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Fermented Foods and the Gut-Brain Connection with Holly Howe
60 Plays1 year ago
Can a healthy gut really help you sleep? Our digestive and central nervous systems talk to each in what's called the gut-brain connection. Discover the science of your gut microbiome and how adding fermented foods to your diet can improve your overall health. Plus, making homemade sauerkraut is easier — and tastier — than you think.
Holly Howe is a fermentation educator and the creator of MakeSauerkraut.com. Connect with Holly on her website where you'll find recipes and courses to make healthy, mouthwatering fermented foods.
In this episode:
- Pathogenic vs. beneficial bacteria
- The scientific process of fermentation
- Understanding the gut-brain connection
- Health lessons from traditional cultures
- Why you can't always trust the grocery store
- Microchanges to improve your sleep
- Sauerkraut recipes the whole family will eat
- Empowerment to form new health habits
Connect with us at SuenoLabs.com. We're currently looking for contributors and podcast guests!
Disclaimer: This show is for informational purposes only. Sueño Labs does not provide medical advice.
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Transcript
Gut Health and Sleep: The Fermentation Connection
00:00:00
Speaker
Since I started doing this podcast, one of the themes I've heard over and over again is not just how brain health impacts sleep, but how gut health impacts sleep. Admittedly, this is an area I don't know a lot about, but I'm seeing this rise in interest and fermentation and people drinking prebiotic sodas and making their own kombucha and all of these other things related to gut health.
Meet Holly Howe: From Teacher to Fermentation Educator
00:00:30
Speaker
So in my quest to learn more about this, I reached out to someone with extensive experience in fermentation and educating others and really understanding that connection between our gut microbiome and our brains and how that impacts health overall.
00:00:53
Speaker
Today, I talk with fermentation educator Holly Howe, author and creator of makesourcrowd.com, about her experience in understanding the gut microbiome, how it impacts our overall health, and the small things that we can do to incorporate fermented foods into our diets.
00:01:16
Speaker
I'm Jimmy Leonard. This is Swenio Labs.
00:01:21
Speaker
Holly, how welcome to Swen your labs. How are you today? I'm doing great and happy to be here. Yeah. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show. So we've got a lot of interesting things to talk about today, but I actually want to start with your background if that's okay. So you are a fermentation educator. Tell me what that means. It means that I um am passionate about fermentation and helping people learn to ferment their own foods. And I take my teaching background. I was a teacher in my past life teaching sixth graders. And I take that skill and that background in my university education and bring it into helping people learn to ferment and simple, easy steps so they can take care of their gut health and their sleep too.
00:02:07
Speaker
I suppose sixth grade is right about that time of life where your body starts to ferment a little bit and you start to have some of those hygiene conversations. Exactly. I got into fermentation about twenty over 20 years ago and people kept asking for help. At that time, there were no YouTube channels, very few books on fermentation, so I just kind of picked apart the pieces and learned how to do it. and then My sons, both their classes wanted help with the how to make sauerkraut, rather, fermented vegetables, so gradually expanded on it. So when you said people needed your help, I'm curious about that. what How do they get stuck?
Fermentation Fundamentals: Salt, Bacteria, and Beyond
00:02:44
Speaker
What does someone need help with?
00:02:45
Speaker
Just simple things like salt is necessary for fermentation. It sets up the correct home for the bacteria to live so you get the good bacteria proliferating and the pathogenic bacteria dying off. So just something so simple as knowing how much salt to add to ferment can make or break whether that ferment is successful. Things like that, how long to leave it to ferment. ferment, what to put in it, how to ah put the pieces together, what temperature, all these little things that you don't think of until you're starting. You're in your kitchen, you're slicing up your cabbage, we're cutting up your cucumbers and all of a sudden you don't quite know how to throw it together or you end up with mold on your ferment and you don't know why or it doesn't taste quite as spectacular as you'd like and you're trying to figure out why. And so those are the little things that I unpacked and came up with the system to help people out with it.
00:03:32
Speaker
So I guess in some ways it's really like any cooking or baking process. Even if you are following a recipe, there's still a little bit of feeling it out that you have to do. Right. There there is a science behind it. when When I think of fermentation, I really like to think of, I know this may sound a little woo woo, but I like to think of fermentation as magic. Amazing that we can take ahead of cabbage and slice it very finely, just like we were preparing a bowl of coleslaw for a meal, and sprinkle some salt over that, mix it all together, brine the sliced cabbage starts to glisten as the moisture is pulled out of the cells of the vegetable.
