What Should We Feed Our Bacteria?

Food can heal, but it can also harm, people have known this for ages. But lately they have become even more cautious, and not only because of a series of food scandals. Their senses are being assaulted by sophisticated, targeted advertising and the often contradictory recommendations of various experts. What to eat, who to trust, where is the truth, consumers ask. Professor Viliam Bada from the Third Internal Medicine Clinic of the Faculty of Medicine of the Comenius University Academician L. Dérer Hospital systematically returns to the idea that the best foods are natural and the least processed.

Often hear the advice: eat fresh food. Fresh, that is, biologically active. Are they also on the shelves of our stores?

Someone else should answer that. Let's say whoever is responsible for this in the store. Freshness just seems to me to be a clever marketing ploy that nobody checks and nobody checks. In my opinion, only food that is demonstrably from Slovakia can be described as genuinely fresh. At present, it is stated that Slovak foodstuffs account for less than 50 per cent of the total assortment. Some, however, have only been packed or repacked in our country. The foodstuffs have become globetrotters, as Hanzelka and Zikmund once were. The travellers themselves, however, were paradoxically mostly dependent on local, i.e. truly fresh, food on their expeditions.

Why? Because they set off on their journeys just after the Second World War, when there was no global food market?

What was also important was what they travelled with. It was the legendary silver Tatra-87, which didn't hold much. I remember how in their film reports from Africa they documented the grinding of grain in stone hearths or the crushing with large hammers. They commented on the images as an example of technical backwardness, pointing out that the natives ate the whole grain, including the ballast bran. Whereas advanced Europeans ate pure white flour prepared by modern roller mills. The question arises, who had the more biologically valuable food?

Africans, which implies that the firewood is paradoxically superior to the modern roller mill. Why?

Both the hearth and the hammer merely thaw the grain, damaging it minimally, no unnecessary heat is generated, and the grain retains all of its nutritional value. The roller mill produces wonderfully fine, white flour, but the bran goes by the wayside, it is waste. In fact, modern people do not know the true smell of grain or the unmistakable aroma of freshly baked bread. What we have separated out as bothersome ballast, we miss sorely.

You mean fiber?

It's not just fiber. Along with fiber, we throw out the entire B vitamin complex, many minerals and trace elements in their most natural form. At least half of the so-called nutritional supplements that pharmacies are full of would disappear from the market if we used food in its natural form. The USA was the first to fortify flour. A deficiency of folic acid, one of a group of B vitamins that were removed along with bran, caused severe neurodevelopmental disorders in newborn babies. By government regulation, it became mandatory to add not bran but only pure, pharmaceutically produced folic acid to flour and pasta. A beautiful example of how there is good money to be made in stupidity.

Should we eat our food as minimally processed or even raw as possible?

No, because many foods, when properly cooked, not only do not lose value, they can, on the contrary, gain it. Take coffee. Green coffee is not the best. Many of the antioxidants are produced just by roasting it lightly. High-quality coffees are roasted gently. Finally, roasting produces the fascinating aroma of black coffee, which is enhanced when it is ground. The betacarotene from carrots is best used when carrots are cooked in chicken soup. Even our dog knows this, and he waits with great patience for his portion at Sunday lunch. A man is not a sheep that the shepherd drives out into the meadow and grazes there. The nutritional extremists - the vitalists - claim that man should eat everything uncooked and raw, but we do not have a digestive tract adapted to this. We are not ruminants like sheep.

In short, food needs to be prepared in such a way that it tastes good and loses as little of its biological quality as possible. Do I understand this correctly?

Yes. Food must also be cooked, only the proportion of natural, biologically active food should be higher. And what pretends not to be cooked should not be canned. Organic yoghurt cannot have a shelf life of a month. Otherwise, it is an imitation that only pretends to be a food, but actually contains preservatives. The prototype of health food is also, for example, congee and acidophilus milks. When do they taste best? When they are fresh and full-fat. Can you imagine eating skimmed pasteurised bryndza or skimmed camembert? Probably not. But non-fat acidophilus milks are on the menu. Likewise non-fat yoghurts. More than 80 per cent of milk consumption, which is already very low, is skimmed milk, ultra-heated, i.e. completely dead. We are depriving ourselves of the benefit of a wholesome food simply because we have made an enemy of fat and are comfortable.

Do we or do we not need fat?

