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Transcript
- 01:04 About Dr. Noah De Koyer
- 06:39 Cultured and Fermented Foods
- 08:29 Gardening, Fermentation, Cultured Foods and Health
- 09:48 Pickled Vegetables vs. Fermented Vegetables
- 11:20 Raw vs. Pasteurized
- 13:52 Fermented Foods vs. Probiotic Pills
- 18:22 Introducing Fermented Foods
- 22:18 Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO)
- 24:58 Fermented Foods and the Primal Lifestyle
- 26:50 The Gut and Your Immune System
- 30:58 Fermented Foods and Nervous System Function
- 32:29 Learning How to Ferment Foods
- 37:48 The Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today
- 41:05 Find Dr. Noah De Koyer
- 42:24 The Medicinal Supplement Summit
Wendy Myers: Hello, welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers. Thank you so much for tuning in.
I am just so thrilled every day that I get to wake up and do what I love and teach people about health and nutrition. I just really love doing this podcast, informing you guys about all the things that you can be doing to improve your health.
And these are the things that I do every day. I do lots of reading and lots of research and I listen to lots of podcasts myself, so I just love to share all these amazing new cutting-edge things that you can do at home to help and dramatically improve your health and meet your health goals and improve your energy levels and improve your brain functioning and so much more. So I am here to help.
Our guest today is Dr. Noah De Koyer. He is going to be talking to us about fermented foods. I have not done a podcast yet on fermented foods, but I think it is really, really important to introduce to your diet.
Some people can have a little bit of time getting used to the taste of them. I was repulsed at first when I tasted them. They can have a little bit of a bite to them. They may be a little bit bitter, which some people aren’t used to. But you get used to them and I actually crave them now. My body really, really wants fermented foods. So I eat them on an almost daily basis.
It’s just very important to introduce them into your diet because they contain probiotics and help give you healthy gut bacteria, which is a key to health. A healthy gut equals a healthy life, disease-free healthy life.
So Dr. Noah De Koyer is going to be talking to us all about 1) the benefits of fermented foods, 2) how you can easily introduce fermented foods into your diet and some tips on how to ferment your own food.
I had a party one time where I invited all my friends over to make a bunch of different fermented foods. It was a lot of fun. So that’s a great way to get friends or have your family together and make a bunch of healthy foods. It’s very rewarding.
But first, I have to do the disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this podcast is for entertainment purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional and medical advice. Please consult with your healthcare practitioner before engaging in anything today that w suggest on the show.
Wendy Myers: Our guest, Noah De Koyer has managed the Family Chiropractic Center of Bayonne in New York for the past 15 years with the mission to guide people to achieve their own innate beauty and good health. His patients range from infants, a few years old to enlightened 19 year olds.
In 2014, Dr. Noah co-created a new business with two of his closest colleagues who share the same desire to help humanity live a healthy lifestyle through a think tank organization, the Centre for Epigenetic Expression.
Dr. Noah is a co-host for the Pain Relief Project Natural Solutions that Actually Work. This is a summit. And he was a co-host for the recent released summit, Longevity and Anti-Aging Project Living Healthy Wealthy and Wise. You can hear Dr. Noah regularly on the Beyond Your Wildest Genes Podcast as a co-host, which is another offering from the Centre for Epigenetic Expression.
Dr. Noah can be reached at his website, FCCofBayonne.com and the CentreforEpigeneticExpression.com and at the Beyond Your Wildest Genes Podcast on iTunes and on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Dr. Noah De Koyer has been married to his beautiful wife Carrie for 15 years and has two incredible children. Noah, thank you so much for joining us on the Live to 110 Podcast.
Noah DeKoyer: Hey, Wendy. It is so great to be here.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and how you got into health?
Noah DeKoyer: Sure, sure. So I was a relatively normal kid growing up, but the one thing that I suffered with was strep throat, ear infections. I became really familiar with the pink bubble gum-tasting Amoxicillin. Several times a year, I would take that.
And as fortunes would have it, my mother met a chiropractor, started seeing a chiropractor. He told her a different of chiropractic, that healing comes from inside out. She decided to bring me. I got adjusted by that chiropractor. I still get adjusted by that chiropractor today, and I haven’t had strep throat since.