00:04:07
Speaker
And we pack that all into a jar and brine rises above it. We leave that to sit for days or weeks. And it transforms from the simple cabbage that had a, say, vitamin C levels, you know, in a cup of cabbage, maybe vitamin C level might be 30 milligrams. During the fermentation process, it can double. If you're using red cabbage, it can shoot up to like 10 times, 600 milligrams. so so In that jar, all this magic is happening. That food is getting predigested so that you don't have to do as much much work for it. Probiotics are being created to take care of your gut microbiome. We're preserving that food so we can eat it months later, if not a year later. Even toxins that may have been on that cabbage that sprayed while it was in the field, the bacteria can break down and remove those toxins.
00:04:53
Speaker
The sugar, that's the food for the bacteria. So if you put a sweet carrot in there at the end of the fermentation process, it's no longer sweet because the cabbage have eaten up that sugar. So we've reduced the sugar content. So all this happens in that jar through, you know, there's bacteria that in there doing all that that we're so unaware of. And there's science behind it to get everything right. But it really is a magical process to grow our own ah probiotics and take care of our gut health with those. so Yeah, I think you could say that about so many things in nature. I feel that way just planting a seed and a flower comes up, you know, it's like, this is really, it's incredible. You know, how, how did, how did this get here? I i mean, I know, I know that sunlight in the water, but it's,
00:05:37
Speaker
it somehow just seems to appear. So magic, i ah yeah i do I do see that. But I also want to make sure that we're ah you know everybody listening to this does understand the science around it. Because I'll speak for myself a little bit too, that I think I've got a very elementary level understanding of how fermentation works. Maybe I'll say a sixth grade level since we were talking about that earlier. So it involves bacteria. But what exactly is going on? Where do these bacteria come from?
Probiotics and Gut Microbiome: The Health Benefits of Fermentation
00:06:04
Speaker
What are they doing? Maybe the question that I'm really asking is, why is this good for me at the end of the day to eat something that is covered in bacteria that seems counterintuitive? So that the science behind the fermentation, what's happening to get to those probiotics is the the bacteria are everywhere. They're on our hands or different microbiomes everywhere.
00:06:25
Speaker
Your armpit might have one bar microbiome around your eyes. It's a different microbiome than on your hands. It's this collection of bacteria. They're everywhere and they live on the vegetables that we ferment, especially the ones growing close to the ground. and so When we pick that vegetable, the race begins between the pathogenic bacteria and the beneficial bacteria. The pathogenic bacteria that would cause that cabbage, if we left it to sit out on the counter for days, it would rot, eventually be smelling, we'd toss it out. But if we add the salt, the salt creates a home for the bacteria so that the good bacteria can thrive and the pathogenic bacteria do not like that salty environment and they wither and die off. And then when we add the the salt, that's creating a brine because the bacteria that make most fermented vegetables love to live in an anaerobic environment without air.
00:07:15
Speaker
So by creating that brine and we add a certain amount of salt, there's a range of a salt concentration the bacteria like. So it's kind of like the Goldilocks number. They like a certain temperature. They like a certain ah salt concentration. And um so then we pack that all into the jar and this bacteria in the jar, they're eating the sugar in the vegetables. And as they eat that sugar, they create lactic acid. So it's their lactic acid bacteria. It's called lacto fermentation from that. And that lactic acid lowers the pH so it's safe, so nothing pathogenic can live in there. That preserves it so that we can store it for a long time. So it's these bacteria that are eating the sugars and creating lactic acid and preserving it. And then when we consume it, research in the gut microbiome is fairly recent. There's a lot we don't know about it, but we do know that we need a healthy gut microbiome. And part of that is eating foods that are rich in prebiotics and probiotics.
00:08:11
Speaker
Most fermented foods, so the prebiotics, carrots, leeks, onions, garlic, those feed the bacteria that already exist in our gut microbiome. The probiotics that are created through fermentation, they go hang out in the gut for a while. They're transient. They don't live there forever. They pass through. And so we need to be continually on a regular basis eating fermented foods, a variety of fermented foods, to help keep our gut microbiome healthy so that, like our gut brain access that can impact our sleep, the messages going back and forth are good, healthy messages that,
00:08:47
Speaker
you know then we can have the good sleep that we want. But by feeding our gut microbiome with these fermented foods, so getting the probiotics and prebiotics, and your health all resides you know depends upon the health of your gut microbiome. Okay, great. So I definitely want to talk about that gut brain connection in a second, but hearing you describe this, it makes me curious why our guts don't already have this. Is it a cultural problem? Like we're just eating too many processed foods. Is this maybe just where we were always meant to eat fermented foods and we've kind of lost that somehow.