Fats are vital. If we didn't have a protective fat layer on our skin, we would die of infection and dehydrate in a very short time. We would not be able to synthesize vitamin D in the skin. The protective layer of the skin consists of a fatty film dominated by cholesterol. We're covered in billions of bacteria, outside and inside. We live in symbiosis with them, there is no point in upsetting the balance. Yet almost daily, in television commercials, an attractive blonde woman threatens that the latest spray in her hands will reliably destroy 99 percent of all bacteria.

And what about eggs, after all, the egg yolk is a cholesterol concentrate. People watch their blood cholesterol levels anxiously. Are eggs really harmless to health?

Cholesterol is still a hot topic. Unfortunately, many who nominate themselves as nutrition experts still see the egg in a strange light. They raise a warning finger as if it produces an invisible glow. It is true that the yolk of an egg contains the most cholesterol per specific weight, but it is also true that the cholesterol in an egg does not raise blood cholesterol levels.

So is an egg a health food?

At Harvard Medical School in Boston, a well-known authority on prevention, Walter Willet, a professor of internal medicine, has stated that no research has shown that increased egg consumption increases the incidence of cardiovascular disease. Cholesterol in egg yolk does not affect blood cholesterol levels. However, egg yolk contains substances necessary for brain function, liver protection and the synthesis of acetylcholine, without which we cannot think. Egg yolk therefore also prevents the onset of Alzheimer's dementia, contains substances for good eyesight, and protects against breast cancer. It is the perfect natural food. That is why the egg has a place on the list of the 150 healthiest foods in the world, compiled and published in a book of the same name by the renowned nutritionist Jonny Bowden.

Regardless of the egg's integrity, people still have a fear of cholesterol. Rightly so?

The human body still hides many mysteries. We're still learning about everything and how it affects quality of life, how diet and overall lifestyle improve or impair it. The view of cholesterol is also evolving. We know that we need cholesterol. It has been shown, for example, that behind the congenital Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome, which hides numerous severe deformities of various parts of the body and an advanced degree of weakness in children, there is an inability of the liver to synthesise cholesterol, which is irreplaceable for life. All children affected by this syndrome have extremely low cholesterol levels. They lack a single enzyme to synthesize it. And I would draw attention to one more remarkable thing about cholesterol.

Which one?

Let's note that the concentration of cholesterol in breast milk is three times higher than in whole cow's milk. Today, no one disputes that breast milk is the most perfect food. If it is full of cholesterol, and has 300 per cent more of it than cow's milk, then cholesterol is not a poison, but an essential component of normal nutrition.

Cow's milk has also been a natural part of the diet of our population for generations. Today its consumption is in steep decline. Why?

The statistics are truly frightening. In real terms, we consume only 53 litres of milk per capita per year, whereas we should be drinking 91 litres. Various factors are responsible for this undesirable state of affairs. It is also due to those who proclaim that milk is only for calves, that it is a food full of chemical waste, that it contains cholesterol, that it causes allergies and, for those who have breathing problems, that it makes people constipated. To remind you of the excellent expert Professor Libor Ebringer, who takes the completely opposite view, rational arguments are lacking. It would be hard to find a country in Europe that has such a low consumption of milk and milk products as Slovakia. No wonder - a celebrity recently advertised a healthy breakfast on the radio: oatmeal topped with soya milk and green tea to go with it.

Do you think the debate over milk has degenerated into a smear on the nation?

Sometimes I get that impression. Claims that we do not need milk are nonsense. Children need it for growth, adults and the old for bone strength. When children accidentally fall off a bicycle and break their arm, they no longer break it in the wrist (loco typico) as in the past, but they break the humerus(humerus) immediately because it has been decalcified. The explanation is the change of food and drink. A recent statistical survey shows that we consume up to 220 litres of soft drinks. Of these, 72 per cent are sweetened with glucose syrup, which promotes fatness and diabetes. A significant proportion are cola drinks containing phosphoric acid, which strongly demineralises and dissolves everything. If you have a "baked" screw or a clogged sink, half a litre of cola will do wonders. In the days of socialism there were warnings on the packaging - unsuitable for children. Today's youth can tolerate anything, but the consequences are dire.

There is more and more talk of limiting meat consumption. We eat around 30 kg of pork, 20 kg of poultry and just under 4 kg of beef a year. How much meat should we eat?

Meat consumption has already fallen slightly below the recommended intake. A varied diet certainly includes meat. It is not right to overeat. Meat, on the other hand, contains wholesome proteins and minerals that our bodies need. How else to cure anaemia, anaemia, if not with good quality red meat?

What most often causes anemia?

