Is sauerkraut a new weapon against bird flu?

MILWAUKEE — While President Bush scrambles to ward off an avian-flu pandemic, the world's largest sauerkraut producer, tucked amid the glacial lakebeds of rural Wisconsin, is sitting atop a bumper crop of one possible preventative.

That's right: sauerkraut.

An international buzz is surrounding the unassuming fermented cabbage. Scientists at Seoul National University in South Korea fed an extract of kimchi, a spicy Korean variant of sauerkraut, to 13 chickens infected with avian flu, and a week later, 11 of the birds started to recover, according to a report by the BBC Network.

"Unlike the government, we've got the preventative, and 115,000 tons of it in Wisconsin alone," said Ryan Downs, owner and general manager of Great Lakes Kraut Co., which has sauerkraut factories in Bear Creek and Shiocton, Wis., and in Shortsville, N.Y.

Downs said more extensive scientific research is needed to prove any curative link to avian flu, but he's more than happy to tout kraut as a healthful part of any diet.

"People are starting to realize kraut is a pretty doggone good food," Downs said when contacted about the South Korean study. "We're ready to help keep the world healthy."

Several television and radio stations across the United States have picked up the BBC story, said Steve Lundin, spokesman for Frank's Sauerkraut, based in Fremont, Ohio.

After a Minneapolis CBS affiliate did its own story on sauerkraut's potential in the battle against avian flu, Frank's checked 54 Twin City area stores it supplies, and found an 850 percent spike in overall sauerkraut sales, Lundin said.

"People will do whatever they can if they can't rely on the government to provide them with a vaccine or other preventative," Lundin said.

South Koreans reportedly are eating more kimchi since news of the study came out. But Korean researchers acknowledged that if kimchi actually caused the effects they observed, it was unclear why.

Men's Health magazine fed the sauerkraut buzz in its November issue, suggesting Americans put together pandemic kits containing a few cans of sauerkraut, among other nonperishable foods, because — like kimchi — it is packed with lactic-acid bacteria "shown by Korean researchers to speed recovery of chickens infected with avian flu."

Another recently released study at the University of New Mexico indicates that sauerkraut may reduce the risk of breast cancer by up to 74 percent. That study set out to determine why the risk of breast cancer nearly triples in Polish women who immigrate to the United States.

Of the hundreds of Polish women and Polish-born U.S. immigrants observed in the study, those who ate four or more servings of sauerkraut and cabbage per week during adolescence were 74 percent less likely to develop breast cancer than those who ate 1.5 or fewer servings per week.