This is the second in a series of three guest posts from author and farmer Ben Hewitt of Cabot, Vermont. Ben’s newest book, Making Supper Safe, is due out in June 2011.

The best part about writing a book is that it affords you the time to delve into a world that otherwise might have completely escaped your notice. This was emphatically the case as I began researching our twenty-first century assumptions about bacteria and illness.

Early in my reporting on Making Supper Safe, I went to visit Mark McAfee, who founded and runs Organic Pastures, the largest raw milk dairy in North America. I could write a dozen posts on this visit alone; McAfee is quite the character, and is situated in the middle of the California’s San Joaquin Valley, where, by some estimates, nearly 13 percent of U.S. ag production occurs. I spent literally hours driving past unending rows of crops, punctuated by the occasional oasis of neon, where truck drivers gathered for fuel, sleep and food.

In any event, it was McAfee who introduced me to the term “terrain theory,” which is the notion, prevalent among raw milk devotees (and I should note my bias: My family and I keep cows and drink raw milk), that the condition of the body’s interior terrain is more crucial to your health than simply avoiding germs that can make you sick. The reason many people drink raw milk is because they believe that the enzymes and bacteria pasteurization kills are essential to good health. To their “terrain,” if you will.

Indeed, I was rather shocked to learn just how recently we’ve come to abandon terrain theory, which was the prevailing theory of health and disease prior to the early 1900’s, in favor of germ theory. Germ theory is the current accepted science of most disease; it is why antibiotics exist, and why there’s an enormous market for sanitizing hand wipes.

This is complicated and contentious stuff; I can’t really do it justice in a blog post. I tried to do it justice in the book but, honestly, I could have written an entire book on the subject, not just a couple of chapters.

Suffice it to say that recent scientific findings seem to support the notion that consuming a diverse array of bacteria is essential to good health. And that when the microbes in the gut are knocked out of balance, we become more susceptible to the sort of bacteria that can make us sick. In fact, one of the top predictors for Salmonella poisoning is antibiotic use within the past 30 days. That’s because antibiotics don’t just kill the bacteria making you sick; they kill much of the bacteria keeping you well, also. In essence, antibiotics create a relatively sterile environment where a bug like Salmonella can take hold.

We’re also learning just how much of “us” is actually “them.” Recent studies have shown that bacterial units outnumber human cells nine-to-one; in other words, we are more bacteria than we are human.

Now, there’s no proof that sterilizing our food (either via irradiation, heat or otherwise) makes us more susceptible to the inevitable exposure to bacterium that can make us sick (as an aside, did you know that there are over 700 species of E. coli, and that we are all populated by E. coli within a day or two of birth?). But as Stanford University researcher Justin Sonnenburg put it to me, “Sterilization and pasteurization of our food have undoubtedly been beneficial to humans over the short term, but there has been a long term cost, and that cost is exposure to microbes.” (Sonnenburg does not advocate consumption of raw milk)

In other words, the more bacteria we try to scrub out of our food, the more vulnerable we make ourselves.

How do you invite healthy bacteria into your body? Do you eat microbial-rich foods, such as yogurt, kefir or fermented vegetables? Do you take a probiotic supplement?

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Visit Ben Hewitt’s website for more information on him, his writing and where to hear him speak. If you haven’t yet read The Town That Food Saved, released in early 2010, read about it on Nourishing Words and find yourself a copy soon!