Sunday, June 26, 2016

Plus Ça Change

Docteur Neeque: at the frontiers of medication
  I   n case you don't speak French, that means "Plus that change," which is referring to the extra coins in your pocket in addition to the coins you've been using to feed the parking meter.

All Froggy lessons aside, it has come time to examine where I am in the Grand Biome Experiment of 2016.

Where, indeed!

You will recall the following:

I spent two weeks eating my normal diet.

I took a sample and sent it in to be analyzed by uBiome.

I spent a week consuming no meat, gluten, dairy, sugar, and pretty much everything else that Makes America Great. This was the longest week since weeks have been recorded—since the third week of Hatshepsut IIV, 5976 B.C. (="Before Coke")

This phase was called, in case you have forgotten, "Phase II."

At the end of this phase, I remarked upon the seemingly dramatic remission of my psoriasis.

During the fourth week, confusingly called Phase III, I began introducing pre- and probiotics (in the forms of pills, powders and elixirs) began a daily vitamin regimen and cautiously reintroduced my old diet (minus a few questionable items such as the Doritos Mammoth-pak Chipstravaganza), with the sole exception of one item per week absent; the first week, for example, I did not reintroduce dairy, the second, I removed gluten etc. in a bid to see which, if any, had impacted my psoriasis.

In case you have not been counting, we are now at the first day of Week 8; on this day, seven weeks ago, the entire experiment commenced.

So what is my conclusion at the end of all this?

Well, there are several.

The first one that I came to was that starting from scratch with a diet based on exclusion—no meat/wheat/dairy or sugar was not doable, at least where these products are sold. However, it was never my point to eliminate any of these foods from my diet permanently; my goal was merely to clear them from my system in order to allow the next phase of the experiment to proceed relatively uncontaminated.

One major disappointment from this phase of the trial was the lack of actual perceivable differences from the regular experiences of my hitherto day-to-day existence.

I did not suddenly have seven times more energy, sleep twice as long, or remember all the lyrics to "One More For The Road." I could not suddenly play the guitar faster, I did not have amazing, colourful, flower-filled dreams. I did not lose ten pounds in two weeks—it was more like ten days (but that was not one of my goals, either).

On the other hand, no memorably ill effects resulted whatsoever during that period. I felt, for the most part, perfectly fine. My energy levels were very good. I slept fairly well; that is to say, with no unusual insomniacal episodes.

I had no gastric adventures whatsoever, apart from some mild constipation. No bloating, gas, reflux . . . well, 'nuff said there.

But now, while not exactly the bad news, the unexpected news: after my initial, amazed perception that my psoriasis had been going away, I discovered that it certainly had not been. It had merely retreated, in one of its timeless cycles of boom and bust.

Thinking that it might have been the reintroduction of one or the other things I had removed, I again took out dairy for a week and then gluten for another week; yet the psoriasis came back with a vengeance.

I'm disappointed, but not discouraged. The goal of this entire project really had no aims to remove my psoriasis; if it had happened, great, but that was not the point. I will have to do some other, more specific experiments to deal with that.

The point of the project was to see what was going on with my gut biome, to see if it could be altered for the better, and indeed, if my overall health could be improved in a noticeable way.

Well, I will say that one of the most important takeaways from all this has been that it can be done.

It can not only be done, but it does not have to be an ordeal; you can improve your diet ten-fold and still not feel like a granola-crunching spirulina-vegan tree-hugging homeopsychopath.

No; one of the most important things this whole experiment has taught me is to be mindful of the things that I put in my body.

What goes in today may not matter very much today; indeed, in the larger scheme of things, it does not.

But we are not merely solitary human beings going about our solitary business, eating our solitary meals and at the end of the day, left with our solitary selves.

We are accumulations, as we have seen, of trillions upon trillions of constantly interacting tiny organisms that are entirely dependent upon our "solitary" decisions upon what to feed and what not to feed them, in order that they may work to make us function at the top of our games, for, without us, they do not exist either.

Everything we do has consequences; today's Happy Meal becomes tomorrow's pound of ugly, yellow,  greasy adipose tissue, oozing its inflammatory toxins into the river in which all of our organisms must swim; polluting the very powerhouses that enable us to digest, to breathe, to feel, to think, and to be healthy.

Out of sight, out of mind, but not out of body.

That Diet Coke, that Dino-Pak theater popcorn serving with extra fake butter/polysorbate 60/FDC Red #5/guar gum, that packet of Splenda in your Lipton Iced Tea mix . . . perhaps not today, not even tomorrow, not even next year, but ten years down the line, when all the good guys have folded up their tents and gone home in disgust, that's when all this crap will be sitting up, taking a look around, and declaring the All Clear.

I hate to bring up that new buzzword of the day, "mindful," but I have learned, if anything, to be mindful of every single thing, big or small, that I consume, every single hour of every single day.

I never eat something I know to be unhealthy without pausing, asking myself if I really want to do what I am doing, or otherwise thinking about it, and that is something that I tended never to do before.

But perhaps most eye-opening of all is the realization that this project is not over. In fact, it has barely just begun.

I will keep on experimenting, being mindful, tinkering with this mix and that mix, and keep reporting back from The Biome.

Phases I-IV are over. But I have no even received back even one of my Biome samples, so when I do . . . get ready for Phase V—the Reckoning.

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