Fiber, Fermented and Raw
Foods, Friendly
Flora and Bowel Health
Fiber
is one thing largely animal food diets provide
very little of. We have all heard how critical
fiber is for intestinal health. It is not uncommon
to become constipated when adopting an animal
food-rich diet while cutting back on vegetables,
fruits and grains. How do we deal with this?
A reasonably
bulky stool is necessary if one is to have regular
and easy bowel movements. The obvious and usually
recommended way to achieve this is indeed to
eat a high-fiber diet. The other, little understood
way, the way followed by the native cultures
Price studied, was to eat a diet rich in fermented
foods and raw animal protein and fat.
Fermented
animal foods such as clabbered milk and yogurt
and kefir made from raw milk, and fermented
vegetables, support the proliferation in the
intestinal tract of beneficial bacteria. Our
innovative liquid probiotic, Doc’s
Friendly Flora, provides a rich supply of
living microbes to populate the intestines and
proliferate. The beneficial bacteria bulks up
the stools, resulting in easy elimination even
on diets containing very little fiber. This
process may take some time, and my patients
often benefit from using psyllium fiber to maintain
bulk during the transition to a diet with more
animal foods than previously.
Dr. Francis
Pottenger wrote about another aspect of the
influence of raw animal foods on intestinal
health, explaining that raw food consists mostly
of hydrophilic colloids. Hydrophylic means water
loving, and a colloid is a suspension of solid
particles in a gel-like fluid. Eaten uncooked,
these colloids absorb large quantities of digestive
juices, forming a gelatinous mass that maintains
the mucosa of the stomach and digestive tract
in a healthy state.
The heat of
cooking precipitates out colloids, making them
hydrophobic (water hating). The hydration capacity
of the colloids is decreased, and they become
less able to absorb digestive juices. Colloidal
cellulose and pectins in plants can withstand
greater temperatures without being precipitated
than can proteins; this is why cooking has a
less pronounced effect on the digestibility
of plants than on that of animal foods. In modern
diets, most people get it backwards, emphasizing
eating vegetables raw while cooking all animal
foods.
In Dr. Pottenger’s
ten-year cat study, cooked-food cats were consistently
found at autopsy to have much longer intestines
than raw-food cats. Intestines of the former
had many distensions and general lack of tone;
the length was often up to twice that of raw-food
cats. A similar process may be at work in humans
as well. The argument has been made that the
length of the human digestive tract demonstrates
that humans are best suited for a vegetarian
diet, because the remnants of the digestion
of animal flesh may putrefy when stagnant in
the rather long human intestines. The eating
of refined and overcooked foods may indeed contribute
to that length; problems allegedly due to flesh
too long in the intestines may in fact be due
to intestines that are too long. Price’s
natives ate a substantial portion of their proteins
and fats raw, and suffered no such problems.
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