Learning Which Foods Are Best For Me
Learning Which Foods Are Best For Me
Zoe Nutrition and wellness of the future
A few weeks ago, I had heard the term “Type 3 diabetes” for the first time from one of our nature walk partners. This is a term that many have used to describe Alzheimer’s disease, because there is such a close connection between Type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.
I have not written about what we went through when my grandmother was deteriorating from Alzheimer’s disease, a process that took over 20 years. We were blessed that she was at last able to locate and live in a safe and supportive environment at Camelot Care, which was one of the first Alzheimer’s-specific long term care homes in California. There is quite a story about Camelot Care and how it came to be — but my point here is, I don’t want Alzheimer’s and I don’t want my daughter to have to go through the years of agonizing worry, 24–7 crises, and overwhelming grief that I did with Nana.
Dysbiosis: The Word of The Day
As I’ve written many times before, our Western medicine has been dominated by pharmacology (pills, injections), and most physicians have one hour or less of nutrition education in medical school. The resistance toward acknowledging the massive part that diet plays in health is mind-boggling. 80% of the grocery store and 100% of “fast food” and most “fast-casual” food is actively unhealthy and is a direct cause of the majority of metabolic illness (diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, immune-dysfunction, many cancers). I think this is because we are only now becoming aware that “it isn’t just us.” Our microbiome is part of us, consisting of trillions of microbes, some of which promote health and wellness and provide crucial body functions, others of which do not — they feed off the unhealthy foods at our health expense, promoting dysbiosis (that’s your word of the day).
Nutritionists know this in detail. But they are primarily female and the specialty is always lower-paid than others. Researchers in the microbiome like Dr. Robert Lustig (a pediatric endocrinologist) have had an uphill battle to explain why childhood obesity has become so prevalent: yes, it’s the Standard American Diet and massive increase in sugar consumption over the past 40 years —
“That being said,” as Bruce would mockingly say — (he has a few phrases that he hates, this being one of them) —
How I Found Zoe Nutrition
When I was looking into Type 3 diabetes, I stumbled upon a nutritional study that was completely different from any I’d seen before. It sought to examine multiple responses to diet and the microbiome by evaluating blood glucose and blood lipid levels after eating standardized meals, and by evaluating the microbiome of each participant, looking at the populations of 30 different microbes in each participant’s gut.
This study was the PREDICT study conducted by Zoe’s founding team. Before the PREDICT studies began, the team conducted highly-enlightening studies on individual food responses with twins through Twins UK. What did they learn from the twins, later backed up by the thousands of PREDICT study participants since?
I’ll let Zoe say: “even identical twins have very different gut microbiomes, with unrelated individuals sharing 30% and twins sharing 34% of the same gut microbes at species level.”
As I read the studies and watched videos, I realized I had seen one of the founders, Dr. Tim Spector, before. I had watched several interviews where he described his personal wellness journey and what he had learned about the complex interactions between diet, lifestyle, environment, microbiome, and individual health.
So, I sent for my Zoe Kit. It arrived last week and I’ve begun the Zoe program.
Before I continue, everyone should know that I’ve already worked with physician-founders to develop a tele-health program for obesity. I am currently meeting with another group of founders who are working on a tech-supported concierge medicine app and program for breast and other cancer survivors. One of the doctors I’d worked with before, Dr. Raphael Kellman, has a concierge practice in Manhattan to assist people with Type 2 diabetes. Dr. Kellman is an endocrinologist and an internationally-recognized expert in the microbiome, authoring several books.
I said to Bruce the other day, “You know, I have no medical degree, yet I’ve written all these books about health/wellness/pharma related topics, and I work in this all the time with business development because most people in the field don’t understand tech or science-related ventures or want to spend the time to understand so they can work with them.”
So, I’m not a doctor, I’m not giving medical advice — but I am sharing the experiences of a common person who has been treated horribly by the US healthcare system, just like pretty much everybody else —
But there are heroes out there, and all of these researchers and clinicians that I have mentioned are certainly among them.
Zoe Nutrition’s purpose is to help everyone who uses the Zoe Kit and app to discover which foods are most beneficial for them, and which foods they should choose less-often. I’ve advocated strongly for everyone to give up refined sugar and processed foods and will continue to do so: I doubt there’s going to be anyone in the Zoe program who’ll come up with a result of having Hostess Twinkies as their most ideal, microbiome-supporting meal.
But a fellow writer has said she’s given up sugar before and it didn’t have much effect on her weight, unlike me and Bruce — giving up sugar has put both of us back to our young adult weights. Reading the Zoe twin studies, I could see that even two identical twins could be this way, each benefiting or experiencing harm from different diets in different ways.
How could twins be so different? Because guess what? One of the clearest results of the research studies is that our microbiomes can be totally different from others regardless of whether we are related to them or not. In other words: our inherited genetics aren’t as influential on dietary responses and inflammation as the genetics of the trillions of microbes that live inside of us, that can help us, or harm us.
One of the first things I learned from the Zoe program is: some people do better with sugar than others. Some people also do better with fats than others. The main food categories that can promote inflammation fall into high carbohydrate or high fat — and individual responses vary tremendously.
I’m pretty sure that, in general, eating whole, simple foods is superior to consuming any processed food. But that’s as far as I can say for any other person: only using something like the Zoe kit will help others to determine which foods, eaten in which combinations and in which order, produce their optimal health results.
So, this is Day 3 of Zoe for me. On my test day, I ate 3 gigantic Zoe breakfast muffins and two smaller lunch muffins. Of the group, all of which tasted similarly bland and vanilla-y (maybe like Nilla wafers, yum), the lunch muffins were extremely heavy. They are the high-fat meal, followed by the blood lipid test. I won’t find out how lousy my blood lipids are for a bit, probably a week or so. The three breakfast muffins were the sugar test, and I already know my blood sugar is good: thanks to the glucose monitor on my arm.
