(Share in the comments how the challenge is going for you! And don’t forget to sign up for the giveaway!)
It’s day five of the No Sugar Challenge. The one thing that I don’t like about the title of this challenge is that it centers on what we aren’t having, “no sugar”. Really, we should be celebrating the foods that we can have! Maybe I should rename it the “The Nourishing Fats Challenge”, or the “Delicious Meats and Vegetables Challenge”, or….even better yet, “The Probiotic Challenge”.
As mentioned before, really defeating the sugar blues isn’t just about taking sugar out. That’s the first step. The second, more proactive step is to add probiotic foods in.
Why is this important?
Our digestive tracts are teeming with bacteria, some helpful…..some not so helpful. The vast majority of us will have a small amount of yeast in our bodies. As long as the beneficial bacteria stays high, the yeast will be kept in check. But when we take antibiotics or drink and bathe in chlorinated water, we can start depleting our stores of beneficial bacteria.
When we feed our yeasties sugary foods, or have too many starches in our diet we are giving yeast food to grow on. However, when we take a good probiotic (one good brand is listed on my resource page) or eat cultured or lacto-fermented foods then we feed our beneficial bacteria. And, they also really seem to help with cravings for sugar too.
Here are a few ancient probiotic foods that are full of beneficial bacteria.
Fermented Vegetables
We love sauerkraut in this household. It can be a required taste, though I loved it right away when made this way. But I stopped making it for a while, and Elena started losing her “taste” for it. She had loved it from about a 1 1/2 years old on. Thankfully, after requiring her to take a bit or two when it was served at meal times recently, she has regained her appreciation of it and will sometimes even eat a small bowlful of it! But not only do we like how it tastes, I really do think that it helps in keeping beneficial bacteria happy too!
“The proliferation of lactobacilli in fermented vegetables enhances their digestibility and increases vitamin levels. These beneficial organisms produce numerous helpful enzymes as well as antibiotic and anticarcinogenic substances. Their main by-product, lactic acid, not only keeps vegetables and fruits in a state of perfect preservation but also promotes the growth of healthy flora throughout the intestine.”
Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions, Pg89
In Eat Fat, Lost Fat, Sally Fallon calls lacto-fermented vegetables “super raw” foods. The raw foodies are really into enzymes, but raw food can actually be a little low in enzymes (though obviously containing more then cooked food). But when you fermented them they produce large amount of helpful enzymes, hence “super raw”. And there are so many vegetables that are good fermented too, not just cabbage. Read, Wild Fermentation
Fermented Dairy
Did you know that us in the “west” are one of the only people groups to drink unfermented milk? When you ferment milk by making it into kefir, buttermilk, yogurt, piima milk you are changing the content of the milk so that it’s easier to digest, is teeming with beneficial bacteria and enzymes, as well as increasing the vitamin B and C content. This is the more historically accurate way to consume milk! Once again, it can be a more required taste, but who doesn’t like yogurt after all?
Fermented Drinks
There are so many traditional drinks that are fermented. Everything from fermented rice milk, to kombucha. Popular choices today include kombucha and water kefir “pop”. Both of which, once you get used to their tangy taste are quite delicious! I like making my water kefir drinks out of high antioxidant juices, like pomegranate juice You get the benefit from the juice, plus beneficial bacteria, without the full load of the fruit sugar!
These are just a very few of the many probiotic foods that we can make and consume. Considering that most cultures used cultured foods in their diet, their is a wide variety of choices for us to choose from!
Enter to Win 3 Starter Cultures
And now for a giveaway! Cultures for Health has generously agreed to do a give away for the our week of no sugar! Not just one culture, but three of your choice (retail value up to $50)!
You can choose from a wide variety of sourdough starters, yogurt starters, kombucha mushrooms, kefir grains and more! She even has raw milk yogurt starters! I hope that this helps one lucky person on the journey of culturing their own probiotic foods.
To enter the contest, follow the link below and enter your information.
Contest Rules
This contest will end Friday, October 16th at 11:59 PM PST. The winner will be chosen via random.org, and will be announced on October 17th.. The lucky winner will have 48 hours to contact me with his or her full name, address, and phone number.
Sorry, but due to shipping costs, only those residing in the United States are welcome to enter this contest.
