Ever feel like no matter what you eat you feel sluggish and low energy? well that's pretty much how I felt at the end of 2012.

I had already gone up from a size 32 to a size 34... and now my belly was beginning to hang.

Being a home brewer, everyone (including myself) just called it a beer belly.

Thought maybe I should lay off of beer.

... but later that year, I had a major epiphany... you know, an "ah ha" moment that went to change the way I thought of health and nutrition forever.

I had been brewing (and teaching how to brew) for a number of years now... and if there was one thing I was familiar with was the fermentation process...

One day, I decided to make Sauerkraut...

You essentially take cabbage, shred it up, and add it to salt water.

When I looked at this process I compared it with brewing beer and realized that all you needed to ferment something was:

This is what allowed me to see that our digestive system is no different.

I used to think you chew up food and the stomach would take care of the rest... but that's actually not how it works.

Once food makes it past the stomach, then it ends up in your intestines and that's where it goes through fermentation...

When you look at your body, it has all the same components needed to ferment:

In other words... your body is the perfect fermentation vessel.

If you were to eat cabbage, your body has the water needed to ferment it (digest it). It has the minerals to ensure the process. Temperature? Best temperature to make sauerkraut is body temperature 37 °C (~98 °F).

What ferments it?

Lactobacillus...

Lactobacillus and other "Friendly Bacteria" known as probiotics make up 80% of your immune system.

In other words... if you learn a thing or two about fermentation which is essentially feeding and growing "friendly gut flora" like bacteria, yeast or other cultures, then you will learn more about health and nutrition than most nutrition experts and doctors.

In fact... what makes a human healthy is really no different than what makes a plant healthy...

QUESTION

What do you think a plant needs in order to grow healthy?

ANSWER

The right amount of:

Are you starting to see the parallels?

If not don't worry...

... but let me make one last observation

Have you ever wondered what a Carbohydrate is?

Without using complicated chemistry language, simply break the word apart... Carbo - Hydrate... or

Carbon Hydrate

Or

Hydrated Carbon

Or

"Water Filled" Carbon

Want to know the difference between a good and a bad carbohydrate?

In my book, it simply means this...

A good carbohydrate is one filled with water

A bad carbohydrate is one that lacks water.

Why?

In brewing, it's easy to see during the process called mashing.

Basically this is where you soak grains in hot water to convert the starch into sugar, but here's what you need to know.

To make 5 gallons of beer, you need about 10 pounds of grain and about 10 gallons of water.

During the mashing process you lose about a third of that water through grain absorption.

Grain absorption being the bad carbohydrates need to get filled with water.

If you think about it... whenever you eat bad carbohydrates, your body needs to process it by taking water from your body, which in turn dehydrates you.

Bad food allows "bad" gut flora to grow!

This is where bad stuff begins to happen to your body... feeling sluggish? low energy? like you are aging faster?

... well, you've found the culprit... food.

Since I'm not a doctor, I can only share this as information for entertainment purposes only.

I didn't have a lab to do research so I am the research lab... I am the Beer Diet Project.

And I am not here to tell you what to do.

I'm sharing my experiences, thoughts and findings... feel free to follow along...

Cheers!