So that was my initial intro into health and it grew from there.
I really got interested in Dr. Mercola’s site. I got really interested in Weston A. Price. And it just kept growing and growing from that.
I also grew up in a town that had a lot of Italian and Polish immigrants and they all cooked their own food and [canned] their own vegetables and had huge gardens. My father had a garden. My great grandfather raised bees. My dad raised bees. So I grew up in this natural way of eating and thinking. And it just kept developing and developing and developing.
And then a tragedy happened in my life where the person, my mother, who introduced me to chiropractic and a lot of this stuff, got colon cancer and died in 30 days. So that was the impetus. It made an even bigger impact. So that is how we got started on this Centre of Epigenetic Expression with my two partners and some of the different summits and the podcasts that we do.
So that’s the two minute version of a 12-minute story.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s how I got into health—also for personal reasons of course, but also because my father passed away from esophageal cancer. And for a lot of people, the tragedy in their lives steers them towards the health field unfortunately.
Wendy Myers: We are going to talk about fermented foods and how those are so important for gut health, gut microbiome immunity, et cetera. It is something I haven’t explored yet on the podcast. Let’s talk about some different examples of cultured and fermented foods.
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah, absolutely. So let’s define some terms first. First off, I like to consider, in my definition, culture food and fermented food is the exact same thing.
The other thing is that fermentation in its basic definition is using bacteria to make food more delicious, more nutritious and to preserve it. So once we look at that, it opens up a huge world of fermented foods and those would be things that we are so used to every day like chocolate, beer, wine, meads, those things are all fermented. Even bread, we would not even have those without fermentation.
And then we look at other things like the things we see every day in the supermarket, especially now, like all the healing tonics, kombucha and all the KeVita products and shrubs, which are vinegars.
And then even cheeses are fermented foods. The soy products, some of the soy products that are—the only soy products that I think are nutritious are the ones that are fermented. It would be miso, tempeh and natto. So those are some examples.
Wendy Myers: And I love fermented foods. I try to eat them every single day. I have a brand called Wildbrine that I really love that has this fermented sauerkraut with ginger and seaweed in it, arame seaweed. It is just really, really flavorful and tasty.
And I made it at home before. So we are going to go into all that stuff.
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: So what do you see is the most important relationships between gardening, fermentation, cultured foods and your health?
Noah DeKoyer: That’s a great question and that touches the point about what I do and who I am. But that relationship of getting your hands in the dirt and picking something out of your garden, taking it, chopping it up, adding a little salt and creating something more nutritious for your family, in my mind, it’s super cool.
But way before, I realized how important for your health fermented foods are. I thought it was just really interesting and fun and cool. But even if you don’t have a garden, if you go to a farmers’ market, which are all over the place now, no matter where you live, and just pick the brightest, freshest vegetables. They are so easy to use, chop against, add some salt and make something out of. It is so much better, so much more fun, so much more vibrant.
So I think that connection really gets us back to what we are missing. Everybody is used to package foods and fast food dinners. But when you start fermenting foods and doing it at home, man, you will get your family involved and it’s just a fun way to connect back to food, real food per se.
Wendy Myers: What is the difference between pickled vegetables and fermented vegetables?
Noah DeKoyer: That’s a great distinction. Now, picked vegetables in my mind are vinegar-based. There’s nothing wrong with that, but generally, they are not alive food anymore.
So when you think of a fermented cabbage, which is sauerkraut or kimchi or kombucha, that’s alive. That’s teeming with live bacteria, it’s teeming with live enzyme. That’s a full live food.
When you buy something that’s pickled like Giardiniera, I believe it’s called—that’s carrots and cauliflower and things of that nature—that is nutritious, that is crunchy, lots of fiber, but it is not alive. No more live enzymes, no more live bacteria. It has a lot of benefits, but it is nothing like fermented foods.
And the interesting thing is if you do fermented foods properly and create that lactic acid, you can almost tell the difference between a vinegar-based pickled vegetable and a lactic acid based fermented food. And when I saw lactic acid, that’s generally the acid that is produced when you ferment foods and that’s really what keeps foods. It keeps its shelf life because bad bacteria, even clostridium, some of the worst bacteria, they cannot grow in a lactic acid environment.
