Lactic Acid Bacteria and Food Detoxification

My friend Joseph, a scientist, sent me an interesting paper yesterday afternoon relating to the toxicity of foods and their mitigation via fermentation.

Lactic acid fermentation is the oldest and most widely used method to improve the safety and nutritional value of foods. It has been employed from the very beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry to preserve cereal, milk, fish, and meat products from bacterial contamination, prolong their shelf life, and enrich them with probiotic bacterial strains [6,7]. Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) are routinely used to produce traditional functional foods such as yogurt, cheese, sauerkraut, pickles, and fermented cereal meals and beverages [6–8]. Dozens of LAB strains have been evaluated as probiotics due to the production of metabolites with health benefits that are scientifically confirmed and well-documented [9–12]. However, Markowiak and Sli ´ zewska have underlined that one of ˙ the requirements for a particular strain to be evaluated as a probiotic should be its ability to inhibit the production of bacterial toxins, inactivate them, or facilitate their removal from the human body [13]. The probiotics exhibiting detoxifying properties contain unique, strain-related characteristics, and their selection deserves special attention. On the other hand, over the past decade, hundreds of scientific studies have highlighted the role of LAB in food detoxification [14–16]. Large-scale food production and increasing environmental pollution make the topic of natural food purification via microbial fermentation extremely important and relevant. Biological detoxification of food can be achieved with various LAB degrading, metabolizing, or adsorbing toxins and thus effectively neutralizing them. The present state-of-the-art review aims to summarize the available data and elucidate the current role of LAB in food detoxification. Due to their wide substrate spectrum and diverse enzyme pool [17–19], LAB can ferment almost any food of dubious quality and potentially detoxify it. The unique properties of LAB that make them the “panacea” for food detoxification are described below. 

Takeaway: ferment your vegetables and grains if you want to remove toxins and break down anti-nutrients!