If you’re ready to start a living healthier, better life, with tons of energy make sure that you ingest a good supply of cultured or naturally fermented foods, each and every day! Cultured foods are alive and brimming with an enormous amount of beneficial LIFE-GIVING enzymes and healthy bacteria (probiotics) and help feed and nourish your gut like crazy. They are simply foods that have been naturally fermented, not canned or pickled. When you culture or naturally ferment vegetables, they become more powerful and ALIVE than they were in their natural state. They preserve not only our food but us too!!! It’s how our forefathers preserved their food in the days before refrigeration. It really isn’t complicated. In fact, its very easy to do. Either eat them straight all by themselves or simply add to your favorite foods.
CULTURED SWEET PICKLE RELISH
Making my own cultured relish is one of my favorite ways to ramp up our supply of enzymes and probiotics. I can’t think of a better way to help restore your gut health after a round of antibiotics than by making sure you get a good supply of fermented foods into your diet.
Cultured Sweet Pickle Relish is QUICK and EASY to to make, versatile and can easily be added to so many other dishes like potato salad, or your favorite chicken or tuna fish salad. Just add it to anything you would normally use regular relish in. This batch will last for 9 months but trust me, it will be long gone before then!!!!
I’m sure you’ve heard of the old adage “You are what you eat!”, right? Most people are aware that fueling yourself with good food and eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, and seafood, along with adding healthy fats (like extra-virgin olive oil) and a little bit of red wine can lead to a better quality of life but there’s actually much more involved to living a healthy, vibrant life than that!
“You can change your life as soon as today just by changing what you eat. What you eat is what your body is made out of, so it stands to reason that if you eat foods with good living microorganisms you will feel alive inside. But cultured foods are more than just simply foods. They’re teeming with life in the form of probiotics and this, my friends, is what you mostly are. Ten times the cells in your body, you’re 100 trillion bacteria. If someone loved you enough to give you life and place this inside of you, don’t you think you should pay attention to it?”
– Donna Schwenk/CulturedFoodLife
ENZYMES The Spark of Life
Without enzymes life wouldn’t exist. Think of them as a “spark plug” or the catalyst that initiates all the processes that happen within the human body. Every chemical reaction that takes place within the human body requires them. Without enzymes, no mineral, vitamin, or hormone can do its work. Enzymes are quite literally the substances that make life possible. They are needed to digest food, run the heart, kidneys, liver, and lungs, and yes, even to think!
What you may not know is that each of us is born with a limited supply of bodily enzymes at birth. This supply, like the limited supply of energy found within a battery, has to last us a lifetime! The faster you use up or deplete your enzyme supply, the shorter your life span. Unfortunately, eating an over abundance of cooked and canned food is at the core of modern man’s bodily ills. You see, enzymes are heat sensitive and deactivate easily when exposed to high temperatures. Sadly, the common modern day diet, made up primarily of cooked or processed foods, is constantly depleting our supply of enzymes.
In addition, even frequent colds, fevers and exposure to outdoor temperature extremes contribute to this enzyme depletion.
To add insult to injury, when we also ingest foods processed with chemicals or foods that contain pesticides, along with alcohol, drugs, and junk food… they place an additional tremendous strain on and continue to deplete our limited supply of enzymes even more! Sadly, cooked, prepared and pre-packaged food, devoid of enzymes, makes up the bulk of our modern day diet. No wonder so many people are suffering today. YIKES… what in the world is a person to do?
SUPPORT A HEALTHY GUT ENVIRONMENT WITH CULTURED FOODS
To overcome this lack of enzymes and restore the balance of healthy bacteria in the gut you need to support a healthy digestive system by making sure that you are getting plenty of digestive enzymes, and beneficial bacteria (pro- & pre- biotics) too. Digestive enzymes will aid digestion and help break it down your food into molecules that can be absorbed so its very important to create an environment that supports healthy digestion by simply including more gut-friendly foods into your diet.
