It's Too Compwicated

 T   he naysayers check in.

Why is it that these people just love to throw in the old line " . . . but the truth may be a little more complicated"?

No shit! And exactly what does that sentence even mean? What is defined as "a little"? Does it mean incomprehensibly, head-scratchingly more complicated, or just mildly, obfuscatingly complicated?

As in, "50 billion bacteria were used in the experiment." Well, the truth may be a little more complicated—actually, the number was 44,976,096,987 bacteria! That is a LOT more complicated!

As in, "You can read this article all you want, but you're actually not smart enough to understand it even if we explain it to you nicely."

" . . . researchers from the University of Copenhagen performed a systematic review of seven clinical trials." Please note that the researchers themselves didn't actually do any clinical trials, they merely analyzed actual clinical trials done by real scientists and then passed judgment on the results.

This is like saying "The Mafia in America is actually primarily the fictive construct of Hollywood scriptwriters" based on having reviewed Goodfellas, The Godfather trilogy, The Sopranos and Van Damme Meets Don Vito Corleone II.

As in "Over the course several weeks," where apparently the writers of this article have decided the word "of" is optional.

As in “While there is some evidence from previous reviews that probiotic interventions may benefit those with disease-associated imbalances of the gut microbiota, there is little evidence of an effect in healthy individuals,” said senior author Oluf Pedersen. “To explore the potential of probiotics to contribute to disease prevention in healthy people there is a major need for much larger, carefully designed and carefully conducted clinical trials.”

Yup. So we're all going to sit around for a decade or two while you run your clinical trials, and possibly at the end of them conclude "Hey, I guess those probiotics people were right all along! Our bad."

Caloriffing

 I   n a mild panic about what the hell my so-called "restricted" new diet was going to consist of, I decided to just do a quick survey of the non-meat-non-wheat-no-starch items I'm actually willing to eat.

I was scared shitless that it would be such a tiny list that the diet would be un-doable; I'd be missing too many nutrients due to my picky-eater syndrome that I've had ever since dinner consisted of rice and ketchup every night, with an optional change-up of spaghetti and ketchup (roughly ages 5-8).

I was happily surprised when the "tiny" list actually proved to be quite substantial; with not a single processed item in there and with no meat or poultry, I was able to cover quite a few nutritional bases and food groups, and this was even before counting in optional items such as cheese, meat and grains (rice, wheat, legumes).

My entire "sweets" conundrum was completely covered with the number of fruits I was willing to consume. This means I'll never need ice cream or cakes or even chocolate to fulfil those insane sugar cravings that have always been my bane.

And I was surprised at just how many vegetables I was not only willing to eat on a regular basis, but in retrospect, actually love.

And on this list folks, there is not a single "white" item—no rice, no pasta, no bread, no potatoes, no milk, no cream, no butter . . . there is not a single item that needed a factory to create . . . there are no mammals or winged things (not that I object to their consumption) and basically, if I were on a desert island and this was the ingredient list I was condemned to for the rest of my life I would not only be happy, I would be extremely well fed.

There are certain items not on there that are undeniably healthy—asparagus, avocados, spinach, brussels sprouts and possibly other popular vegetables that I'm not particularly fond of, but hey, some people I know despise broccoli and cauliflower.

I curiously dislike most cooked fish but love smoked or grilled salmon and love shrimp of all sizes and adore sushi and all makers of sashimi, but admittedly my fish and seafood pantry is somewhat limited.

Beans I leave out mainly because the kind I like are spiced with pork and molasses but otherwise I think I have most food groups covered.

What about you? Could you live the rest of your life only eating the items on this list?

Think about it.

This is a randomly organized list with not much rhyme and only cursory reason. The only rules about excluded items are purely arbitrary and are not identifiable as belonging to any official or unofficially recommended diets.