So that’s the difference. And that’s an important, important distinction for sure.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I think another important distinction to make is—maybe a novice is going to the grocery store just to try out some probiotic foods, fermented vegetables, they will see a sauerkraut that is mass market-produced.
Noah DeKoyer: Right.
Wendy Myers: The problem is a lot of sauerkrauts or fermented foods have been pasteurized. So can you tell people what to look for between this sauerkraut that’s been pasteurized and this that is actually raw that has probiotics?
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah. Just so you know, I live right outside of New York City, so Nathan’s Hot Dogs and […] Hot Dogs are a big thing, particularly in the summer. And classically, you would see sauerkraut in plastic-sealed bags. There’s no way that could be live. It’s not going to happen.
So, basically, your best bet is really to shop where you know that these foods are going to be at like a Whole Foods or even Trader Joe’s is starting to carry them now. But all the terminologies, “raw,” “fermented,” “live,” “live enzymes,” that’s what you are looking for on the label.
And generally when something is live like that and you open it up for the first time, you are going to hear a little fizz. I don’t drink soda anymore, but for those of you who drink soda. Or even Seltzer, let’s say Seltzer, when you open that Seltzer can and you hear that little fizz, that’s built up gas that those bacteria are creating. That’s what you want to look for. Do a little fizz.
I am sure audience is all over the country. Where mom had it, we have Stop and Shop. That is one of the normal supermarkets. They have health food sections and they are right in there as well. One of the classic ones that have been around for so long for sauerkraut is Bubbies, that’s only in my area for sure.
Wendy Myers: No, we have that right here in Los Angeles as well. They are growing in lots of different places in the US.
But yeah, you definitely have to look for the word “raw.” It has to say “raw” on the outside of it or it is probably dead.
Noah DeKoyer: Exactly. I mean it could be alive for a long time too. That’s the cool thing. In the store, they might have a shelf life on it or they might have date on it. But when you make it yourself, man, that stuff just gets better and better and better.
I have some fermented Meyer lemons in my refrigerator. They are probably two years old. Easily, it’s getting better and better.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that all sounds good.
Wendy Myers: So let’s talk about eating fermented foods versus taking a probiotic pill. What are the distinction and the difference and the benefit in eating the fermented cultured foods?
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah, that is an interesting topic. A couple of weeks ago, I happened to be at a little microbiome forum in the city. It’s Sakara Lounge. And Aviva Romm was there, Dr. Raphael Kellman and Dr. Robin Berzin. So it is a really nice three-headed panel. They asked the same exact question. And my answer is going to be pretty similar.
First off, when you buy a probiotic pill, what you are looking for is how many colony forming units are in that probiotic pill. So, low-level supermarket brands might have in the millions or maybe one billion or two billion CFUs. And that’s decent. Pharmaceutical grades have—you are really familiar with Klaire Labs and ProThera and other companies, you probably can mention a few—have upwards of 50 billion CFUs. That’s really a good number.
When you make fermented foods at home, I have seen numbers when people have made fermented foods. Particularly, Dr. Mercola did this. He has a culture starter called Kinetic Culture, which I highly recommend where you can direct which bacteria you are growing and other nutrients. And he did a study. He just made his sauerkraut tested and there were trillions and trillions of bacteria in just a few tablespoons. So the potency on fermented foods is so much far greater than the probiotic pills.
Saying that, I still think it is really, really important to take a probiotic in your daily regimen whether it’s something like lactobacillus, bifidobac or something more soil-based like Prescript Assist which I love.
So I think the combination is important, but fermenting foods is going to increase your potency 10-fold. And plus, when you ferment your foods, you are creating nutrients.
One of the big nutrients when you ferment foods properly that is created is vitamin K2. You know K2 is hard to get. I mean it’s really hard to get and it’s super important. And it is made by fermenting natto and some other vegetables. So it is really important.
Another interesting story about how fermented foods increase its nutrient density beyond probiotics is back in the day, when the sailors would go on their long journey, they had a real strong risk of getting scurvy. And we know now that it was a vitamin C deficiency.
But back then, they had no idea. But what they did know is they bought barrels and barrels of sauerkraut on their trip. Nobody would get scurvy. So beyond the different varieties of bacteria and virus and archaea and fungus that grow when you make fermented foods, it has its own nutrient density.