Please note that Cultures for Health is one of my sponsors, and as such I am being compensated for hosting this giveaway. That said, you can trust that I only accept sponsors whose products I whole-heartedly endorse and believe in.
Questions:
1) Any lacto-fermenters out there? Have any tips or recipes to share?
2)How is the sugar challenge going for you? How do you think the weekend will go for you?
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I have been wanting to make my own yogurt but never took the plunge. I do eat greek and regular yogurt and kefir occasionally. I am really enjoying the sugar free challenge and am feeling really great! I’ve been mostly concentrating on avoiding any kind of sugar, and leaving out more grains in lunch and dinner was something I did and didn’t even really think too much about, but I forgot when eating pita chips and hummus for a snack about the flour. I was so focused on avoiding just sugar this week. My desserts have been delicious apples with organic peanut butter! So satisfying!
For those wanting to enter the give away, we are trying to get the code to work right. It should be up pretty soon. Sorry about that!
You should also make sure that you don’t have a ad blocker as it may block the link for the give away. Thanks!
I am a huge believer in homemade yogurt, and I promise it’s so easy you’ll wonder why you didn’t try it before. I hope Kimi doesn’t mind me sharing my post where I walk through it step by step – I make it almost every week! http://www.kitchenstewardship.com/2009/04/13/monday-mission-homemade-yogurt-the-easy-way/
You can do it!
About lacto-fermentation, my tip is to try using just salt (like Wild Fermentation often does for the brine) instead of whey if you don’t like things very sour. The whey really makes quite a flavor in pickles and salsa…we were not fans at my house! 🙁 I’ll try again next year with a recipe from my grandma!
🙂 Katie
I am still learning more about the processes of fermenting foods. I was actually surprised when I was off sugar for awhile that I got a detox sort of reaction when I first started adding in some fermented foods and probiotics! We really do need these things!
That’s really interesting, Bonnie! Thanks for sharing your experience. 🙂
I just started my third batch of sauerkraut from your method. We love it. I’ve been on kind of a fermenting ‘kick’. So far I’ve been pleased with all of it and I do think that adding the probiotics to our diet have been very helpful. I ordered a SCOBY and Dairy Kefir Grains from Cultures For Health over the summer and they have been working wonderfully for me. I recently added in water kefir (grains given to me by a friend) and I’m still working on getting that to work the way I think it should. I have carbonation issues. But this current batch looks promising. And LF veggies are wonderful. We opened a jar of spicy carrots last night and OH MY. So good!
I am so thrilled that you are having good results with your lacto-fermenting! That’s great!
I love Cultures for Health! I always enter their giveaways, but never win. 🙂
I make water kefir with their grains. I have made viili, one of the countertop yogurts and love that, too. Here in Texas it was too hot all summer for that, but I’m hoping to get started again soon now that it’s cooling off. I bought some sourdough starter but haven’t tried that yet having gone gluten-free, um, sorta. Had a homemade soaked wheat tortilla with my lunch today.
I didn’t join in the challenge because for the first time in my life I seem to have licked the sugar monster and eat almost none. I use it to make water kefir & kombucha, use a little honey and stevia and that’s it! Seems like a miracle to me.
Kimi, thanks for sponsoring the contest, and for your blog.
Betsy,
I hope you win this time!
We are doing ok…well, compared to a SAD diet, we are doing great, but to my standards we have slipped a few times! Our inlaws came back yesterday from Europe with amazing chocolate for me…I had to have some!
I’ll try to make sure we do better these next couple of days!
Thanks for the encouragement!
ps…I just finished drinking some kombucha before reading this…I love that stuff!
I love fermented vegetables. My mother is Japanese so I grew up with them. I look forward to making your sauerkraut – sounds delicious. I also make my own countertop yogurt and recently decided to try kombucha.
As far as the no sugar challenge, my husband and I have an easier time that our kids – 4 yr old and 14 yr old.
