. Your body has to create these hormones to build the muscle that tells your body to stay young, but it also makes you feel young. So everything starts to change because your strength training is building muscle and creating those hormones and the elruderi takes away the after effect of the sore muscles.
Donna Schwenk:I don't know why it does that, but I have had so many people right on my forum email me and say I'm just not having the recovery time anymore, and that was one of the things my daughter noticed too, that she did not want to believe it, but she said, okay, I'm not, I'm just again. We used to have a lot of recovery time and we're just not anymore. And I shared this on another podcast and a couple of people write me who's. They were young people who had had cancer and had chemo and it destroyed their testosterone in the men and they wanted to have babies. And I guess, when they give them supplemental testosterone and hormones to try to put those back in, but it wasn't really doing the job, but the elruderi was doing the job and they couldn't build a doctor who was like, wow, it's. What we've seen is an increase in 50% in people who were deficient.
William Davis, MD:That's what I'm seeing too. Exactly what I'm seeing.
Donna Schwenk:That's what across the board, that's what everybody's telling me. Who's been tested is about 50%, and these are in people who you know are either deficient or older. I mean, it has been in actually different age groups, but it's been very helpful and that's very helpful in bodybuilding.
William Davis, MD:I used to tell ladies hey, if you're pregnant or having menstrual cycles, maybe you shouldn't do the rhodorite, because we know that oxytocin increases uterine contraction. That's why it's given to pregnant ladies to provoke delivery of a child. Well, I kind of backed down on that when I started to think well, you know what, we're all supposed to have rhodorite, pregnancy or not, when I don't know. Of course this should be give ladies who are pregnant or menstruate these super, duper high numbers that we get with fermentation. But I had a bunch of young ladies say hey, I did it anyway.
Donna Schwenk:Well, my daughters had an interesting thing. When they first started it they got more cramps and then they got less after they kept taking. So I don't know what that means, but in the very beginning I said maybe this is the rhodorite doing this, maybe you shouldn't take this during that, and they kept doing it. But then they kind of calmed down. So I don't know what that means, but it was the very beginning that they did. I did. Both of them did notice they had more cramps, but then it's.
William Davis, MD:So once again, just observe age. Something similar, I saw something similar. Ladies would tell me things like I have very rough cycles, a lot of cramps, a lot of emotional lability, a lot of bleeding and on the Reuter Eye it's come back to almost nothing. I barely know I'm having my cycle, so it'd be really interesting to document that formally. The other thing is, I talked to a lot of ladies in our age group in their 60s and 70s, and one time I asked and it's embarrassing, I do a Zoom with about 80, 90 people every Wednesday night that you've been on there as a guest. I asked them what's happened to your libido? Of course a bunch of hands go up and people would say, actually said, oh, I had to cut it back on the yogurt every second or third day because my partner couldn't accommodate my needs.
Donna Schwenk:That's what happened to my husband. I was like, oh, he just thought it was him. He didn't know it was the yogurt, until I told him that he's like I saw a big increase. Well, okay, let me ask you this so that's a sign for health, right? If a man has a good libido, right, that means he's got good blood flow. All of that I mean I know this is pretty personal, but I think that's a good thing, right, absolutely, because it shows that. And he did notice a big change. I noticed a big change and I noticed a change in myself and he was telling me he was like a young man I mean, he wasn't having that much trouble before, but, good God help us all it was a tremendous. So I'm thinking that testosterone went up. He's pretty healthy anyway, but I've seen a big change in him and I've seen people have written on my forum and on my emails.
Donna Schwenk:They have seen that change and a lot of them will say, well. Some of them say, well, I've just noticed the increase in octitocin has really made a difference for me, and they don't really want to tell me why. But then they'll write me later and say, well, my libido really increased and it makes me feel so much better. So it's pretty cute because it's, I mean, we shouldn't worry about talking about it, because it does indicate health. You know that's an important thing.
Donna Schwenk:So, especially as you get older, you know, absolutely. I mean it's fun to have all this energy and to feel good and to want to do all the things like you were when you were younger, and that's what happened to me. So it's and that's happened to my husband and a lot of people writing me. So I don't know what this is going to do when this goes out to the world, but it does work. I will tell you. So it really does. I'm not. We tested it because my husband decreased it and it got less, but it did make a big difference. I mean we're getting really high counts of L-rutorii in the sugar. I mean there's, it's quite a lot. So, anyway, that's just my experience, and you found that too, with people that you've talked to too, right, yeah, A marked increase in libido and sexual performance, yeah, which you know makes life richer and fun.
William Davis, MD:You know, I hear a lot of people say things like hey, I retired and so my sex life completely fall apart. Well, you know, this is and this is not a drug, right? Not these nasty drugs. It's just food. What drug would increase love and empathy?