And not to mention, when you buy probiotics in the store that is not from your physician or not from your doctor or not from your healing practitioner, high chances are that they are already dead. They are not just even alive. It is just a crappy product.
I don’t know where you get your probiotics from your clientele, but one of the big companies I use is Klaire Labs and they ship it to you in ice. They keep it cold. So that’s how impotent it is.
The differences are when you make your own, you are getting a lot more bang for your buck. And it is probably cheaper, particularly if you grow your own vegetables.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Also, one other tip I was thinking of when you are buying it in the grocery store is you have to look at the price. A dead jar of sauerkraut is a lot cheaper than a live jar fermented. It’s $15 for a little jar of the fermented sauerkraut because it takes a long time to make. But the dead is maybe $3 or $4.
So look at the price point. You are not going to get away with live foods on the cheap. So that’s why it’s good to make it at home.
Wendy Myers: So what is the best way to introduce fermented or cultured foods into your life, to your diet?
Noah DeKoyer: That is important too because I have been fermenting foods for about 15 years now and I have run into this problem myself several, several times. The best way to introduce fermented foods is slowly.
We have all heard that statement, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” I think Hypocrites said that. Well, this fermented food is medicine in my mind in terms of it is really strong, it is really potent, it is really nutrient-dense. It’s got tons of probiotics, live enzymes.
If you make sauerkraut for the first time and you just have a bowl of it, boy, boy, your stomach is going to start talking to you.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Noah DeKoyer: Or if you buy a couple of bottles of teas, kombucha and you just drink a bottle or two, it is going to affect you in some negative way. So the way to do it is slowly.
Whether you buy a great product or whether you make your own, a few tablespoons at every meal for several days or buy a bottle of GT’s Kombucha or lemon cayenne KeVita, which is my favorite drink. And have a third of a bottle for three days and slowly ramp up. But I think the idea and the goal is to have a little bit of some sort of fermented food almost every day and almost at every meal.
It’s a great way if you add it into your smoothies. I happen to like goat milk kefir as opposed to regular cow’s milk kefir. It just agrees with you more. I think it agrees with most people more. But if you make a smoothie in the morning with coconut milk or almond milk or even yogurt or regular milk for that matter.
A great substitute is to start adding some goat milk kefir too because you got a ton of beneficial bacteria. And it just transforms that goat milk into something much more special that is really healing for your stomach, really great for your digestion, really great for your skin, immunity, the whole thing.
So those are some of the ways that I think. You can add them in soy for breakfast and the smoothie for lunch and the sauerkraut. Maybe a little bowl of real miso soup because you can get really live miso paste in the supermarket now. That’s not that much, five or six or seven bucks for a tub. And you could use a tablespoon and a cup of boiling water and milk.
So those are some of the best ways to add it. But slowly is the key. The last thing you want to do is create stomach distress and then you just get turned off by it because it was a little bit too much for you.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I mean some people that really have impaired digestion or really their gut bacteria is really out of whack, they’ve got major health conditions, autoimmune disease, some of them can only handle some of the juice from vegetables. They can’t even handle just a bite. They have to start really, really slow.
Noah DeKoyer: Wendy, I got to tell. I’ll tell you a little secret. That’s me right now. I don’t know what means. All of a sudden, my HCL or stomach acid production has dropped off the face of the earth.
So I actually am currently treating—I have SIBO right now. So I am on to microbials and virals. I am eating a FODMAP/SIBO diet, which I have a little bit of fermented foods and I am eating a little bit less than I normally would.
It is exactly what you said. If your stomach is not functioning the way it should, it has got to be a little bit slow to work up or rebuild that microbiome, rebuild their digestion, stomach digestive enzymes. And so I am in that boat right now.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, tell us what SIBO is for anyone who is not aware of that and what can cause that.
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah, SIBO is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. So you are not, as humans, supposed to have any bacteria in your small intestine. All those beneficial bacteria that do all those good things are only supposed to be in your colon.
Through a variety of reasons, excessive stress, low stomach acid and a few other reasons that those bacteria can start creeping up into the small intestines. And then it just aggravates. And then you get more constipation, which even creates worse SIBO symptoms and it is just like a bad cycle.
