The Wheele of Five by Weston Price
There is a new ‘Food Guide’, in which the government and the Nutrition Centre set out their views on how the population ‘should or ought to eat’. It is a guide with a moral compass, as key drivers behind this …
All posts tagged: Fermentation
Cheese maturation, umami and kokumi
Take home message Making good cheese is a skill Gouda cheese is made from (raw) milk, rennet and starter culture. The starter culture converts milk sugar into lactic acid (= fermentation), while the rennet causes certain proteins (casein proteins) to …
How many live bacteria does food contain?
Take home message Interest in live bacteria Is the die cast? If you believe the title of an article in the journal Trends in Food Science, it certainly seems so: ‘The future is fermented: Microbial diversity is an important source …
Natural cheese starters are poor in species,….
…however, rich in different genetic strains. Research into a tradtional starter culture for Gouda cheese, which was maintained through daily back-slopping, showed that only two bacterial species are present, namely Lactococcus lactis and Leuconostoc mesenteroides (Erkus et al., 2013). This …
Reduce asthma – strengthe immunity
Forest soil is hot, but why? The Netherlands is going to copy Finland. Finland is already doing it, sending children into the forest. Dutch researchers would like to see children come into more contact with the soil (earth), to train …
The genome of kefir
Take home message Kefir grains (= kefir plant = SCOBY) can be found all over the world, but are there any differences? The dairy industry has discovered kefir in the past 10 years and you can buy kefir everywhere in …
Traditional cheesemaking
Take home message No stainless steel Today, everything around milk and milk processing is stainless steel (INOX). The cheese vat in which the milk is processed is stainless steel, the milk pipelines through which the milk is pumped and even …
The gut and ageing
Growing interest for the gut and its microbiome What is a healthy gut? What microbiome belongs to it? How do you steer health, and especially from what age? This kind of research is much needed, because the list of diseases of affluence is growing rapidly. Think of obesity, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, but also the range of intestinal problems (irritable bowel, Crohn’s disease), or colon cancer. There is increasing evidence, that there is a causal relationship …
What do you call kefir?
Take home message Kefir from SCOBY versus kefir made of a commercial starter? German colleagues (Nejafati et al., 2022) looked at not only the microbial composition of kefir, but also the metabolic products of the bacteria and yeasts present in …
Symbiocene kefir
Take home message Symbiocene thinking Through the Dutch TV-programme ‘Tegenlicht’, it became clear, that a new way of thinking, a philosophy, is needed to leave the Anthropocene era behind us. We are living in the Anthropocene, the human-dominated technological age. Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albre sought new concepts to express our feelings associated with experiencing nature. Unfortunately, many of these feelings stem from human destruction of nature and the environment, urbanisation and artificial ways of …