I make yogurt, brew kombucha and just started Kefir water (b/c of this site!). My first batch of kefir soda pop came out great! Though, I used 100% organic grape juice and forgot that I am not a fan of grape. It’s too fizzy for my kids, as we’re not soda drinkers (the kids and I are not). So, I’m going to stick it in the fridge and hopefully get it a little less fizzy. I have another batch fermenting and will do my second ferment w/lemon-lime mint later today. My husband is a Mountain Dew drinker and with Type II diabetes in his immediate family, I’d like to get him started on something else. He says he’s not interested in kefir “soda” if it doesn’t have caffeine in it…
I’d like to start making buttermilk. I do have access to raw goat’s milk (that’s what we drink all the time). So, I’ll make buttermilk with that until my supplier stops selling milk from December-May (pregnant goat’s or something like that). To get raw cow’s milk, I have to travel 45-60 mins away. What a pain!!! But, I may cut back on our milk intake over the winter and go to the farm to pick up milk every two weeks during the winter b/c I do hate to make yogurt and buttermilk with pasteurized and homogenized milk (when I don’t have any other options and if it’s only during months when raw milk is hard to come by, is this ok? It’s local, hormone free and supposedly lightly pasteurized, cows pulled out of production when sick, etc…)
I’m doing great on the sugar-free challenge. No cravings and no detox. I’m hoping it’s b/c I’m healthy and not b/c the kombucha and kefir have too much sugar (I do fairly long ferments). I have been letting my kids have honey and maple syrup on their soaked oatmeal and some left over pancakes from last week (honey – not sugar used to sweeten). They are really too young to understand what’s going and they have colds – changing their diet too much may have caused some tantrums. Since I don’t use refined sugar anyway, they are still kinda doing the sugar-free challenge with me. And, when we ran out of bread that I had made last week, they stopped eating grains (aside from quinoa) w/me. After a day, they stopped asking for bread
I have made some fermented veggies – ginger carrots, beets, salsa (with your recipe), sweet potato poi and the black bean dip in NT. I also have tried Food Renegade’s lacto-fermented lemonade – which is great – but sadly is brown due to the rapadura. One thing I’m learning is the effect of the ambient temperature on the process. My most recent batch of sweet potato poi didn’t come out as well as others – but again, it was colder out. Since I started lacto-fermenting in the late spring/early summer – I’m not used to doing this at colder temps.
As far as the challenge, it’s been going well for the most part. On Sunday I did have some white flour / sugar in a meal that was served as part of a homeless ministry in which I participate. I pretty much will eat whatever the meal is – I feel like I need to identify with the folks I’m eating with as much as possible. And it’s 1 meal a week – 3 weeks out of the month. Today I didn’t really plan my lunch appropriately and ended up needed to supplement & did have a multi-grain bagel – which seemed to be low in white flour. It was also a stressful day & I was tempted to head to the candy dishes of coworkers, but then I thought better of it.
I appreciate the challenge & want to stick with it. Though it will be interesting to see how well I do. It’s somehow easier for me to say “no” when there’s an external thing making me say no.
Thanks so much for doing this Kimi.
Jessie,
I think that that you had a good reason to break your sugar fast with your homeless ministry. 🙂
I am doing the biginer level of the challenge, although I started late so I will make up for it by going into next week. Tonight I pllan to make pan fried apples that everyone has been talking about. I would really like to take this a little further and eliminate more sugars from my diet long term. I hope to make these changes stick and even rub off a little on my husband who has a wicked sweet tooth.
As for cultures I have been wanting to buy some for a long time, we love yogurt and kefir in this house! When I got on the computer just now I was actually going to go over to Cultures for Health and purchase some but saw this first and figure I will wait and see if I am the lucky winner.
Thanks for everything you share with us. Looking forward to trying the biscuits!
First of all, thank you for offering this ‘challenge.’ I say ‘challenge” because thankfully it hasn’t been one for me this week. Could be I’m like Natalie where it seems to get easier each time (plus my husband is away so I haven’t had the temptation to make dessert;-) Two times which helped with any cravings I did have were my homemade vanilla bean applesauce and fresh pumpkin pudding made with oat milk, stevia and arrowrooot.
I haven’t been fermenting enough lately, but one of may favorite farmers just gave me a batch of homemade kim chee which is to die for. I am determined to make buttermilk and kombucha once I get through the case I just bought on sale.
I appreciate all your posts this week to check in with everyone and offer support. It is nice to have such a community.
Thanks for the CFH contest, too!