So what you got to do for someone with SIBO is you have to starve off those bad bacteria. You got to spit that out with some antimicrobials. There’s an antibiotic too, […] antibody. You can use that. I have decided not to use that.
And you got to really eliminate all the sugars from your diet, all the refine carbohydrates, nothing like corn and potatoes and rice and even things like chocolate and then some vegetables like onions, which I love to ferment, but no onions, no garlic, things like that. So that’s where I am at right now.
I think it is pretty rampant in our society. You know this. Our society is stuck on the fact that we produce too much stomach acid and that everybody needs Protonix and Pepcid and Zantac when the truth is that 50% of people over 50 have too little stomach acid and they are really treating it the absolute wrong way.
So I think if you gave the QuinTron Test, which is a breath test to diagnose SIBO, to most people, I think a heck of a lot of people would show positive for sure.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, a lot of people that are having bloating and gas and they just feel really bloated after a meal and they are not digesting their food well, there are also other symptoms too.
Noah DeKoyer: Bloating is a—you nailed in the head, definitely bloating and stomach pain and constipation.
Even bad skin, I started getting too. I am using something in my skin. It looks pretty good. And I am too young to have bad skin.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And most doctors are not going to clue into that. Unless there are functional medicine practitioner, SIBO is just not on the radar.
Noah DeKoyer: Not in the least, which is silly.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And so let’s talk about how fermented foods are a valuable part of a primal lifestyle.
Noah DeKoyer: Let’s define primal as being eating our ancestors did, sleeping like our ancestors did, exercising like our ancestors did, playing like our ancestors did.
As a culture, as a human race, there was a time when water wasn’t safe for us to drink at all. So we lived on things like wine and meads and beers, even kids because once you fermented it or made it into alcohol beverage, they were safe to consume. So it is something that we just developed with as humans.
And when we are starting to come together as little cultures and little tribes, we have to figure out ways to preserve our foods. And that’s the way they did it, by fermenting it, storing it and keeping it cold and salting it and all the other things that we have developed.
And when you look at every different culture, whether it is Japanese, whether it is Russian, it doesn’t matter. They all have their own set. So it has been a part of our primal Paleo ancestral way of looking at things and developing since we are humans for sure.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And today, most people, the only fermented food they are getting is beer.
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah and way too much of it, right?
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Noah DeKoyer: And that’s not even live anymore.
Wendy Myers: That doesn’t count. That does not count. No probiotics in there unfortunately, unless you are making your own at home maybe. Yeah, I was just joking.
Noah DeKoyer: You know that’s coming. You know that’s coming.
26:50 the gut and your immune system
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So let’s talk about the importance of gut health and how your gut is so tied to your immune system health and as a majority of your immune system and what goes wrong when you don’t have proper gut bacteria that are aided by eating fermented foods.
Noah DeKoyer: As I mentioned in the beginning, when I first started doing this, I thought it was cool and fun and interesting and […] Kombucha was a weird-looking thing.
But as time went on, you just saw more and more articles. Now the microbiome is the hottest topic. You can’t escape it. It’s everywhere. And it is because that ecosystem in our enteric nervous system dictates and controls so much. It’s considered by Dr. Kellman and other people as basically like its own organ, in and of itself.
In that environment, in our gut and in our enteric nervous system and in our microbiome, we are creating all sorts of vitamins and minerals that we don’t get from our food. We are creating most of our neurotransmitters. Most people think the neurotransmitters or the chemical communications that happen in our brain are created in our brain and that’s not true. They are really created down in our gut from primarily serotonin and dopamine, all those.
And then when we just look at how expansive the central nervous system is and the connection between the central nervous system, the enteric nervous system, your microbiome. The nervous system runs the show. It runs your immune system. It runs your endocrine system. So it is ubiquitous in every aspect of health possible.
You can’t go to a functional medicine doctor with—any symptom you go to a functional medicine doctor with, essentially, they are going to look really closely at your microbiome, your stomach health, your gut health. Whether it’s thyroid, whether it’s autoimmunity, whether it’s cancer, it is tied into every single aspect of your life and it’s indistinguishable, inseparable and it’s that crucial.