For us, iron deficiency comes first. Even in foods of plant origin there is iron, but with a different potency (divalent), unlike in de-wormed meat, where there is trivalent so-called heme iron. Meat contains iron in the available form in which the body can best use it.The transport of iron is always linked to certain carriers. Iron is literally protected; it is a potential source of free radicals. Therefore, it is very important to know in which food iron is present so that the body can use it easily. I stress that red meats contain it.

However, the widespread opinion is that red meat is harmful. Is this true?

Red meat has been linked to the incidence of colon cancer. However, the desperate lack of fibre, especially from legumes, and the overall reduced stool volume is forgotten. Many teenage girls, in an attempt to achieve a slim figure, go on diets and concentrate exclusively on eating white chicken, in which iron is at a minimum. Nothing against it, it really is dietetic, but a certain proportion of red meat must be part of our diet. The elderly and the aged are in a similar position. Most iron is found in the food that the protagonists of healthy eating hate, liver. They consider it to be a source of toxins of the highest degree, yet liver contains heme iron, the precious vitamin B12, folic acid and another heme-forming substance, the pyridoxine vitamin B6, which is accessible to the human body. Patients with cardiac insufficiency are particularly susceptible to anaemia. Thus, those suffering from anaemia should also eat liver twice a week.

But what kind of liver?

A good liver is from animals that have lived naturally, for example, from free-range chickens. A hen is a burrowing fowl, it is supposed to run around the yard, the meat and the roast from such a hen are the best. The reference to harmful substances being concentrated in the liver is true to the extent of the way the animal is reared. But liver from animals with a short life cycle (such as a pig) is the best - the safest. The French don't allow goose liver.

Pork is very popular in Slovakia and neighbouring countries. However, there are religions that reject it as unclean. Rightly so?

Pigs have been traditionally reared in Slovakia and pork is still a major consumer today. Mad cow disease and high beef prices have contributed to its primacy. Taste habits do not change easily. The claim that pork is unclean dates back to a time when these animals were massively infected with parasites that were a health risk to humans. Let us note another thing. All the internal organs of man (heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, kidneys) are closest to pigs. Many transplant attempts have their basis in pigs. Even insulin could not have been produced in the past without the use of pigs. People who have artificial valves usually have bioprostheses fashioned largely from the pericardium of the pig.

So we don't have to give up pork?

Not if we don't overeat it. The European Society of Cardiology has nothing against pork either, pointing out that pork is rich in B vitamins, zinc and selenium, the so-called trace elements that many people buy as dietary supplements in the pharmacy (European Cook Book, healthy diets, healthy hearts, 2010). And as for lard, I would point out that it has a composition most similar to olive oil, which is made up of 70 per cent monounsaturated oleic acid. The proportion of oleic acid in lard is 45 per cent. This is why lard is one of the most stable fats when heat-treated, just behind olive oil. Most centenarians live on the Japanese island of Okinawa. The favourite food of the Okinawans is pork. They like pork belly and they also eat pork fat mixed with blood and starch, a bit like our blood sausages. As you can see, pork is not at all an obstacle to living to be a hundred years old. But why go all the way to Okinawa when we have examples from Slovakia.

What do you mean?

At the end of November 2013, MUDr. Imrich Sečanský, the father of Slovak dietetics and a close collaborator of academician Dérer, passed away. In 1943, after a stay abroad, he promoted dietary catering in the Bratislava hospital on Bezručova Street. He founded the Institute of Nutrition, a hotel school in Piešt'any and diet canteens. He was the most prolific writer of books devoted to proper nutrition. He worked until he was 80 years old. He was never a vegetarian, he liked good quality pork ham and a daily glass of good wine was a symbol of culture for him. He loved and respected his parents and grandparents. He lived to the blessed age of 99.

What do you think about the overall composition of food consumed in Slovakia?

I am concerned about the low consumption of pulses. It was a traditional food of Slovak families. When I was growing up, we ate pulses regularly every week, whether it was soup or soup. Lentils, peas and beans were a natural part of the main meal. Sides of pumpkin, horseradish, and lettuce were regular. Legumes consolidated health by containing complete protein. Particularly valuable is the content of soluble and non-soluble fibre, which greatly influences the mobility of the intestine and is an easy aid against hard stools. Now people are spending money on laxatives so they don't get constipated. There are regular advertisements on TV for the miracle gutalax. It's unbelievable where modern man has come. He will give up a good bean stew or cabbage soup because it is not good for him, because such food causes gas. But these gases are good, they are part of life. Interestingly, if somebody smells of garlic, onions and fish, everybody condemns him as a boor. If he smells of good schnapps and expensive cigars, he's a celebrity.