00:09:25
Speaker
but I got into eating fermented foods due to a dentist back in the thirties west and a price who went looking for healthy traditional cultures. Who had perfect teeth cuz he started seeing as a practicing dentist that people were losing their teeth or where room in their job for all their teeth or with some people getting holders decay going on. he was questioning what was going on there. So he went looking for people around the world, Alaska, Australia, Switzerland, et cetera, looking for healthy cultures. He looked at their what they were eating. He looked at how they prepared their foods. It was at the time when processed foods were coming in, so processed vegetable oil, sugars, white flowers, et cetera. And he could see just in the same family
00:10:09
Speaker
change in dental health and change in overall health. these He has pictures of them with these big, beautiful smile with the teeth all aligned and perfect you know teeth we all could just hunger for. but One thing I could change about my health was to have a you know perfect bite in the full set of teeth. And so he looked at what these people were eating and how they prepared their foods. He found only 14 groups and a common thread among all of them was that they ate some hyperfermented food. And so that's kind of what got me onto this. And so these ancient cultures, they had no idea why they were eating this fermented food. They just knew it was part of a healthy diet. And so they were able to intuitively feed and take care of their gut microbiome.
00:10:52
Speaker
through not only their fermented foods but their raw dairy their cheeses are on process foods today we go to buy a pickle it's been processed and dyes and vinegar etc it's not alive anymore most cheese that we buy has been pasteurized is not alive anymore with all the ah Healthy bacteria and so today the way we eat our Stress, etc. We don't have the healthy gut microbiome that these ancient cultures had intuitively So we really need to be conscious of the foods we're eating what we're doing through our lifestyle today to maintain that sugar, you know is devastating on the
00:11:30
Speaker
got microbiome and so you know look at our diet today and sourdough bread we used to always eat sourdough bread nowadays it's main in a quick process it's not predigested through the fermentation process so we're losing all these different avenues to build on a healthy gut microbiome so we have to work at it today because we have to find the healthy foods that are not always so easy to find and make those foods that can feed and take care of or get microbiome. That makes sense to me. That checks out that just the ways we've introduced sugar and kind of taken these shortcuts is is losing some of this. I could only imagine that hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago is probably better.
00:12:10
Speaker
there were just fewer distractions. And I think that people were probably just more in tune with their bodies where they were able to say, when I eat this, I feel better. And when I eat this, I feel worse. And I think so often now we eat something and we feel worse, but we don't make the connection. We don't necessarily think, oh, that's because of what I had for dinner last night that I feel so terrible today. We don't always dwell on that in some ways. Well, and the choices we have, it is, you know to me, my food procurement, really, I see as a full-time job in order to go get the raw milk, because I want the raw milk that hasn't been pasteurized, can feed and nourish our bodies, to find the grass-fed meat, to find the ah all these different foods that used to be on our shelves.
00:12:54
Speaker
and a part of our diet are no longer there unless you go looking for them. So it takes a lot of effort and most people today don't have the time to make that effort or haven't understood the connection. And that's why I love just introducing fermented foods to people because it really in 20 minutes, once you know what you're doing, you can make yourself a batch of sauerkraut. Use that to feed your gut microbiome for a month. You don't need to consume vast quantities of it. A fork full or two can do wonders for your gut and you start taking care of your gut health on autopilot. Find the little condiment you add to your dinner plate just like these ancient cultures took care of their gut health on autopilot.
00:13:35
Speaker
That's great. So i I want to get into that, but before we do, you mentioned that there's a connection between the gut and the brain. So tell me what's going on there.