So, the biggest difference with the Zoe program from many traditional wellness programs is that you wear a blood glucose monitor for two weeks and log your foods. Those of us who pursue wellness are used to that (and Zoe’s food logging is heavily UK-oriented FYI if you are going to get this program — it’s the weakest part of their app and I’ve let them know they lack quite a few basic foods like uncooked greens).
You don’t visit the lab and take a one-time blood sample. You do have a fasting baseline, and you do get the results on the first day, after eating the breakfast and lunch muffins.
I understand lipogenesis (the process of metabolizing food that turns sugar into fat) differently now. I can see from my blood glucose monitor that I did seem to have a healthy response to the sugary, fatty Zoe muffins.
I can see, though, that if I kept eating sugary, fatty Zoe muffins for every meal, I would soon not have that healthy response.
My blood glucose level was in the 70s last night when we went out to dinner, which we started eating at about 8 PM and completed at about 9:15. It went up to the low 100s after we ate. This is my dinner (at Brine in Sarasota, our server said “We are the best seafood restaurant in Sarasota” — they’re very good, I will say that!):
4 Maine oysters
3 lamb meatballs with a big hunk of spicy butter
3 oz ceviche (shrimp/conch)
1/2 large shrimp and crab salad with vinaigrette dressing (genuine olive oil/light vinegar) — butter lettuce and red onion, baby heirloom tomatoes
10–12 french fries with ketchup (maybe 1/2 cup fries)
Vodka and soda with lime, a heavy Sarasota pour.
I felt fine after going home, but a bit hungry so I ate some turkey, 2 pieces of salami, 1 piece of Swiss cheese, and some (aiiii — this was good!) truffle cheddar! Yes yes, fatt fattt — while I eat this stuff, someone is right next to me, requesting …
So I got dippy the low blood sugar in the middle of the night. I feel fine this a.m.
What I’m personally curious about right now is: do I need to give up these fatty meaty meals and snacks? I don’t care: I want to eat what is best for me and my microbiome. As I’ve said before, I know I’ve done some microbiome good on my own because not only is my inflammation obviously low, I should also be coated by skin cancers by now, and I’m not — I’ve noticed the standardized, no processed food (except for cheese, olive oil, vinegars, and the occasional processed meats like salami) diet has improved my skin and apparently — cured my “eye cancer” (thanks, no Moh’s surgery you cash-hungry brutes!). It was a mole-like slow growing basal cell skin cancer in the corner of my left eye, right by the tear duct. The actinic keratoses on my ankles are much smaller and smoother now, too.
Do I need to give up alcohol? Hmn! That will put me in a different space amongst all our Stump Pass Day Drinkers and Friday/Saturday nite goodtimers … we shall see … I doubt alcohol is good for the good microbes in our gut.
Finding Out What Animals Live In Me
So, the third part of the Zoe kit is the microbiome test (part 2 is the blood lipid test — that is a card that you prick your finger and put blood on, allow to dry for 1 hour, then send to the lab). This is a little paper basket that you tape on your toilet seat, and then use to collect a small (pea-sized) amount of feces. It’s similar to the home colon cancer screening tests that Kaiser used to send me. You know: to schedule me for a colonoscopy (2,038 to $3,432 in Florida).
This test is also sent to the lab — I am expecting results of it and the blood lipid test in about a week. In the meantime, I am expected to log my food. They have a library of 100 food challenges which help to illuminate our individual responses to food, but everyone is asked to take a carb and fat challenge: I’ve chosen oatmeal and bacon. I quit eating oatmeal a while back after eating it daily because I felt it was slowing my weight loss. I am not thrilled about adding it back in, but the point of this is, like choking down those heavy Zoe muffins: learn what really is beneficial for me, stop fearing food, heal my microbiome.
At any given time, there are three times more microbes in our body than there are human cells. We have about 37 trillion human cells, and about 100 trillion microbes live inside of us or on our skin: most of them are in our gut. And, for every small form of life that lives inside of us (including viruses and fungi, as well as bacteria), there are approximately 8 million genes (compared to about 20,000 genes in the human genome).
We already know that our microbiome influences mental health, with some gut microbes associated with depression and anxiety. Other gut microbes have already been associated with heart disease, cancer, diabetes, digestive disorders like Crohn’s and IBD (and IBS, which is what I have had my entire life) and immune disorders.
So, what we have is a medical system that — everything I just put is from the NIH health library, by the way — is still telling patients that the way to become healthier is to eat via the USDA “Food Plate” and follow the “calories in-calories out” method.
But our body processes food right then and there, within minutes of eating it. And we process the food with the aid (or the opposite) of this massive 2.5 pound bunch of invisible microbes. Enterobacteriaceae and Clostridium are gut microbes that love sugar and are associated with inflammation. Eggerthella, Subdoligranulum, Coprococcus and Ruminococcaceae are gut microbes associated with major depression.
No one will say “If you eat a Twinkie, you are feeding Eggerthella, which grows a lot and kills off these other helpful bacteria that help you regulate your endocrine system …”
And then maybe you got mad at your partner because Eggerthella sent out some metabolites that made you feel depressed and angry — so you ate another Twinkie and Eggerthella grew even more!
I think many aspects of our microbiome are like gardening. If you don’t tend the garden, all the beneficial plants die, and weeds take over.
I have high hopes for strengthening my own microbiome, and also high hopes that I can cure my IBS at last — through Zoe Nutrition.
If you are interested in Zoe, here is a link to get $35 off: a benefit I didn’t get — I paid full price.