You mentioned pulses, but what about the other ingredients in our food?

We have improved slightly in our fish consumption, but we eat only 5.3 kilos of fish meat per capita on average each year. The recommended consumption is less than a kilo higher, but it is still not enough. In doing so, people are not buying quality fish. Potato consumption has plummeted from the recommended 80 kilos to 49 kilos, with a huge proportion of unhealthy crisps and chips full of industrial fatty acid transformations! These potato monstrosities are the biggest attraction for the little ones. Parents successfully use them as a reward. Instead of 120 kilos of vegetables, we eat only 100 kilos. And what vegetables they are - wilted, imported in trucks, where they have kept them fresh with an artificial atmosphere. We have a huge deficit in fruit consumption. What an annual consumption of just under 51 kilograms, when the recommended allowance is 97 kilograms! Everybody knows about imported fruit - it is often unripe fruit, prematurely plucked from the tree. On the outside, they are also the desired colour, they are hard, but they lack the taste and smell of ripe fruit. In Slovakia, however, we have the conditions to grow enough of our own vegetables, fruit and potatoes. We do not produce traditional dried fruit at all. Prunes come from Chile or California, they are chemically preserved, they have to be washed before consumption!

Potatoes were once said to be the second Slovak bread. The traditional potato with onions and sour milk, or fučka, has been replaced by fries. What is behind the high deviations from the recommended doses?

There are probably several reasons. People haven't even noticed how their diets have shifted to fast food. They justify it by lack of time, they shorten the preparation of their meals by buying semi-finished products, the contents of which they do not really know. Of course, price is still the deciding factor when it comes to buying one food or another. But it is not always a consideration. In particular, under the influence of intense head-washing by massive advertising by large concerns, sweetened drinks are bought more than milk or sour-milk drinks and products, margarines are pushing butter and lard out of circulation. Consumers have made it clear that artificial fats of vegetable origin do not contain cholesterol. Indeed, they do not contain it, but they do contain industrially produced trans forms of fatty acids. And these are substances that the human body cannot cope with.

Margarines are considered to be the perfect food product and are often labelled with hearts, the symbol of healthy eating, which is why people like to buy them. Are they really that healthy?

First of all, it should be pointed out that there are also natural trans forms of fatty acids, which are produced enzymatically during digestion in ruminants. Due to their natural origin in the human body, they are very quickly converted into substances that have a very beneficial, even directly anticancer effect. The goat, for example, is one of the animals that does not suffer from cancer at all. Goat's milk and its products are therefore also highly valued. Quite different are the industrially produced trans forms of fatty acids, which are produced under very drastic circumstances. The first is the extremely high temperature of 220 °C for vegetable oil. Good quality oils are obtained by cold pressing. A powdered metal catalyst (nickel) is added to the highly heated oil and then hydrogen gas is pumped under high pressure into the pressurised vessel. This process is called hydrogenation and results in a change of state from liquid to solid. The hydrogenated acid in the TRANS position is called elaidic. It has a melting point of 45 °C, a temperature that does not occur in the human body. Natural (CIS) oleic acid has a melting point of 13,5 °C and is therefore a very easily digestible fat. Trans elaidic acid cannot be broken down by the fat-digesting enzyme lipase, as its temperature optimum is just above 36 °C. Trans elaidic acid therefore accumulates in the body and causes a number of negative reactions.

What are they?

First of all, it increases "bad" LDL cholesterol and triglycerides while decreasing "good" HDL cholesterol. At the same time, industrially produced trans forms of fatty acids promote the development of fatness, diabetes, atherosclerosis, sclerosis multiplex, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's dementia, and some cancers. The aforementioned Professor Walter Willet of Harvard Medical School has said that industrially produced trans forms of fatty acids are the worst and most dangerous type of fat, where there is no safe level. This is a comparison to the effect of gaseous carcinogens. It is difficult to comment then if the concentration of trans forms of fatty acids on branded margarines is stated to be below 0.5 grams. So not zero!

Yet margarines are often mentioned in connection with the fact that they lower cholesterol.

It's a bit different. Margarines in their pure form do not lower cholesterol. However, when esterified phytosterols, substances of plant origin that are similar in structure to cholesterol, are added to margarine, they occupy its intestinal receptors and cholesterol, which originates from bile, cannot be reabsorbed in the intestine. Phytosterols have the same effect when added to, for example, yoghurt.