I haven’t really joined in on the sugar challenge since we don’t do white flour or refined sugar and I limit all other sweeteners, BUT I do lacto-fermenting. I make kefir regularly and kombucha as often as I can. My husband and three year old LOVE kombucha. I’ve tried lacto-fermented soda once, but didn’t put enough flavor in. It was still OK, but I think I could do much better. I’d love to try water kefir “soda”. I’ve also made my own kraut and this summer fermented some green beens with small red onions. I think we will try it soon. I’ve also done some salsa and it was also good.
It’s hard to try these recipes sometimes, because I really don’t know what the end product is supposed to be like. It would really help to have some way to sample the products I’m making. I do know one lady who makes these things to sell, but they are out of my price range. I can at least ask her questions and that does help some.
Hi Kimi, I’m a multi-strain lacto-fermenter! I have kombucha and kefir sodas going at all times now, and I’m now culturing Matsoni yogurt, a starter that I bought (along with the water kefir grains) from Cultures for Health. They’re terrific. It’s a very mild yogurt and I love it.
I have made sauerkraut for years now but made my first batch of kimchi yesterday and today. (It’s a two-step process; you culture the cabbage alone overnight, drain off the brine, then add the seasonings and top up with brine.) I’m finally putting my Harsch crock to use! (I’ve always used other containers for sauerkraut.)
I bought Cultures for Health buttermilk starter as well but haven’t reconstituted it yet because, frankly, I don’t know how many more cultures I can keep track of. Let’s see, anything else? Crispy nuts, not exactly fermented, although I have done them that way, yummy. Just made a new recipe of gluten-free, low-carb crackers, which are further drying in the dehydrator with my current batch of crispy nuts — hazelnuts this time, a first.
I’m doing fine on the sugar-free challenge. I’ve had a bit of raw honey (my boyfriend claims that if it’s raw it’s not like eating sugar — do you have any thoughts on that?) and a mango eaten over 3 days with yogurt. About 2 oz. of wine at lunch today to use up an open bottle before it goes bad. That’s it. Thanks for doing this. I think getting sugar and grains out of my life is one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself. I think taking FCLO and lots of butter and other animal fats helps keep me from cravings.
A lot of people do find that raw honey will not raise blood sugar like even un-raw honey will. 🙂 Fats really do help, I agree! Thanks for sharing:-)
I have not been doing good with this challenge. I had a terrible week so I had a cup of tea the other morning to cheer me up.(With honey)
I normally don’t use or consume white sugar anyways so I’m not terribly disappointed.
But. I’m big into lacto fermented veggies. I’m curious if anyone has any suggestions for pickles with breakfast? I eat eggs almost every morning, and find dairy cultures to be more of a snack thing. So I would love to find a lacto-fermented veggie, or fruit whichever works.
I’m open for anything.
we use lacto-fermented salsa with scrambled eggs.
I am sorry you’ve had such a terrible week! I hope that your honey tea was soothing to you. 🙂
We use a lot of cortido with our breakfast eggs – it adds just enough spice and texture. My kids really enjoy it, too.
The tea was a great band-aid for the week. Thanks for the ideas Jessie and Meg! I’ll take any other suggestions if anyones got them!
I am very new to all of this! I have so much to learn that my head is swimming. But I love your blog and read it regularly. I have not been doing the sugar thing but today I found stevia.
We do lots of lacto-fermented beverages. The two that we have EVERYDAY are kefir from raw goats milk and home-brewed kombucha. We start our morning with the kefir– either to the side of a soaked cereal, or in our breakfast shake. We have our “booch” with our big mid-day meal to facilitate digestion. We’ve also regularly done NT’s “fly” which my children absolutely love– though it moves like goo. LOL!
I’d really like to try the Kombucha. Thanks for hosting the giveaway. As for the challenge, I now like coffee with out any sweetner. I know coffee isn’t so good for you. But I think I was “addicted” to the sweetner I put in it more than the coffee. We’ll see. But it seems like a good first step. We’ve been off white sugar for a little while now and I really don’t even want any. But it was good to keep track of how much sweetner (even if it was natural) I used on other things. I realized that I like pancakes just as much with apple butter as with syrup. I think long term, in addition to not using sweetner in coffee, I’ll use a more moderate approach with other foods. Having the norm be more fruit based, and the special being maple syrup, sucanat etc.
