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Among all the people that influenced my professional futureand left a profound impression in my life is Gaylord Hauser. Though I have never met him personally, he became my idol and mentor after I read his groundbreaking book Look Younger–Live Longer, published in 1950.I had just turned 17 when I started my apprenticeship in a health food store in my hometown in Germany. Gaylord Hauser’s book was the first book I bought with my hard-earned money.

What fascinated me most was the nutritional program he had developed for health- and beauty-conscious Americans, especially young movie stars in Hollywood. His program for both men and women actually centred around the waste products of the industrialized food industry. He offered the healthiest concoctions made with B-vitamin-rich brewer’s yeast, a leftover in making beer; mineral-rich blackstrap molasses, the waste product in refining sugar; and fiber-rich bran and wheat germ, loaded with vitamin E.

All this he mixed with yogurt, at that time a rediscovered source of lactic acid bacteria. As yogurt was not widely available, he taught his readers how to make it themselves at home.

Enthusiastically I followed his instructions and made a three-litre batch for our seven-head family to try. Unfortunately, my homemade yogurt, in spite of the exotic name, met with great disappointment. Everybody felt that old-fashioned homemade milk, straight from the farmer’s cow, unpasteurized and just fermented in a warm location for a day or two, tasted better. Pure, natural lactic acid bacteria was part of our daily fare.

Nevertheless, this experiment added another experience to my limited knowledge of lactic acid fermentation. Making sauerkraut from white cabbage was a yearly ritual at our home, which provided the family with valuable, nutritious lactic acid-rich food. Likewise, the salt-brine fermented dill pickles my mother made every August. Nowadays, dills are made with vinegar, most often white vinegar, which is made from wood pulp, a far cry from a healthy food.Our bodies, with their very complex and intrinsic digestive systems, were designed to function only with the presence of abundant lactic acid in our food. The advent of refrigeration changed the way food is now stored, and the preservation of vegetables through the fermentation method has disappeared. As a consequence, many health problems related to poor digestion and food absorption appeared due to the lack of lactic acid in our food.

Louis Pasteur made the greatest impact in food preservation with his process of pasteurization–once taught to be a blessing, now considered in the whole-foods movement to be the ugliest curse. Pasteurization kills ALL bacteria in food, the bad ones with the good ones, e.g., in milk, where the lactic bacteria turns the milk sugar lactose into beneficial lactic acid during the fermentation process, thereby creating naturally soured milk products.

Lactic acid consists of a multitude of friendly bacteria, each strain responsible for a very specific job in making such foods as buttermilk, sour cream, Camembert cheese, sauerkraut or sour dough. The absence of lactic acid in our modern diet has triggered a seemingly endless chain of digestive problems, including the weakening of our immune systems.

Source: alive #247, May 2003