The Gut-Brain Connection: Why Diversity Matters
00:13:47
Speaker
So it's the gut brain as access. Like we say, you know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Well, we can't actually say that are butter gut brain access. It's a two way highway. What happens in the gut impacts your brain and what happens in your brain impacts the gut. So when we're a nurse before an event or we have anxiety and our stomach gets all in knots, that's an example of that gut-brain access, that messaging going back and forth. If we have a lousy night of sleep, that will impact our gut microbiome. Yeah, so that message is going back and forth and
00:14:21
Speaker
You know, your mood, your emotions, your thinking is all impacted by what's going on in the gut. And what you're thinking is going to impact the health of the gut. So it's going back and forth. There's a lot of research to play out still, but we do know that keeping your gut diverse population of microbes in your gut microbiome is key to staying healthy. And that's through that variety of fermented foods, through reducing stress, getting good sleep, all those things will impact the healthier gut microbiome. And eventually they will figure out all the little nuances. um We do know like melatonin produced in the pineal gland will impact your so circadian rhythm. If your pineal gland is not working and that melatonin is not getting produced, the backup is your gut. But if your gut's not working, then the backup's not working to produce that. So there's just so many avenues to work on. If we go back to our food and look at
00:15:15
Speaker
setting that foundation of the good food so that our gut microbiome has a chance and all you know to do its best work. And I would imagine for a lot of people who struggle with sleeping well, but also have a poor diet in this area that we're talking about, after so many years, that just becomes normalized. That's something that as I have these conversations and I talk with different people, that seems to come up a lot is we have this idea of what normal sleep is. But normal sleep can be so skewed, where normal sleep means waking up multiple times per night, taking 20, 30 minutes to be able to calm down and fall asleep. And so then if we're doing even a little bit better than that, we're thinking, Oh, I slept well, but really, it's like, you're sleeping so terribly, you slept only marginally terribly. And it's almost like we have to completely reset our expectation of what
00:16:07
Speaker
is possible when systems are working well if we've been so long where things are not talking to each other and communicating. Yeah, and it's making little micro changes because, you know, when you don't have a good night of sleep, you don't get anything done the next day and becomes this vicious circle. And it's looking at little pieces, which I call like habit stacks, taking one little change you can make, and I stack it onto to something else. So if I'm going to be adding fermented foods to my diet, I'm looking at Not all pick like i'm gonna add it to my dinner meal i buy the jar of sauerkraut and i know i'm gonna stack it on to eating dinner and so that just that one little change when i put my dinner plate together i'm gonna add the fermented food to it when i know it's bedtime i'm gonna look two hours ahead of time i'm gonna turn off all my blue light devices whatever it's these little little changes we need to make because our society no longer. Value is good sleep and it's just amazing ah you know i'm in my sixties my generation we we s slept.
00:17:07
Speaker
That was just normal. like Full stop. We slept. You didn't wake up in the middle of the night. You didn't have all these devices pinging at you. And so it's just sad to see how far down that rabbit hole we've gone of not getting a full night's sleep. and there's just you know To me, that's the number one health hack is to get in your good night of sleep because then you have the energy to make changes in your day. and Yeah, it's it's pretty amazing how ah complacent we've grown with getting a full night of sleep and how hard it is for people to get that. and you know There's a lot going on to impact it.
00:17:45
Speaker
And in some ways, the generations that have grown up only with blue light and devices haven't reached the age yet where some of these effects are really going to show. And I think that's a growing concern is what what's going to be happening in 20 or 30 years as some of the long-term health effects start showing up in different places.
Beyond Sauerkraut: Exploring Diverse Fermented Foods
00:18:10
Speaker
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00:18:25
Speaker
So you mentioned sauerkraut a few times, Holly. So I want to talk about that. So it what other fermented foods do you make? Is it just sauerkraut? I know sauerkraut is a big thing. and You know, sauerkraut is such an easy one. I call it like my one thing. When I first started learning about fermented foods, I was making my own sourdough bread, it's making my own yogurt, my own kaffir, my own kabucha, grinding my own grains, and all of a sudden I hit this overwhelm. And so then I drew back and I went, I think it was Tim Ferriss that came up with the one thing, but what was one little micro change I can make to my diet that would have the impact that I wanted? And so then I scaled back and just worked on the sauerkraut. I liked the sauerkraut as a fermented food or kimchi or fermented vegetables, but sauerkraut seems to work well into our family life because you can make it. It's it's a very simple process to learn.
00:19:16
Speaker
You can pretty much make it year-round, available green cabbages year-round, even though ideally you are making it seasonally. And um you can tailor the taste of it to meet the different flavor desires in the family. Sauerkraut I make is not made with just cabbage. It's made with shredded carrots and garlic and ginger. I have one recipe that has pineapple and lime zest and lime juice. So when people think my husband's favorite has ah jalapeno peppers in it and oregano and I think there's cilantro in there too. So when you think of sauerkraut, we're not talking about the canned stuff on the shelf in the middle of the grocery store. That's dead. It doesn't have the probiotics that we want for our gut health.