Salad stuff
Tomatoes
Lettuces (romaine, iceberg, red, leaf etc)
Spinach
Celery
Cucumber
Cabbage
Peppers (green, red, orange, jalapeño, habanero etc.)
Watercress
Broccoli
Carrots
Garlic
Flax seeds
Seasame seeds
Pine nuts

Fruits
Strawberries
Grapes
Apples
Bananas
Pineapple
Oranges
Lemons
Melon

Nuts
Peanuts
Walnuts
Cashews
Almonds
Pine Nuts

Vegetables
Tomatoes
Onions
Garlic
Peppers
Carrots
Green beans
Mushrooms
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Snap peas
Green peas
Corn

Fish & seafood
Salmon
Shrimp
Lobster
Maguro (raw)
Toro (raw)
Unagi (grilled eel)
Ebi (sushi shrimp)

Protein
Eggs
Nuts

News From The Brown Cloud

"I am convinced that an imbalance in our microbial microflora has a decisive influence on the development of chronic inflammatory illnesses like rheumatism, Morbus Crohn and psoriasis."

 I   have to remind you that I don't know what I'm doing. However, based on my research over the past couple of months—extensive, to say the least—most scientists don't have a clue what they're doing, either.

I constantly come across the "This is so new that we don't know if . . ." or "Well, so far it looks like . . ." or "This is an exciting new field but there isn't really much anyone knows . . ." blah blah blah.

But these are the exciting days of Citizen Science, aren't they, really, since the government has proven that they really don't have a fucking clue about what dietary guidelines to approve and have basically sent most of the developed world on a fruitless four-decade-long red herring for "weight loss" while creating a globe filled with diabetic, obese, disease-ridden eaters of low-fat, high-sugar processed bullshit.

Oh, it's not the food companies' fault, or even everyone's favourite villain, "Big Pharma"—I mean , how naive do all these conspiracy theorists have to be to realize that the microsecond "Big Food" or "Big Pharma" thought they had even a minor chance to muscle into the latest fads and discard the old ones, they would? They just go where the money and wisdom is at the time, like all the rest of us.

They're not withholding some miracle weight-loss drug or easy-to-do-at-home therapy just to market their unhealthy bullshit; they're as much in the dark about all this shit as everybody else.

So: to all the "Supersize Me" idiots out there, go for it. You're probably just as likely to hit on the holy grail as that Citizen Scientist dude Edward Jenner, who took it upon himself to rub cowpox virus onto open wounds to ultimately prevent smallpox.

No, I have no illusions that what I'm doing is groundbreaking science. But it's an experiment that any one of us with a little energy and willpower can do just to settle a few things we're unhappy about.

I don't happen to have a problem with weight loss, but you might. And with everything I've been reading in the past few months—most of it from solid scientific sources, not anecdotal naturopathic-homeo-psycophatic granola-crunching New Age Dr. Phil Quackmeisters—it seems that there is much more than meets the eye to this quadrillion-strong community that hangs around inside and outside us.

When you think of some of these discoveries, you just say, "Yeah. That makes fucking sense. OF COURSE it's like that. It's so damned logical!"

Like fingerprints. You never question why everyone's fingerprints are different, or even why people have fingerprints. (I don't know).

But does it surprise you that each and everyone of us walks around this world in a cloud of our own personalized microbiome?

That is detectable and identifiable as belonging to you and only you and as individual as a DNA test to identify you?

Well, d'oh, think about it. We get sick from trillions of things floating in the air or landing on doorknobs or whatever. We know that the air an the environment is just pckd with a veritable miasma of tiny organisms; it makes sense that we each would have a personal microbiome that calls us Dad (or Mom).

We all have streptococcus and staphylococcus covering us from head to toe; every single goddamn one of us. We all have e. coli surfing our stomach acids; every single goddamn one of us.

What the eggheads are realizing, and again, major "d'oh," is that oh, yeah, of course there are like, trillions upon trillions of organisms swarming all over us, possibly controlling our brains, our moods and our health.