BENEFITS OF CULTURED OR FERMENTED FOODS
- Safest and best food method to preserve vegetables
- Increases the bioavailability of vitamins and minerals
- Strengthens the good bacteria and helps kill harmful pathogens in the gut
- Supplies a tremendous amount of pre- and pro- biotics
- Increases the supply of vitamins and minerals
- Helps remove pesticides
- Can help relieve stomach distress
- Support adrenals
- Can help with weight loss
- Can help reduce candida
- Can help reduce or eliminate allergies
- Fermented vegetables high in Lactobacillus plantarum helps boost glutathione production in the body!!!
Did you see that…
Cultured foods can help REMOVE PESTICIDES- all thanks to a certain enzyme found in naturally fermented foods. How beautiful is that!!!!
And chances are if you have a yeast (Candida) problem, your gut bacteria is out of balance. You need have to have LOTS of good healthy bacteria to keep candida in it’s rightful place. How do you do that? By adding cultured foods to your everyday diet on a daily basis!
One of my favorites and most important items on that list is that they are a wonderful booster for your body to make glutathione (GSH)? GSH is considered the body’s master antioxidant and exists in almost every cell in your body. It is responsible for detoxification and free radical reduction. When you use a starter culture specific to vegetables that contains Lb. plantarum, you ramp up the glutathione production!
DAILY CULTURED FOOD TIPS
-Begin by consuming one spoonful of cultured foods a day with lunch and dinner.
-Over time increase your consumption to at least a couple of cups a day. GO SLOW and gradually build up… it can take awhile for your body to get used to all this goodness! Otherwise you might find yourself running to the toilet a lot!
-Work cultured foods including Kombucha and Kefir into some of your favorite dishes. I add cultured relish to potato, chicken or tuna fish salad, cultured kraut to coleslaw, Kombucha to homemade salad dressings and other beverages, and Kefir to my smoothies.
–Kombucha, another powerful cultured food, tastes great all by itself but you can sneak it into iced tea or even salad dressing. No one will even know it’s there! Start with an ounce and slowly work up to at least 4-8 oz’s of Kombucha every day.
SWEET PICKLE RELISH RECIPE
I’m always looking for ways to incorporate essential oils to my food so whenever possible I add them to my recipes, and this one is one of my favorites. I love adding Dill and Celery Seed essential oils from our Vitality line to this Cultured Sweet Pick Relish recipe. It kicks up the flavor a notch or two and provides us with all the benefits these two oils have to offer.
1/4 teaspoon Cutting Edge Cultures plus 1/2 cup water
1 large English cucumber (appx. 3 cups)
1/2 onion
1 red bell pepper (remove seeds)
1/2 cup pure maple syrup
1 1/2 tablespoons pink Himalayan salt
1 tablespoon celery seeds
1 1/2 teaspoons mustard seeds
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
1-2 drops Dill Vitality essential oil
1-2 drops Celery Seed essential oil
Makes approximately 1 quart
-Combine Cutting Edge Starter Culture and water; stir together and let sit while you prepare the other ingredients.
-Coarsely chop the cucumbers, onion and red bell pepper into large pieces and place in a food processor and pulse until chopped into relish sized pieces.
-Transfer mixture into a large bowl… Add salt, celery seeds, mustard seeds, turmeric and Dill Vitality essential oils; and mix well.
-Transfer mixture into a glass jar that can be securely sealed.
-Press the veggies down lightly with a spoon – DO NOT pack them.
-Add cultured water and add addition filtered water to cover, leaving one in of head space to let the vegetables bubble and expand as they ferment.
-Seal the container and let it sit out of direct sunlight, for 3 days. Your on your kitchen counter is fine providing it doesn’t get direct sunlight.
-Check the relish a couple of times EVERYDAY to make sure it is fully submerged. If it has risen above the water, simply use a spoon to push it down so that is fully covered again.
-Should your mixture develop white spots of yeast on any unsubmerged relish, don’t worry. This isn’t harmful… just remove it.
-After 3 days store in refrigerator to slow down the fermentation process and ENJOY!
I adapted this recipe from Donna Schwenk, of Cultured Food Life. She has some of the best recipes and information I’ve seen on this subject matter and I highly recommend checking out the recipes on her site.
LIVING YOUR BEST LIFE
Living your best life is really about making healthy lifestyle choices. Making sure that you are constantly supporting your body on a daily basis with naturally fermented foods is very inexpensive and something everyone would benefit from. I hope you choose to make them part of your life and experience all the benefits they have to offer.
