wonders of kefir

Milk kefir is one the major staples of our diet.  There are many wonderful things about it.  Not least is that it enables us to benefit, with digestive ease, from the goodness in raw dairy milk, including the crucial fat soluble vitamins D and K2 and also various B vitamins which are otherwise difficult to obtain in sufficient quantities from a plant sourced diet.  In high latitude countries such as Britain it is not possible to obtain vitamin D from sunlight for about half of the year due to the low altitude of the sun. 

Kefir transforms the milk of another mammal, for example a cow, so that the ratios of the amino acids are more suitable for humans.  In particular in increases the amount of tryptophan which it is very easy to be deficient in and is the precursor to serotonin.  The kefir culture also breaks down difficult to digest casein proteins into peptides and lactose, which is  a problem for many, into lactic acid.  Kefir is  the most powerful probiotic substance we know of, actively repopulating the gut with friendly bacteria. 

If you make your kefir with the milk from traditional A2 type cows such as Jersey cows, then all the better. This milk does not release a particular beta-casomorphine called BCM 7 which is responsible for some milk intolerance.  Jersey milk also contains more cream therefore more fat soluble vitamins.(more below).

We integrate noni powder into some of our kefir meals.  The xeronine in noni helps the tryptophan get through the intestinal walls more effectively.

Demonstrating kefir at Dutch Raw Food Festival:



at our workshop:



addendum on A1 and A2 milk:

"All proteins are long chains of amino acids. Beta casein is a chain 229 amino acids in length. Cows who produce this protein in their milk with a proline at number 67 are called A2 cows, and are the older breeds of cows (e.g. Jerseys, Asian and African cows). But some 5,000 years ago, a mutation occurred in this proline amino acid, converting it to histidine. Cows that have this mutated beta casein are called A1 cows, and include breeds like Holstein.

Proline has a strong bond to a small protein called BCM 7, which helps keep it from getting into the milk, so that essentially no BCM 7 is found in the urine, blood or GI tract of old-fashioned A2 cows. On the other hand, histidine, the mutated protein, only weakly holds on to BCM 7, so it is liberated in the GI tract of animals and humans who drink A1 cow milk."
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/07/09/the-devil-in-the-milk.aspx