Its going good so far, but today was really hard I gave in to some sugar, but did not overdo it I’m going to try to keep off sugar this weekend, but its soooooooooo hard especially during the weekend.=[
Hi Kimi, thank you so much for the challenge, it has really challenged me to think about what I am eating. I don’t eat sugar or anything with flour in it, no coffee, soy, corn so after ten years of fibro, I am pain free. yahhh!! I thought about the alkaline/ acid foods system, but not for long….have you looked into that…oh my goodness. I would love to make the lacto fermented veggies and drinks, but I am quite intimidated. It all sounds so mysterious and I don’t know where to begin. I read all about it in your blog, but still… Is there a way you could list the easiest and least challenging ones to try first…and then work up to the more challenging ones? I have them all grouped into the most challenging catagory and it’s crowded in there.
Hi Kim,
I am a regular visitor to your site, though I have never commented on anything.
1. We prepare yogurt at home. I boil the milk first completely in a milk cooker. Then I let it cool (if i can stick my little finger in it for a whole minute comfortably then i know it is the right temperature). Then i add the culture. Stir it well. Then i put the container in a warm place. My best place is the microwave with the door open. i do this at night and by next morning, I have my yogurt ready. I put it in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. I think it thickens and tastes better.
2. I have been off sugar ever since your challenge. Fortunately, I had been having a very bad UTI and yeast infection going on at the same time. I am taking probiotic supplements and no sugar. Seems to be helping.
Day 5 went well
I decided to change my all now sugar and grain approach a bit and go to more moderate approach
At dinner I had 1 glass red wine, a handfull ovenbaked potatoes and a few sugarfree winegums. However I noticed that I really didn´t miss the flavour from the winegums and potatoes- but more the crispness from potatoes baked in olive/ coconut oil.
so today at day 6 – I am back again – but I have made an almost sugarfree and grain free chocolatecake and I am going to enjoy that with some whipped cream and fruit tonight. it is after all weekend.
BUT I am 100 % sure that I´ll continue to be very low in grain, sugar and juice after this week- maybe just keep it for the weekends.
Tired please read ; no grain and sugar approach -not now
and I mean I´ll keep the sugar and grains for the weekends in the future.
I make Kumbucha tea and yogurt and Keifer. I have just started to experiment with making different kinds of flavors, with the kumbucha. I’ve been making it for years, but just started making it differently though. Last one was my best batch.
The challenge started off a bit rough. My daughter made me a surprise lata mata with honey still felt bad because it was the first day, but have done better. Realize that I get so busy just doing that I don’t take the time to eat well at times and grab without thinking.
I make a whole slew of things, fermented salsa,ketchup, sauerkraut, kombucha, plus more. I did find out that you have to be careful what glass containers you ferment in. Some glass contains lead that can leach into your ferments, ick!
A good brand to use, I find, is pyrex. Also if you are having issues fermenting your kombucha try making it in a wide bowl, more room to breathe and grow.
Keep it away from any electromagnetic source, don’t put it anywhere dark and cover with a flour sack towel so it can still breathe. Hope this helps someone.
We make yogurt pretty regularly. A few years ago, we made L/F salsa from NT. It was really good. Since then, we haven’t had enough of the right combination of veggies at the same time. Next year, I plan to double our tomato plants and hope that will help. We have tried some of the L/F pickles (bread & butter and dill–we like the b&b best). Would love to try something new, but like Micki, am a little intimidated. What does anyone recommend trying next/first?
As far as the challenge goes, my husband told me today that he was the one making the last of the homemade ginger snaps in the cookie jar disappear! I was kind of hoping that if we all did this together, we might adjust appetites a bit… so I am yielding that expectation and am grateful for the improvements some of us have had.
I have a 17-year-old treasure of a daughter who has autoimmune disease and thyroid and asthma issues. This challenge has helped us to see clearly just how important it is for her not to have any processed sweeteners and to even carefully limit raw honey. We have also seen that it pays to be very careful with grains and it would be worth another ‘challenge’ on our own to see what removing grains will do for her.
