The history of fermented foods like beer, bread, and other foods can be traced back thousands of years to ancient civilizations in China and Egypt. This ancient technology was originally used to preserve foods when refrigeration was not an option. While less common in modern industrialized civilizations, we’re now realizing that fermented foods play a major role in gut microbiome diversity, which is a biomarker for overall health. Join our conversation with Dr. John Leech, Technologist at Teagasc in County Cork, Ireland to learn all about the history and how cutting-edge technologies are being applied to research in food fermentation. John shares his story of how he found this field of research and how he’s now headlong into striving to understand and harness the power of fermented foods. We learn about the complex microbial communities that define and deliver the health benefits of these foods, but we also hear about how this biological complexity makes them inherently irreproducible. Foods like kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, tepache, milk kefir, and water kefir are produced from fermentation, facilitated by complex communities of microbes. Consumption of fermented foods can alter our gut microbiome, which has been shown to affect obesity, inflammation, longevity, and efficacy of drug treatments. John and his team are using qPCR, NGS, and other methods to characterize the microbial consortia used to produce these foods. They’re now working to figure out how to simplify the consortium while still delivering health benefits, all while making the process reproducible and scalable
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