To work on authentic content is an awkwardly shaped creature for our brain. It takes energy, and the brain consumes already 25% anyway, without performing a special job. Our journey to Hawaii took its toll, brain activity is still low ;-).
Since I am involved with Biestmilch I did quite some searches on the gut-brain axis. I learned a lot about the interactions between gut and brain, I learned that there is a hard-wired connection between the brain and the gut, and that there are myriads of soluble factors synthesized by the nervous and by the immune system that influences our well-being in every moment of time.
The presentation by Heribert Watzke gives an inspiring view on the importance of cooking (= transformation of food) for energy production and expenditure and the avenues the skills of cooking have opened to us humans. In Watzke’s opinion right in the center of the evolution facilitated by cooking is the gut-brain axis, due to cooking the brain became the Big Brain and the gut shrunk … Cooking made work easier for it, so it degenerated.
But what happened during evolution is that the so-called big brain started to overrule the gut-brain (you may have experienced yourself, what happens if you ignore your guts feelings). We lost our balance, and in extreme cases this dysbalance does not only lead to discomfort but to obesity, anorexia, and many other diseases. Watzke says, we need to find the food structures that are inducing strong enough a signal that the big brain cannot undercut the gut’s language.
My experience over the last 10 years taught me, and this is now my opinion that biestmilch is one of the foods that by its very structure can help re-balancing your brain-gut axis by reinforcing the signals from the gut to the big brain.
Heribert Watzke set up the department of food material science at Nestlé in Switzerland, pulling together many disciplines, including chemistry, nutrition and neuroscience, in pursuit of ever better foods. Watzke’s background is in chemistry — in the mid-’80s, he was part of a groundbreaking team at Syracuse working on splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen to create alternative energy — before moving to materials science.