00:20:02
Speaker
And it does not have a very good flavor to it. But when you take and make fresh sauerkraut with your local cabbage and with these other flavoring ingredients, the flavors just pop and it tastes delicious. It's a secret way really of ah turning into a five-star chef because through the fermentation process, glu el glutamatas created, it's kind of a precursor part connected to MSG. It's a flavor enhancer. It's a natural glutamatas healthy for you. But it's mommy pleasant savory taste so when she has put together a meal they always look at including some type of mommy rich ingredient. Whether it's the promise on cheese or the tomato paste or whatever cuz that makes the flavors pop in the middle.
00:20:47
Speaker
So when you add sauerkraut to your meal, the flavors pop, everything tastes better. It just awakens the taste buds. So it's a very easy ferment to add to make and to add to any meal. It's great with scrambled eggs. For lunch, you put it on your hamburger or hot dog or you add it to your salad or mix into your Buddha bowl. Or even if you're into doing very smoothies, you could throw it into a smoothie even. That's a good way to hide it for people who are trying to, are not yet comfortable with the taste. so it's Yeah, there's a lot of fermented foods out there. We're familiar with kombucha. Chocolate technically is fermented food because the ah beans that make chocolate are fermented. So there's lots of fermented foods out there. And just to me, the one that can really have a good impact on your gut health would be the sauerkraut or even the kimchi because the kimchi has a lot more variety of vegetables and fermented products in it. So it can even have a greater impact on the gut health. So they tend to put a fish sauce in there or salted shrimp or
00:21:44
Speaker
on the various ingredients in a typical kimchi. And that helps with the brine and the salt process that you explained earlier? Yeah, exactly. And then it just helps with a more diverse gut microbiome. So I am taking away from this that I've got some new sauerkraut flavorings that I need to try because hearing some of what you're talking about is broadening my
Fermentation Fun for Kids: Tips and Tricks
00:22:06
Speaker
horizons. I was going to say I didn't know. I guess it had never occurred to me to add some of these kinds of things just to think about flavors that you like and to experiment a little bit.
00:22:18
Speaker
So I will add to I have little kids at home. So what do we do for them? are Are there flavors that you've seen that kids tend to gravitate toward or maybe they're still in that stage of life where you do need to sneak it into a smoothie, which is how we get them to take a lot of their vegetables. I'm just gonna say that. Yeah. Well, one thing I think to get children interested in is number one, to have them help you in the kitchen making the sauerkraut. Because it is a pretty fascinating process. You can pack everything in in the jar and they can taste it as kind of the coleslaw salad end of it. And then they can taste it along the way to see the flavor profile change. Or maybe they just watched the jar and they watched the little bubbles coming up in the jar to go, wow.
00:22:59
Speaker
What's creating those bubbles? Well, it's the bacteria and there's these little guys you can't see and they're blowing bubbles. They're blowing bubbles to create carbon dioxide to get the air out of the jar so that they have a nice safe home in which to work. So one way is to get them interested in the process. Typically, most cultures include a lot of fermented foods in their diet, especially the European culture. So children are used to the sour taste. So the sooner that you can start them on yogurts and these sour foods and you know the kimchi and the sauerkraut,
00:23:33
Speaker
the more their taste buds are used to that kind of sour tang. But barring that, you can mix it into a salad. And when you put it on a sandwich, it melts with the other flavor. So they might not even notice it. You can make a grilled cheese sandwich and include it in there. You can even just put the sauerkraut brine into like a guacamole. So again, they're getting the benefits of the probiotics that are in the brine, but they're not eating it directly. then It's not in their face. So it's kind of a way to hide it in the background. That's a good idea. I like that guacamole one. yeah Yeah, that works. and And you can also ferment like carrot sticks and they can plunge those into an ice creamy dip and they might enjoy those as a way to get the fermented food. You can make a fermented pickle relish. Again, it's just getting to know your children and what they prefer. and yeah Also, when my oldest son was 15 or something, he was had to take um antibiotics and so he wanted to restore his gut health.