Wendy Myers: I know. Almost every client that comes to me has some sort of digestive issue, whether it would be low stomach acid. They have H. pylori. They’ve got all kinds of intestinal system issues, whether it’d be IBS, diarrhea, constipation, Candida, parasites or something. And they have malabsorption.
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: Every test I do for amino acids, people are not absorbing their amino acids for various reasons. Metal toxicity is of course—definitely they have a compromised intestinal lining and compromised gut microbiome. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah. Think about it. If you are not producing the right stomach acid or the digestive enzymes or you have dysbiosis, which is when we look at the totality of the microbiome, which is all the different bacteria and all different viruses and fungus and archaea and even some parasites that are in that grouping of that organ. If that is not functioning right, you are simply not going to break down your food. You are simply not going to properly digest your food and you are going, as you said, malabsorption.
We are always so worried about taking in a multivitamin. How about starting with adjusting what you are eating?
And I believe the ancient healing art of Ayurveda, which is considered the oldest healing science or art out ever, states that it is not necessarily what you eat. It’s what you digest. So that’s crucial.
Having a healthy microbiome is part and parcel of having great digestion and breaking down your food and absorbing those minerals and then integrating them into your body. I mean it is really truthfully just amazing and astounding.
Wendy Myers: Let’s talk about the connection between fermented foods and a properly functioning nervous system. A lot of people have stress and anxiety and sleep issues. How does that relate back to the gut?
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah, it is just what we have mentioned a few different ways. Most people think that most of the neurotransmitters are created in your brain. But they are not. All the communication molecules that your nervous system functions on are created in your gut.
So without a properly functioning microbiome, you can’t have a properly functioning enteric nervous system and you can’t have a properly functioning central nervous system, which is your brain and your spinal cord and peripheral nerves that go everywhere in your entire body.
And that’s the reason why I think most functional medicine doctors start with the gut now because it has impacts on everything, including your thyroid and that just goes on to a whole other rabbit hole. But you can’t escape how integral the microbiome, your gut health, the enteric nervous system and the central nervous system tied in.
We think that the most neurons we have are in our brain. Well, there are more nerve cells in that enteric nervous system than there is in your central nervous system. So you could see how huge it is, not to mention all the Peyer’s patches and all the other things in your digestive system and the enteric nervous system that creates immune cells. It is so expansive and so exciting that it just goes on and on and on.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, let’s talk about some key resources and products that you need to help you to begin making your own fermented foods and how to make them at home.
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah. I like to consider myself self-taught or self-taught expert. But the truth of the matter is that I have been following, taking courses and watching people for a long time.
One of the first books and one of the first people that I have started reading was Dr. Sandor Katz. I think a world without the microwave or something was his first book. But he wrote Wild Fermentation, which is a great book.
And then I brought it up here. Let’s see if everybody can see this. This is the bible right here.
Wendy Myers: The Art of Fermentation.
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah. This is a great one. He’s really a fascinating individual. So he is a great read.
But then some of the classes I have taken is Johnny McGruther from Nourished Kitchen. Of course, Donna Gates from Body Ecology has a great fermentation class. She has a bunch of cultures. I mentioned it before. Dr. Mercola has a lot of videos on his site on how to make sauerkraut in his Kinetic Culture.
So those are the best resources I know. And the other one is Hannah Crum from Kombucha Kamp. She’s wonderful. Kombucha is a big deal in the fermented food realm, I mean everything. It’s like the cure-all.
But she has a great site, a great new book. She just wrote The Big Book of Kombucha, which is just historical perspectives and what you could do with kombucha and how you can use it. So those are the resources, Hannah Crum, Johnny McGruther, Donna Gates, Sandor Katz.
She is newer for me. I don’t know if you know her or not, but Summer Bock is huge into the fermented world too. I have just started looking at—I know she’s got a massive class that she puts on that teaches people how to ferment foods. So I would recommend her material as well, absolutely.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I learned from watching videos on Donna Gates’ website, BodyEcology.com. And that was one of the first books that talked about the importance of the gut microbiome and how to care for it.
I actually had a group of friends come over and we all had a fermented vegetable party. And we had a little mandolin and we shredding the vegetables. And we have the Body Ecology fermentation seeds, the little…
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah, the culture…
Wendy Myers: The culture, the cultures. And we put those in some warm water and some honey or something sweet. And then we made celery juice, lots and lots of minerals in celery juice and salts, naturally occurring salts and we use that as a liquid base. It was fun.