However, the newest types of margarine are quite different. They do not hydrogenate. The manufacturers assure us that they are safe.

The answer to how things really are is Denmark. It has become the first country to legislate to limit the trans fatty acid content of products to less than 1 g. As recently as 2001, Danes were consuming 30 g/day of industrially produced trans fatty acids. Their sources are fast food meals, ready-made bakery products such as shortbread, sweets, biscuits, biscuits, crackers, icings, artificial mayonnaise, artificial whipped cream, confectionery products. Everywhere, trans moulds extend the shelf life and improve the taste characteristics of the products. The third source was various flavoured corn fritters. The Danes' vigour in limiting the consumption of trans forms of fatty acids is due to the Inuit living in Greenland. The Green Island is administered by Denmark. Danish doctors noted that the Inuit had about 10 times lower death rates from cardiovascular disease than the Danes. Why? Because they were and are dependent on what they catch. They eat mainly fish, seals and bowhead whales. The delicacy is birds fermented at low temperatures... A disgusting food for civilized Europeans, but healthy for the natives. The Icelanders were even stricter than the Danes. There, the norm of consumption of trans forms of fatty acids is as it should be according to Harvard doctors, i.e. equal to zero. Some restaurant owners in New York have voluntarily opted for zero trans fatty acids in the food they serve.

So which of the butter-margarine pair would you prefer?

Definitely butter. Even in Bowden's book, 150 Healthiest Foods in the World, butter is in, but margarine is not. Margarine is not a food, it is a product of the fat industry. Margarine is not and cannot be an organic product. Its composition is strictly protected. Let us note that margarine has no face of its own. It tries to resemble itself. To what? Well, the thing it condemns and condemns the most: butter. Raw margarine is an unpleasant grey colour, smells bad and doesn't taste good. So they artificially add the colour, smell and taste of butter. The producers are calculating with the imperfection of the human senses. Some can be fooled, but not all. Compare the croissant in Bratislava and in Paris. The French one tastes better because it contains butter. You can fool the consumer, but you can't fool the animal. Our dog will never touch a margarine product.

You often remind your patients that the best thing for human health is natural food that has been treated as little as possible. Have we forgotten them?

We haven't forgotten, but many under the same name hide different ingredients. The staple food for man at our latitude is bread. In the old days, bakers did not use any additives; only flour, but not fresh flour, water, sourdough starter and salt, went into bread. The baker of my childhood added caraway seeds or potatoes to some. He also added some barley flour. When he took the bread out of the oven, he wiped it with a wet brush, which gave it a beautiful shine. I haven't eaten better bread since. Jan Werich used to have excellent bread sent directly to Kampa from Orava, where he used to go to fish. He was a connoisseur of good food. I think that a person who works with food should first and foremost be a good person, not a mechanical part of a profit-making machine. If we just need to make money on food, we are on the wrong track. We need to return to the honesty of the old farmers, millers, bakers, dairymen, greengrocers and butchers. We must value water, the well in the field, the forest and the famous honeycomb.

Soon you will see the book How to prevent heart and blood vessel diseases. What is its central idea?

The underlying theme is not to question the wisdom of our ancestors. When we confront their knowledge with contemporary knowledge, we are sometimes surprised, even embarrassed, by what they knew. How many Slovaks know that the first cookbook with 1 500 recipes was published in Budapest in 1870 by Ján Babilon, a native of Radvan? He wrote that all great nations have such books because they realise that the health of a nation depends first and foremost on healthy food. It is a timeless statement.

Professor MUDr. Viliam Bada, CSc.

• Doctor from the Third Internal Medicine Clinic of the Faculty of Medicine of the Charles University in Bratislava, ÚNB, Academician Ladislav Dérer Hospital, where he has been working since 1967, without interruption for a total of 47 years.
• He started here as an assistant, he also worked in the experimental laboratory, which belongs to the III. internal clinic of LFUK.
• His teachers were academician Teofil R. Niederland, the founder of the III. internal clinic and prof. MUDr. J. Gvozdják, DrSc. Niederland's plaque is currently the highest award of the Slovak Medical Society.
• Professor Viliam Bada taught internal medicine to the students of the Faculty of Medicine of the Medical Faculty of Charles University all his life. He is a member of the committee of the Slovak Society of Cardiology. Prevention of cardiovascular diseases is his heart's affair.

Interview with prof. MUDr. Viliam Bada, CSc. published in the daily Pravda 12.4.2014, author Jozef Sedlák

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