00:24:31
Speaker
And the doctor we're working with at the time just said, you know if he'll just eat one or two strands of it, that's teeming with the bacteria and that will still do some good for the body. You do not have to eat a whole bowl full of it. So sometimes just finding out the flavor and each child just takes a bite of the sauerkraut. But yes, it does take some getting used to in their avenues to sneak it in the back door. Yeah. I, I like that idea for sure. Sounds better than what my kids sometimes do, which is just dip a carrot and ranch, lick the ranch off and put the carrot back. So and so this these are you know children that it'll take time to, some children will actually crave it because their body will taste it. And a lot of even adults who make sauerkraut for the first time who are dealing with some health challenges,
00:25:20
Speaker
want to consume that whole jar in one day because it tastes so good. And that's part of the gut microbiome. The microbes talking to you saying, this is what I need, this is what I want, please give me more of it. And we do need to be careful when we first introduce fermented foods into the diet that we don't eat too much all at once because it's a huge influx of bacteria. that our gut may not be ready for. So we want to start slow with it. But you may find that when children or anybody taste the fermented foods, that their body actually starts to
Learning Resources and Essential Fermentation Tools
00:25:52
Speaker
crave it. So Holly, I also want to talk about your website. You have a website, makesourcrowd.com. yeah Pretty simple, easy to remember. So what's happening on the website? You've got recipes, you've got resources. What what could somebody discover here?
00:26:08
Speaker
you know Just to get in there and get started with how to make your first batch of sauerkraut, how to make a batch of kimchi, or how to make some type of pickles. I'm not as heavy into the recipes as I am into the methodology. So I want to empower people. I want people to feel like they can begin to take charge of their health and charge ah and learning this preservation skill. So it's very heavy on the tips and the skills, and there's you know plenty of recipes in there to get you going. But you know explore, jump into this good start here tab and make yourself a batch of sauerkraut. It's actually much easier than you realize. There's also online courses in there. And I also sell my book on there. So lots of ways to learn. And i do if people reach out via email, I try to get back to them, help them get through the process. But it's simpler than you realize and just takes one little step at a time, slice up that cabbage and get started.
00:27:05
Speaker
Is there special equipment that somebody needs other than, of course, cabbage and the ingredients? You know, most people have some type of canning jar around the house. That's what you're... um Most of what I teach is small batch fermentation. Ideally, as you graduate and you become proficient at this, you would be fermenting in a large stoneware crock. It's just an easier environment for the bacteria to do their work in, et cetera. But most people tend to stick to the jars. This is a very doable process. But one thing you do need, even though we talked about it kind of being a magical process, there is a science behind it. And so a digital scale that you can buy for under $20. The reason for the digital scale is that you need to get your salt numbers correct. When we have the right amount of salt in there, it just makes life easier because we have it set up for the bacteria. Through fermentation, we always need to be thinking, what do the bacteria need?
00:27:56
Speaker
They need the right amount of salt. They have a you know kind of room temperature like to work at, and they need to be under the brine away from air. And so by using a scale, we can weigh out the amount of cabbage and other ingredients going in the jar. And then we can add our 2% salt, which is like a one tablespoon of salt, weighed out to like, you know, 16 grams. But those are details they'll find. But the digital scale is really the one piece of equipment that I now pretty much require for you know safe and consistent batches of fermentation. I didn't start with the scale that was halfway through my process of learning. I used to do it by taste. Does this taste taste salty like a potato chip? Then I've got the salt correct. But it's ah not that's open to air depending on your day and how that how salty that tastes, et cetera. Yeah, I could see how that's a little more subjective. And if you want to make sure you're doing it scientifically, you might as well just measure the ingredients.
00:28:51
Speaker
Right, and and our you know sourdough bread bakers, they use percentages and numbers, and that's how they get that bread to rise perfectly. you know And in baking, you start you're seeing more and more people weighing their ingredients for consistency. Well, Holly, other than your website, is there anywhere else that listeners can go to learn more about you or to learn more about this process of fermentation? um They can find me on Pinterest and Instagram and Facebook all under makesourcrowd. Super easy. Yeah. As long as you can spell sauerkraut. Exactly. It's a wonderful skill to learn and it's a great way to connect with not only the bacteria that are living on the vegetables that you're going to ferment, but you'll eventually start connecting with your local community because you'll find out that the fresher the ingredients are that you work with.
00:29:45
Speaker
that the easier it is for everything to come out and work perfectly. So you start searching out a good local produce, you find a farmer's market, you connect with your communities. So it's just a great way to connect with not only your gut microbiome and how to take care of it, but with the skill you learn and the people in your community. Well, Holly Howe, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure.
00:30:09
Speaker
Swinyolabs is a show about sleep, memory, and dreams. For more content, visit our blog at swinyolabs.com and connect with us to learn more about how you can share your story related to brain health and the daily habits that help us to rest and live better.
00:30:27
Speaker
Thanks for joining. We'll be back soon.