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah, using that stuff. That’s a trick that a lot of people don’t do. It’s a good idea when your fermented food is a juiced celery. Celery juice is great trick. It’s got natural nitrates and nitrites in it that really helps the fermentation process.
That’s good. I should have mentioned that. That’s a great, great point. But yeah, Donna Gates has done a lot of firsts. She’s brought Stevia into the market and young coconut kefir and all sorts of firsts. She’s really innovative. She’s a great place to start.
Wendy Myers: And that’s a really easy thing for someone first starting out, making vegetables or fermented foods. They can do fermented coconut kefir and it’s really, really the simplest thing that you can do.
Noah DeKoyer: The simplest thing is if you can handle cow’s milk or even goat’s milk, man, you just a cultured packet from Body Ecology. Let that milk get to room temperature. Put that packet in there, shake it up in the Mason jar and leave it on your counter for two days and bam, you have kefir. I mean it’s so easy. It’s absurdly easy.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I made that one time. I went to my local farmers’ market and I got these cultures, the little seeds, they call them.
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah, the grains, the kefir grains?
Wendy Myers: Yeah, the kefir grains. That’s the term. I can’t remember anything today, whatever the terminology. I’ve done it before, I just don’t remember the words and what it is called. So I got the kefir grains and made that. And you can keep using them over and over and over and those are handy.
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah. Just like a kombucha, the kefir grains are what’s called a SCOBY or a Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast. So those are live little cultures that are ready to just ferment anything. And you can do milk, like you said. You can do young coconut kefir.
But if you can find those grains, really live grains are great to have. And they keep reproducing. And then they are a little harder to come by, but I think they are better. They are more active. That’s a better product. You need to get your hands on those for sure.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. You can find them at your farmers’ market if you go to the little stall that has the raw dairy. They will typically have them. Not always, but that’s where you find them. They are in the back. You have to ask for them.
Noah DeKoyer: Yes, right.
Wendy Myers: They don’t have to just advertise. Yeah.
Wendy Myers: So I have a question I like to ask all of my guests. What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Noah DeKoyer: Wow, I wish I had a thought. The most pressing health issue is people outsourcing their health to someone other than themselves.
Healing comes from inside out. And you have to trust in your own innate healing abilities, find out and experiment. Find out what you need to do and take action because once we give our health or put our health into someone else’s hands, you are giving up a lot.
Now, that’s not to mean you shouldn’t get help. I mean I think I know what I am doing, but I am under the care of a doctor right now too. But people don’t want to take responsibility for their health anymore.
And I think that’s my message. You really got to take responsibility for your own health. If you don’t, who else is really going to care for how healthy you are?
Wendy Myers: I love that answer because that’s my whole message to people and why I started my website. It’s to empower people to take responsibility for their own health. No one care as much as you do.
Noah DeKoyer: Right.
Wendy Myers: They just don’t no matter how well-meaning they are and whatnot. For instance, my poor mother just developed an E coli bladder infection and went to doctor after doctor after doctor.
Finally, after the fourth doctor, he finally diagnosed it as E coli and wanted to put her on antibiotics, which she took even though I told her maybe it is not the best idea. But E coli is pretty serious. There is a time and a place for antibiotics.
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah, absolutely.
Wendy Myers: But that didn’t work and then the doctor wants her to do another one and then one another one. But she was shining infrared light on the area and I told her to take super high dose vitamin C. That will kill off infections.
But she’s still dealing with it unfortunately because she hasn’t been doing the natural stuff as much as she should be. It’s tough because the doctors just are not able to take care of it for her. And that’s just one example. That’s just one example of many.
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah, absolutely.
Wendy Myers: And I always believe you want to do natural protocols first before resorting to medication or surgery.
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah. In chiropractic, even before I got into the nutritional realm, we say chiropractic first, medicine second and surgery last. And you could apply that to anything. Natural health first, medicine second, surgery last, right?
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I do my chiropractic twice a week. I have to. I have for years. It’s just I have to go to my chiropractor.
