What's all this about making "yogurt"?

Why has yogurt making gone viral?

First of all, it's NOT yogurt. It looks and smells like yogurt. By FDA regulations, something called yogurt must be fermented with traditional yogurt-making microbes Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus. That's NOT what we are doing.

Instead, we are fermenting human microbes, i.e., microbes that are adapted to the human body and provide substantial benefits but have been lost by most people because of their susceptibility to common antibiotics. Using my methods (prolonged fermentation, addition of prebiotic fiber, selecting microbial species to achieve specific effects) we obtain hundreds of billions of microbes per serving for greater benefits. 

These are the concepts I introduced in my Super Gut book and extended further in the Super Body book. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Super Gut
• 0:22 Why It’s Not Yogurt
• 1:54 The Case For Human Microbes
• 2:41 Antibiotics And Microbe Loss
• 3:39 Prolonged Fermentation Method
• 5:19 High Counts Without High Costs
• 6:09 Choosing Microbes For Outcomes

Transcript

William Davis, MD: 0:00

Hi everybody, Dr. William Davis here, author of the Super Gut book, the book that I used to introduce the idea of fermenting human microbes. So I've been asked to answer a number of questions to clarify some uncertainties that might have come out since the book has been released. So the first question is could you explain why you recommend making yogurt? Well, first of all, let's make clear, it's not yogurt. In the US and many other countries, if you want to call something yogurt, it must be fermented with microbes that are traditionally used to make yogurt. In other words, these recipes and the yogurts have been handed down in many cases over many generations. And this is a food made with Lactobacillus vulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus and sometimes other microbes like lactobacillus acidophilus. That's not what we're doing. That's what I'm advising you to do. What we're doing is we're not fermenting, in this case, dairy. You can ferment other foods too, but let's talk about dairy. We're not going to ferment it with those traditional yogurt-making microbes. We're going to use human source microbes. That is, bacteria that should be part of the human body, but in most cases has been lost. So in the modern world, we've all been wildly overexposed to antibiotics. One course of antibiotics, not one, not many, just one, just one course of antibiotics is enough to wipe out hundreds of species in your gastrointestinal microbiome and other microbiomes, by the way, in other parts of the body. So we've lost many microbes, many of which were beneficial. So now we can't replace all hundreds and hundreds of them, but we can replace some of the most important ones. And so that's why I've chosen microbes like lactobacillus rotori. All wild mammals have this microbe. All hunter-gatherer indigenous populations have this. Modern people have lost it because it is, while it's very important, it's also very susceptible to common antibiotics. So that's the whole rationale. We're going to restore human-sourced microbes that we believe are very beneficial for human health. But we're going to go further. We're not just going to ferment it, we're going to use my method of prolonged fermentation. So think of it this way: Lactobacillus rotorite doubles. So microbes don't have sex, right? There's no male and female microbes. They just double themselves. So lactobacillus rotorite, the first yogurt that I uh talked about, doubles every three hours or so at human body temperature. So we're going to let it double 12 times. And that gives us about 300 billion, billion with a B, microbes per 120 milliliter or half cup serving. So, in other words, making this yogurt-like thing, it's right, it's not yogurt. It looks and smells like yogurt, but it's not yogurt. It's just fermented dairy using human microbes. The whole idea is to generate very, very high counts so that we get big benefits. Remember, you're introducing hundreds of billions of microbes into hundreds of trillions in your gastrointestinal tract. So you want really big numbers. That's hard to get in a probiotic, right? It's very, it would be very expensive. Getting, for instance, 300 billion microbes per day in a capsule form would probably cost you huge amounts of money, like your mortgage on your house, be a lot of money. And so all we're doing is causing the microbe to replicate, to reproduce, many times get very high counts. Another question is why do I recommend using lactobacyls roteri for fermentation? Well, lactobacills rotari is just one microbe that we ferment. There are many others. For instance, if you have a newborn child and you want to make sure that child matures neurologically and has good immunity against viruses and other pathogens and is healthier, we want to make sure that child has bifitobacterin phantus, a microbe likewise very susceptible to common antibiotics. And mom is supposed to pass it on to the child at birth or with breastfeeding, but mom likely got many courses of antibiotics in her life and as well as at time of delivery or afterwards. Likewise, children are often given antibiotics. So this very important microbe for infant and child health by Photobacterian phantus is also largely lost. How about bacillus coagulants, a very interesting microbe that helps recovery and athletes or other people engage in heavy physical effort? Or how about lactobacillus gastride that has been shown to reduce waste circumference, reduce abdominal fat? In other words, you can choose a microbe for an effect you want, though in the end we want to cultivate many, many, many microbes, and there are ways to do that. What we're doing here is restoring the most important microbes that will over time encourage the restoration of other beneficial microbes. Another question Besides Lactobacillus rotori, what other species do you recommend for home yogurt making? Well, I mentioned those two. Bifidobacterian phantus is a good one. Lactobacillus gasterae is another one. There's a non-bacterial but fungal species that we like to ferment, and that's Saccharomyces bulartiae. If you've had beer or wine, that's been fermented with Sacromyces cerevisiae. We're going to use its cousin, very closely related microbe, a fungal microbe, Sacromyces bulardi, and we make a juice out of it. We take a capsule of commercial source of sacromyce bulardi, empty it into some juice, just make sure the juice has no preservatives in it. Preservatives like sodium benzoate or potassium sorbate, and then agitate lightly, loosen the cap because you're going to see it within 24 hours at room temperature. You can ferment this one at room temperature. You're going to see a lot of carbon dioxide being formed. And if you have your cap on too tight, your your vessel, your butt, your jar or container could actually explode. We don't want it to happen. So we leave the cap on loosely or periodically let it uh release the gas. We let it ferment for about 72 hours so that almost all the sugar is gone and converted to healthy metabolites. Now, this is important because even though it's a fungus, it tends to feed beneficial bacteria. It's probably one of the most important things you can do, by the way, during the course of antibiotics because it minimizes. Nothing makes you impervious to the adverse effects of antibiotics, but the sacromyce blardei minimize the damage to your microbiome. Now, there are many other microbes you can ferment, and that list is growing longer all the time. So follow it, read my super gut book, and you'll see that I have lots of recipes for all different kinds of microbes. Follow my conversations online, YouTube. My blog has thousands of posts, WilliamDavismd.com, and you'll see that we're introducing new microbes all the time.