It's like, so goddamned obvious, at least to me, that there is very little actual mystery to it. And when the scales finally fall from your eyes, so to speak, and you realize that hey, human beings have been living for millions of years without modern medicines and that yeah, 60,000 years ago they didn't even brush their teeth because they never ate the crap that we do, and usually ended up with a perfect, uncavitied set well into old age . . . that tooth decay is a completely modern disease . . .well, you have to know then that Nature kind of holds all the cards around here. (I kind of stupidly found that out for myself the other week when I burned my fingers. Usually I would have popped the blisters immediately and put bandaids on them, but I just covered them and left them alone. Of course, they healed in half the time they normally would have done just by all my little phagocytes and nematodes and fragellixes and plankskistroms getting together and doing their jobs.)

No. What I am doing is not groundbreaking, radical or even difficult.

What I am doing that most people wouldn't normally do is basically becoming my own guinea pig for a completely original pseudo-scientific experiment conducted on myself for my own curiosity, that will take a lot more time than a lot of people think they can spare. 

But my thinking is, hey, if there is even a remote chance that I will feel better, be less anxious, live, umm, let's say at least two out of five days in a happy, unstressed state (two out of five is better than the way it is now, and I'll just BET that that goes for every single one of you as well) then, hey, let's bring it on.

I just wish I could be a bit more rigorous in the science department, but I just don't have the tools I would want, like a hematology lab and a diagnostic centre.

That being said, I'm going to conduct blood tests at every stage of this experiment, send in samples of my, err, "biome" to the relevant folks, and write down everything I do, for a period of about two months.

Tell me that you simply can't spare the time to at least just do that last item.

If someone told you that with no medications, magic therapies, vitamin injections or workout regimens YOU might be able to transform yourself into You 2.0, wouldn't YOU take the extra time out to do it?

My point being that there are no miracles here. It's all just plain old common sense. Perhaps taken a couple of steps further than What Mom Always Said, but not rocket science nonetheless.

Oh sure, becoming a vegan or joining a gym or doing Jenny Craig might do something for you but are you going to be Jenny Craiging in your 80s? Popping down to the gym for 500 chin-ups when you're 65? Eating spirulina popsicles and chasing them with mollusc-chitin smoothies when you're cooing to little Billy Ray the Third?

Get a grip, people.

I'm just hoping that if I can inspire even one person to follow in these footsteps and, what, maybe lose 10 mmol/Ls of cortisol in their daily hormone rounds, hey, I'm doing Mighty Anulap's* work.

*and Nirnix is his prophet

I find out something amazing every single day just by typing "microbiome" into Google News. You don't have to; you can just subscribe to my experiment home base to be assured of the latest unhysterical news. Remember: I read it all so you don't have to.

Just to leave you with something a little intriguing, and just to point out that compared to some what I'm doing is very, very far from radical, I urge you to read this, which should be an inspirational as well as a cautionary tale.

Today is the first day of Week II of Phase I.

Stay tuned; everything is on track for the moment and I will be sending out updates as things develop.

One Week In

 W   ell, intrepid explorers all, it's been almost a week into my experiment. As you can imagine, since I haven't actually changed too much of my normal behaviour yet rather just set about documenting it in detail, not really much has changed on too many fronts.

However, what has happened to me in general over the past week could be a good indicator for any of you who might be considering imitating my diet; speaking for myself, when abiding by it I feel far from deprived. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything and aside for the occasional wistful thought of a large, cold beer, I never crave "more chocolate" or "more sugar" or a "juicy triple-bacon cheeseburger."

In fact, I get very few food cravings, and indeed in the last couple of days my appetite went so far down that I wasn't even hungry enough for last night's dinner and actually considered skipping it.

Admittedly, my present diet is somewhat limited. For example, the meal I would consider my most varied in terms of ingredients actually barely contains a variety of food groups: whole wheat pita, grilled lean chicken, stir-fried onions and red peppers, some lettuce, coleslaw cabbage and cilantro. Maybe some chopped jalapeños.

