The Binary Circumstance

I recently wrote about how to make your own yogurt.

Urinalysis of populations from several different countries showed there are wide variations in metabolism based on the types of microbes that reside in the gut. What is particularly mind-boggling is the amount of bacteria we all having living in our intestines.

Each country turned out very different, metabolically.

“For instance, Chinese and Japanese people are almost identical genetically, which isn’t surprising, since they diverged culturally only a few thousand years ago - but they are very different metabolically,” said researcher Jeremy Nicholson, a biological chemist at Imperial College London.

“We know there’s a huge difference in the diseases that different nations risk - broadly speaking, the Japanese tend to die of strokes, the Chinese of heart attacks - and we see those differences reflected in their urine,” he added. “Of course they’re different in terms of lifestyle - the Japanese tend to eat more fish than the Chinese as a whole do - but their gut bacteria are also very distinct as well.”

Gut microbes help us get energy from our food.

“In your guts, you have about 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) of 1,000 different species of bacteria,” Nicholson explained. “If you include all the genes from bacteria along with your own, only about 1 to 2 percent of the genes in your body are human, with the rest from the gut microbes. And what bacteria you have can be quite different from person to person.”

Next time you want to thank somebody for being alive, you might want to start with the bacteria of the world.

I wanted to make my own yogurt and found many sites that offered great advice but MakeYourOwnYogurt.com had very clear instructions and photographs.

My first attempt was a success!

I used my food dehydrator to keep the yogurt at the right temperature for the bacteria to grow instead of a heating pad. But I thought the heating pad was a great idea as well.

Some of the health benefits and information about the bacteria in yogurt can be found here.

Based on federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) standards, in order for a product to be called “yogurt” it must be made by combining a dairy product with a bacteria, usually Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus. The National Yogurt Association (NYA) has made its own rules for yogurt. In order for a special “Live & Active Culture” seal to appear on a container of yogurt, the product must contain at least 100 million bacteria per gram of yogurt at the time it is made.

That’s a lot of bacteria.

One of the advantages of making your own yogurt is that you can choose the types of bacteria you want to put in it. For example, if you want the same cultures they use in Dannon’s Activia, you just go to the store and buy some plain Activia and use it for your starter. The same is true for DanActive or any other brand of yogurt.

The cost savings is also very substantial. A 24oz container of Activia currently costs $3.99 or $0.166/oz. A gallon of whole milk costs $2.99 and that will make a gallon of yogurt for $0.023/oz. The equivalent of a gallon (128oz) of Activia would cost $21.25.

DanActive is even more expensive. An 8-pack cost $6.49 and each container is 3.1oz which comes out to $0.261/oz. A gallon equivalent would cost $33.50, eleven times the cost of making your own.

…In Ayurvedic terms, space is the principle of unbounded choice-making potential–and it is literally everywhere, though our senses may deceive us on this point. For example, modern physics asserts that more than 99.99 percent of the material world is actually empty space, despite its apparent solidity. Even subatomic particles are only localized probabilities, and the vast emptiness between the electrons and nucleus of an atom in proportionately far greater than the distances between the planets of our solar system. –The Wisdom of Healing by David Simon M.D. pg.35

Both the Seattle Times and the Seattle-PI reported today that Ric Weiland, who was one of the first five employees at Microsoft, left millions to nonprofit organizations focused on gay rights and HIV/AIDS. For many of the organizations, the donations he gave them were the largest donations they have ever received.

Weiland committed suicide last year at the age of 53 after a long battle with depression.

I had never heard of him before today but have certainly used products he wrote or developed. I found his story fascinating. He was obviously a brilliant, remarkable gay man who lived a full, rich life.

I find it interesting that he was unable to find happiness even though he was in a long-term relationship, had strong family connections and was active and respected in his community. We are constantly being told that those things are protective against unhappiness. But in his case those things and the fact that he was in great physical shape and very wealth were not enough. Depression is a puzzling problem.

I’d certainly like to know a lot more about his important life. It sounds like his depression was being managed until he suffered so many deaths in his family. Personally I find it depressing that a gay man of such enormous accomplishments felt he had leave much of his fortune to support the battle for basic human rights for gays and lesbians in our culture. I wonder if that got to him as well. If he had been straight his life would have been different just because of the political climate in our country.