After 5 years, got a bad bacterium in my kefir?

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After 5 years, got a bad bacterium in my kefir?

Postby Altair on Thu Feb 09, 2017 8:33 am

Hello everyone, I've been culturing milk kefir for 5 years and it's always been perfect. Every few months I "reinforced" it by putting in some organic commercial kefir with the milk, and I always took extra care about hygiene.
However, after 5 years of consuming milk kefir every day, I started to have diarrhea problems. After a whole week, I started to suspect the kefir might be the cause it.
The kefir tastes normal, and look normal and healthy, it multiplies, and it appears just perfect as usual.
I'm afraid it got a "bad" bacteria. Is there a way to save this presumed contaminated kefir or do I need to find a new starter?
Thanks everyone in advance for the help!
Altair
 
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Joined: Tue Feb 07, 2017 1:58 pm

Re: After 5 years, got a bad bacterium in my kefir?

Postby Sea-Lution on Thu Feb 23, 2017 8:43 pm

Have you "experimented with yourself" to confirm it is YOUR kefir? Does the commercial kefir cause the same problem? Plain cow milk? Goat milk? A friend has diarrhea from cow milk but not from goat milk.

As for the possibility of "bad bacteria" ... sigh. Just because something is labeled "organic" does not guarantee it is organic. I'm chemically sensitive and have a reaction to 80 percent of the "organic" processed products I try - the labels lie. I only buy organic products with ingredients I would use myself but usually have a reaction - upset tummy, bad gas and/or a red skin rash starting at my stomach area and spreading to my neck, arms and back is most common, and occasionally other more severe reactions. So if it is YOUR kefir and not a lactose intolerance or something my guess is that yes, you got BAD bacteria.

And by BAD I mean some of the "organic" kefir you used was from cows fed genetically modified feed, which is bad enough, but the bigger problem is the Roundup that is sprayed on not only the GM crops, but other crops as well. In the USA most everything people eat is sprayed with Roundup, and it is unbelievable all the digestive problems people have, and the ridiculous names the Drug Industry has given these problems, like Leaky Bowel Syndrome, good grief just call it diarrhea.

In the early 1990s when GM crops were underway and Roundup was being tried extensively for other crops as well, I attended a graduate student's presentation for his thesis. This was in an area of logging; when trees are removed the previously shaded soil now gets sunlight, and plant life goes crazy happy! Well, everything except the baby trees - the grasses and bushes prevent the trees from quickly growing back. So, the practice was to spray Roundup after logging, which killed everything except the baby trees.

This student studied the effect of Roundup on the bacteria living in the forest soil ... and discovered the number of bacteria had exploded! The bacteria had mutated to digest the Roundup as food. For the past years, seeing all the digestive problems people are having, my hypothesis is that their gut is overwhelmed with bacteria which are living on the Roundup in the food they eat, which is in pretty much every meal for most Americans, and the beneficial bacteria that are supposed to be in their guts are either killed or crowded out by the Roundup-eating bacteria.

So the moral of the story is: just because it is labeled organic does not mean that it truly is organic, and if you got some non-organic kefir you can bet the cows were fed GM grains, which are sprayed with Roundup. (In other countries the brand name may be different, the chemical is glyphosate.) If that is the case, toss your kefir culture and start over.
Sea-Lution
 
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