That's not exactly a smorgasbord of a little of every healthy food group on the planet. Still, it beats a Big Mac or a slice of Domino's Cardboard Special.

And since I basically only eat one main meal a day, one would think that I'm losing weight all over the place. But I'm not . . . I weigh about the same as I've weighed for many years. (All I can conclude from this is if you keep on eating what you're eating now, you're probably not going to lose anything or gain anything any time soon. D'oh.)

But since I'm not in this to lose weight, I'm more interested in sleep and mood changes. Oh, and gastric activity! After all, a continually unhappy stomach makes for a bad mood, a least in my book. And bad for me means feeling bloated (ate too much) or nauseous (too much crap) or gassy—and that last can actually be a good indicator that you're consuming enough fiber. (Or, that your liver is not digesting properly!)

But by and large I've been sleeping okay, apart from an aberration over the last couple of days, when depression and anxiety briefly reared their ugly heads—but since I haven't changed anything with my diet I can't chalk that up to this experiment.

My energy levels have been somewhat to be desired, but my blood sugar—always a culprit in low energy spells—has been pretty good. When I say that I mean that it's hovered around the 7.5 mmol/L mark (that's 135.0 mg/L for Trump supporters) so that's neither great nor awful—just normal.

Blood pressure in the 115/70 range. Mood variable, but generally mild; no major mood swings.

I've been keeping a chart, as is my wont as a graphics-type. And here it is: the week in review (click or right-click to open in a new window for full resolution).

So I'll just keep on keeping on; one more week to go until the Great Purge. And tonight I was thinking about changing things around a bit and having (low-carb) shrimp stir fry . . . what a concept!

The Practical Diet

 H   ere are some thoughts about what I should be considering when thinking about the diet that will be at the end of this biomic experiment. You may want to look at it for ideas on some kind of diet you might be thinking about adopting. Remember, I'm not doing this to lose weight, although I very well could be.

(And remember, I'm going to try to work in as regular an exercise routine as I can—in my case, that would involve, for now, just walking.)

But also remember that it's not my plan to make this a temporary diet; with a few tweaks, I plan to adopt this diet or one like it for the rest of my life.

---

So what is this diet-to-end-all-diets going to consist of?

Well, first off, I will never be able to sustain any kind of diet which will:

• Be expensive
• Be difficult to find
• Be quickly perishable
• Be difficult to cook
• Be messy to cook
• Take up too much space in the fridge
• Be unfreezable
• Be ultimately not very tasty
• Not be able to be substituted for

My present diet is fairly ideal because it consists of only three types of meals. All are low-to-non-containing carbs, and contain little or no red meats. In fact, they contain very little of any meat.

One is my standby: whole wheat pitas with a filling of pan-grilled chicken, reheated by sautéing with a little olive oil, with sliced red pepper, red onion and raw garlic, garnished with fresh raw cabbage/cole slaw mix (minus the mayonnaise), shredded lettuce and cilantro, with occasional addition of diced habaneros.

The benefit of this meal is that the chicken is cheap, has to be grilled only once in a grill pan and is easily kept in the refrigerator for up to two weeks. The assembly and cooking of the entire meal usually takes around 15 minutes, and most of that is waiting for it to get hot. The pitas just require three minutes in the toaster oven from frozen, do not fall apart and are extremely tasty.

The vegetables can all be sliced ahead of time and be kept in the refrigerator in their own containers. The whole dinner does not take up a lot of refrigerator space. You can shop for a week's worth of dinners once a week and prepare the fixings for seven meals all in one session.

Alternative #1 is whole-grain pasta reheated in a little olive oil with homemade tomato sauce (not from any jars) and home-made meatballs if I feel like it.

Alternative 2 is pizzas made with the same whole-wheat pitas as meal #1, with various cheeses, again red pepper, red onion, garlic and usually good-quality salami as the meat component (not 100% necessary).

Now . . . day in, day out, how does that strike you as a diet?