I have undiagnosed arthritis in my hands and, as the week of the challenge has progressed, my pain has lessened each day until this morning when I woke up and had absolutely NO pain or stiffness (PTL! :*)) I have also lost some weight, but I’m not sure how much (4-5 pounds, which is about 10% of what I need to lose). I finally have some hope that I’ll be able to lose the rest of the weight I would so much like to lose. Sometimes it is hard because my husband likes to share food with me… and he is a big fan of white flour and white sugar! Sometimes, I think his love language is food.
In addition to health benefits and hope for further improvement in that department, I have really enjoyed finding new things to eat, especially for breakfast: sauteed veggies and homemade/no sugar sausage or fried fresh ham and pancakes with applesauce or your soaked biscuits; dry popped amarynth with fresh fruit salad and coconut milk.
I am grateful to you Kimi for hosting this. We keep saying we need to tighten up the standards, but we haven’t had a good week. This was just what we needed to encourage us (especially me and my older two daughters) to press on and make it work. I hope we will be able to continue and build on this week. It will be a challenge with the holidays, but I think it will be just as important to work at with some compromised immune systems and the cold and flu season coming.
This has been a whirlwind week for fermenting! I am making yogurt again since the summer began. I started a batch of sauerkraut, even though I had to break down and buy cabbage @ the grocery store. The rains are killing the cabbage plants round here. I just made another batch of LF salsa. The salsa is really my favorite fermented thing. I spoon a couple of spoonfuls onto my salad.
I also ferment my homemade ranch dressing buy using whey. I leave it out on the counter for a couple of hours. I’m guessing, not exactly “fermented” but it will have some of the goodies, right?
The sugar free challenge is going ok for me. Since I’m sugar free all the time anyway, I can’t really say I’ve done anything different. I have to admit though, I bought my kids a sweet dough pie on Friday for their after school snack & I took a bite. I couldn’t resist, it was filled with lemon curd!
We love fermented foods at our house, but I always tell people that it can take some time for taste buds to change if you didn’t grow up eating this way. One way we like to introduce people to fermented foods is by mixing some in a green salad. Cortido and ginger carrots work especially well. Most people comment that they like the taste. As far as sugar goes, one thing that helps with our kids is that they get one square of 81% dark chocolate on Saturday every week. They don’t miss the sugar at all because they know that Saturday is coming. You could work up to a higher and higher percentage as they get used to the taste. Thanks for all the great ideas and recipes!
I, so far, only make homemade yogurt and kombucha, however, because of your site, I am becoming very interested in the lacto-fermented foods. I plan very soon to start incorporating these into our diets.
Thank you for all the resources and support.
I have been trying to cut down the sugar and add more LF veggies into our diet. We are so NOT there yet. Years ago I tried going cold turkey but there was a revolt in our household. As we are now a little older and my husband is seeing different health issues arise due to his parents’ diet he is much more supportive. It is also interesting to note that for some time I made my own bread. Due to situations that occurred this summer I began to buy more store bought bread again. Well about a month ago our eldest (age 15) asked when I was going to start making bread again. It turns out our whole family prefers the homemade bread and is even willing to take on other chores so that I can return to “bread” baking again. This will include soaked tortillas, croissants, rolls, biscuits, muffins, and “sandwich” breads for 3 teenage boys who are VERY active! At present our biggest downfall is soda! At present we can only get the milk based kefir grains up in town but may have to start with those. Any suggestions on how to convert them to a water based product? My whole family LOVES Italian sodas so I am hoping to make the changeover! How long do LF veggies last refrigerated? We made the ginger carrots but the complaint was they were too salty. Any suggestions? There are two of us who love kimchi but my husband has asked me to quit eating it as apparently I sweat it out at night and he said it makes our bed stink! He said my hair even smells like it… Who knew? Ok so maybe we had a pretty good idea after having spent time in Korea..
I really have been enjoying your blog and have gained so much insight and information from you and your “followers!” Thank you so very much!!
I want to brew my own kombucha can I do it I. A harsch crock??? If so, would I leave the cover on like I normally do when I “pickle” ??? Or should I just use a towel to cover it??? Thank you!!
**I want to brew my own kombucha can I do it I. A harsch crock??? If so, would I leave the cover on like I normally do when I “pickle” ??? Or should I just use a towel to cover it??? Thank you!!