I mean now of course I have a bulging disk in my lower back, which I got from lifting weights. So the trainer is a little overzealous with the old lady over here. So now I am dealing with that. But I go to my chiropractor twice a week very faithfully. I love him.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit more about you and where they can find you?
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah. So if you are anywhere right outside of New York City, my chiropractic office is five miles outside of New York City. It’s a great facility. We have physical therapy, acupuncture, chiropractic, nutrition, the whole ball of wax. That’s www.FCCofBayonne.com.
But globally, like you, we have a business with my partners, Dr. Mike Acanfora and Dr. Wanda Lee McPhee. A few years ago, we created the Centre for Epigenetic Expression.
And we have hosted a few summits and we have a pretty large podcast that just cracked to 100,000 subscribers. It’s called Beyond Your Wildest Genes. And you are going to be on that too. We just talk about anything that supports your health in a positive way.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I love the name of your podcast. It is so cute.
Noah DeKoyer: Yeah. Dr. Mike came up with that in some sort of thought flash in the middle of the night and I think it is one of the most clever names I have heard. I really like it too. It’s […] for sure.
Wendy Myers: And so as the listeners know, I have an upcoming Medicinal Supplement Summit. I have spoken on well over 35 summits and I wanted to finally do my own summit.
And you are a guest on the summit. You are a speaker on the summit. Tell us a little bit about your talk on the summit.
Noah DeKoyer: We are going to talk or we have talked about, and it’s going to be released soon, some natural supplements [for acute] and chronic pain.
As a chiropractor and we keep going back there, we don’t really like to talk about pain. We like to get people out of pain as fast as possible.
But there are supplemental ways to speed your recovery or eliminate or speed those processes up like reducing inflammation by using some really specific supplements like fish oils and vitamin D and proteolytic enzymes. And we get down and dirty with that stuff.
But as we know, the traditional methods for dealing with pain like NSAIDs, Advils, aspirins, those carry some significant risks to your stomach, to your kidneys, to your liver. But nutritional and natural supplements hold very little risk in many, many ways. Much of that is of benefit and safer benefits, long-lasting benefits.
If you reduce inflammation in your body, not only are you going to get rid of your pain, in many cases, you are also going to stave off things like neuro-degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and things. To reduce your pain or reduce your inflammation has such profound impacts on your health.
I don’t think I mentioned this on the summit, but chronic low back pains shrink your brain. Who the heck wants chronic low back pain? Who wants a smaller brain? I don’t.
But that’s the study. That’s proven. That’s been researched. Chronic pain shrinks your brain. I don’t want my brain any smaller than it is right now.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, me neither. I am certainly at risk for that.
Noah DeKoyer: So that’s my topic. And I know you have a whole bunch of awesome speakers. And I am really looking forward to listening and supporting, affiliating and being a part of your summit for sure.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, we have a lot of exciting speakers. We have Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com. We have Dr. Daniel Amen of BrainHealthMD.com. He does the brain scans. We have got Katie Spears, the WellnessMama.com.
There’s a lot of amazing people. So if you have been wondering about what supplements are right for you, the latest in supplement customization, how to do testing the customized supplements to your body, how to take supplements, the best supplements for various conditions. Definitely go check out the MedicinalSupplementsSummit.com. It’s certainly a mouthful.
Noah DeKoyer: I think it is an absolute no brainer summit because it’s such an important topic. I can’t wait to get my hands on it for sure.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I mean I love supplements and I have taken a lot of different supplements, a lot of different brands. And it is hard. When you first start really caring about your health, you start taking supplements and you don’t know what to take.
And I had a whole grocery bag full of supplements and I take them into my doctor and to my chiropractor. “What do you think I should take and not take?” There is a learning curve that people have to deal with. So this summit is going to help people reduce that learning curve and get them taking what’s right for them.
Noah DeKoyer: Anything that you can do to speed up your knowledge base is worthy investment.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Noah, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Is there anything else you want to add to our conversation?
Noah DeKoyer: Absolutely. Just when it is released, let me know. I want to share it too.
Wendy Myers: Okay. Listeners, thank you so much for tuning into the Live to 110 Podcast. You can learn more about me at my websites, myersdetox.com and check out my healing and detox program at MineralPower.com.
Thank you so much for listening.