If I reduced the ice-cream-strawberry-apple whipped-cream dessert to just the fruits, nuts and whipped cream with no sugar at all, (meaning apart from milk in my tea and coffee that would be my only dairy intake—period) and perhaps indulged in some 70+% dark chocolate from time to time, and maybe from now on started to include the occasional shrimp, broccoli, carrots and green beans as possible side dishes, the whole system sounds eminently workable?

No rice at all. No bread, except for the aforementioned whole-wheat pita, and no pasta except for 100% whole wheat/whole grain (what the fuck is the difference?) and no high glycemic index vegetables, like potatoes  . . . no sweets except for raw fruits—apples, strawberries, possibly bananas, grapes and pineapple as well—and dark chocolate . . .

If I could stick to it, say, 28 days a month (the other two days possibly allowing for dining out, or a rare steak dinner at home) . . .

Seems to me my sugar and carb intake would be reduced to very, very low levels, and never be in a position to cause spikes. The grains would also be low glycemic index foods unlikely to cause spikes in blood sugar.

In the nuts dept, my main intake is from almonds and cashews, not peanuts. Seeds . . . I could sprinkle flax seeds over my fruity desserts, I suppose. Legumes? What the fuck is a legume?

Day 4: Hangin' Wit' Da Trillionic Hordes

One of my routes through the cemetery

 D   ays One through Three have been splendidly low key.

Since I haven't made too many changes to my usual habits, things have not been much different except for the fact that I've been documenting all my intake carefully.

Here, for example, is a a typical daily routine:

---

Tuesday May 3

9:30 a.m. Coffee, 1 sugar, homemade whipped cream (no sugar added)

GI tract quiet, blood pressure 110/73/54. Blood sugar 7.3 mmol/L (131.4 mg/dL)
Aches/pains: usual numb feet 4/10 annoyance. Psorisasis 5/10 annoyance. Stiff joints.
2 aspirin, 1 atenolol, 1 metformin

12:50 p.m. 
Clamato 1C
Indian munchies 1/2C

2:30 p.m.
Walk in cemetery 43 min./2.43 miles
Big shop

9 p.m.
Dinner: Whole wheat pita/grilled chicken/olive oil/red pepper/red onion/lettuce/cabbage/cilantro (one)

Dessert 1/2 cup no-sugar-added ice cream (4g glucose), strawberries, apple, cashew, almond
Homemade black tea blend, 1/2 tsp. sugar, milk

1 a.m. Retire
Read "Chasing The Devil," Tim Butcher

Not For The Squeamish: Day One

 A   s you know, I have psoriasis. I've had it since age 25.

It's an auto-immune disorder—the top layer of skin cells multiply in days instead of weeks, so they're immature and not complete—what results is scaling and peeling to various degrees.

Thankfully, my case is mild compared to some—this can get really, really horrific if it covers any more than 5% of your body, as you can imagine.

For me, it's always been my right hand, and very suspiciously, exactly in a pattern that matches the grip I used to play racquetball for many years. It's just too close to be a coincidence—and it is nowhere on my left hand.

In the past couple of years it's begun to attack my face. Again, not seriously but annoying nonetheless.

I believe that possibly by changing my gut biota this accursed condition will ameliorate!

Anyway, this is where it was at on this day: Day One.

My right hand, freshly peeled. My thumb is in a temporary two-day remission, but there are four spots on it just like these and they will come roaring back in a couple of days, as these ones begin to heal again under bandaids. Pretty nasty, huh? There are other spots on this hand which I couldn't show—this camera is just too difficult to operate with the left hand.

Now can you see why, after I put bandaids all over my hand, that I wouldn't want to get my hand wet—say, by washing dishes?

As usual, now that I want to show it, the psoriasis on my face has temporarily retreated, thanks to my aggressive occlusive taping with Fluocinonide and Tacrolimus. But you can see the spots—when they flare they turn into ugly scaling red horrors, a bit like my fingers. Especially irksome is the corners of my eyes—they get horrific and actually start to invade the orbit itself. Scary!