Donna Schwenk:Right, and there's some you know there's drugs out there that do that, but it's just a wonderful thing to see it naturally, I mean occur in the body, because our bodies are pharmaceutical factories. Do you know what I mean? And whether it's weightlifting or taking L-rutorii and increasing the bacteria, you know improving your microbiome all of these things your body is doing, you know, by itself, without you administrating a drug, just by eating some yogurt or whatever cultured food you have. And like it's really funny because the more I do this, the younger I feel. I feel like I just got started.
Donna Schwenk:Everybody my age is retiring and I'm really seeing people deteriorate and I'm like I guess I'm not getting any of my social security benefits because I'm not planning on retiring. You know what I'm saying. What would I do? I would be bored because I have so much energy. You know what I'm saying. It would be. You know I see all these people. They can't wait for it.
Donna Schwenk:But honestly, the one thing I want to tell people is that if you don't feel good, you do not know what you're missing. When you feel good, the world is your oyster and there's, you know, the creativity and the fun and the energy that you can have, because your body is designed to heal you. You just have to take care of it, you know, and it's not like I'm not going to the gym every day, that's not happening. But I'm going a couple of, two, three times a week, maybe, Maybe two, Okay, and it's just. And then I'm eating a lot of yogurt and kefir and other things, and it does matter what you eat. I mean, I'm not living on. I don't eat sugar, I don't, you know, maybe once in a great while, but I don't live. I eat pretty good, but I don't eat perfect all the time either. You know what I'm saying. But I do eat really well, but it's because it makes me feel young. I don't want to go be like some of those other people. I don't want to.
William Davis, MD:I hear you Well, Donna, It's always a pleasure talking to you. I always learn something new. My one regret about doing this in a podcast format is listeners can't see just how spectacular you look. You glow. You really do glow. You're about many years younger than you are.
William Davis, MD:I hope that alone is inspiration for people if they could see you, but I will try to post this as a video also so people can see just how glorious you look. But, donna, once again, so if people just because these are my listeners, they may not be familiar with all the things you do online Could you share? If people want to see your recipes and some of your blog posts, where do they go?
Donna Schwenk:It's culturedfoodlife. com, or you can Google my name, Donna Schwenk, and it'll come up and we have hundreds of recipes. We have a getting started on the menu. You'll see get started. You'll see a smiley pot and if you click that, it is a drop down menu and it tells you how to do all of these cultures for free. It's all there. It's a huge menu. It's got yogurt, it's key for a kovac, your culture, vegetables, everything on there that you need to get started on how to make these foods, and it's all free.
Donna Schwenk:I have a membership site where we have extra stuff. We get free ebooks, we do discounts and we have forums and all kinds of the community. But what you really need to get started is all on my website for free and I put it on there so you'll feel better. And I have products that we sell. We sell a starter for this yogurt. That is fabulous for a whole bunch of different yogurts gaserai, rutarai, overplus. We have kefir, we have kaboosh, we have all kinds of different things. We have a new kefir soda. That's fabulous. That is a great replacement for pop. But we have all these things and you just head over to my site and if you can't afford things, it's very affordable. I find ways for you to do it. You can get cultures from friends or get a culture from the store and make it. I've got all different kinds of ways to do things to help you.
William Davis, MD:I've made the soda. It is wonderful. Yeah, it's really fun I look forward to having it every day.
Donna Schwenk:I do too. It's really fun. It's super bubbly. Is yours bubbly?
William Davis, MD:Oh yeah.
Donna Schwenk:Yeah.
William Davis, MD:That's the one danger. You've got to keep that what I do. I just leave the cap on loosely, yeah, or you can buy those venting caps, because it produces a huge amount of gas and that's Saccharomyces bilardiae, which is one of the really good probiotic yeast.
Donna Schwenk:We put that in there to help people. That's like one of my favorite yeast ever. It's very powerful and I've got a whole articles about that too. So all of these microbes that people don't know, they just don't know and it seems overwhelming. But I promise you it's not hard, it's just new, and I make it really easy because I was pretty sick and I didn't do things that were hard in the beginning.
William Davis, MD:That's your strengths, Donna you bring it down to earth and make it very accessible to people.
Donna Schwenk:Yeah, so it's really fun and it's not hard. I got a lady that my daughter's boyfriend's mom had gotten really sick. She just went on an Alaskan cruise and she has been making key for Intajar on the cruise in her cabin every day because without it she gets a lot of inflammation and she can't eat some things. And if she could do it and she was very against it and now she says I believe her, I drank the cool light, I believe it. And then the whole body changed. She took it on the cruise with her. I was like all right, we're good, it was great. So thank you for having me.
William Davis, MD:I appreciate it and you, Donna, always a pleasure.
Donna Schwenk:You changed my life with El Ruder. I didn't know anything about it, so I really appreciate it, thank you. Thank you for sharing that. That was.
William Davis, MD:And it shows.
Donna Schwenk:Donna, it shows. Yeah, it's so much fun too. Do you know what I'm saying? I really enjoy making it, so thank you again. I appreciate it, thank you Donna. Thank you.