Jeff Cox - The Essential Book of Fermentation: Great Taste and Good Health with Probiotic Foods

One day, a scientific paper crossed my desk at Organic Gardening magazine describing how certain plots of land produced scabby potatoescaused by a soil-borne funguswhile other fields were scab-free. In an experiment, soil from the healthy field was mixed into the scab-producing soil, and that immediately cured the problem. The reason, the scientists reported, was that a strong mix of microorganisms in the healthy soil literally ate up the fungus that produced scab. In the soil, it turns out, possession is nine-tenths of the law, and soils colonized by overwhelmingly large numbers of beneficial bacteria and other good microbes just dont leave much room for disease-causing organisms to get a toehold.

Not only that, but I discovered that a wide range of soil microorganisms inhibit or kill other microbesespecially pathogenic ones that cause rot and disease in plants. This piqued my interest because it was fungus control naturally, without chemical fungicides, and fit right in with the organic method. At the same time, I was teaching myself soil science by reading Nyle Bradys standard textbook on the subject, The Nature and Properties of Soils. Brady was writing about how soil microbes are intimately involved in the decomposition of organic matter. In addition to their direct attack on plant tissue, they are active within the digestive tracts of some animals, he wrote.

Well, sure, I thought. Fruits and vegetables, green leaves, nuts, and other organic matter are not only digested by the microbes in the compost pile and in the soil, but also by the microorganisms that inhabit every healthy human intestine and actually are ubiquitous all over the planet. In fact, all the plants and animals in the world weigh about the same as the worlds total microbial biomass. I did some further reading on the subject and was astonished to find that nine out of every ten cells in our bodies are intestinal microorganisms, and that those cells contain 99 percent of the DNA in our bodies. They live in our gut and decompose organic matter exactly the same way they do in the compost pile. When scientists looked at a healthy human intestinal flora, they found more than four hundred species of bacteria, thirty to forty of which compose about 99 percent of the flora. (Now we know that every gram of our intestinal contents contains somewhere in the neighborhood of a trillion bacteria, and that the gastrointestinal tract is the most densely colonized region of the human body.)

Longtime organic gardeners know that good, healthy compost contains similar numbers of microorganisms in each spoonful, and that rich organic soil is even more diverse than our gut bacteria, with somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand species of microbes. By one estimate, there may be 150 million species of microbes in the world, almost all as yet unclassified. These myriad bacteria and fungi are at the very root of healthof the soil, of plants, and of animal and human health. Maybe, I thought, a healthy mix of the proper intestinal microorganisms builds our natural good health the way it does in the soil.

This was an exciting idea. I found out several things that supported it. Our intestinal flora is indeed a source of good health. Intestinal bacteria such as Lactobacillus acidophilus not only decompose our food, rendering it into forms our intestines can absorb to feed our bodies, but in doing so they themselves actually manufacture vitamins such as vitamin K and many of the B vitaminsincluding B12. Further, they thrive in the acid conditions of our digestive tract, hence their species name (