Sauerkraut – next health trend?

While listening Rich Roll podcast with I think it was Jason Wachob from Mind Body Green, I heard that one of the trendy things in health movement will be sauerkraut…

I immediately remembered my childhood. I was raised with strong presence of sauerkraut. It’s been fermenting at my house and we would consume it a lot, especially in winter time. Why? Probably the main reason was that it’s cheap! Basically to make it, you need cabbage (which in autumn is very cheap product) and tremendous amounts of salt. It can stay long without of spoiling, therefore it’s easy to store. We can add flavors, such as enriching the taste with caraway seeds and so on. We also can add carrot, which is also very cheap product in autumn when most of sauerkraut buckets are made. Heck… you can even buy juice which is produced from fermentation of cabbage in a regular supermarket these days.

And I can see extensive research is going on for past years on how to prepare sauerkraut with new tastes, reduced salt amount and on health benefits of this product.
I think sauerkraut is catching on if not over passing popularity of kimchi which is famous fermented food that comes from Korea.

But basically sauerkraut is shredded cabbage that has been fermented by different kinds of lactic acid bacteria. I could start bringing extensive amounts of research data to support claims about that it’s a health food and about that it’s not a health food.

However I would like to go with common sense. I would understand people who claim it’s a survival food for times when we don’t have much food to eat. You always have to remember that sauerkraut is very salty food. 1 cup of sauerkraut has almost 1000mg of sodium. Of course there are low salt options, but you still need a lot of salt to prepare it. Basically sauerkraut is rotten cabbage that has salt added. Do we feel mouth watery when we see rotten cabbage on the field? If this food did not have so much salt in it, would it be appealing for humans? I think not.

So final thoughts would be, I believe this food will gain popularity, therefore it’s going to be accessible in a nice packaging, with flavors and labelled as organic health food. But from common sense point, it’s far from being health promoting food.