Wake Up And Smell The Prevotella! (A Healthy Gut Bacteria)
Stop telling yourself “I eat healthy” and a pill is all you need —
If most people understood just how badly traditional U.S. medicine and our food system had failed them, they would be very angry.
But most people don’t get how bad it really is.
I do a 5k nature walk twice a week in our local parks here in SW Florida. We can have up to 7 and 8 people at a time, but lately, it’s just been me and Gambit, our Jack Russell Terrier.
I’m 60 years old — I’ll be 61 in a month, and Gambit will be 16.
Gambit is so excited to go that he not only cries when we stop at the park, he talks — it sounds like he’s saying “Hooray! Hooray!”
Our local group is called Transformation Wellness and the idea is: transform yourself and your life into more of what you want you want it to be.
When I talk with people about their health and wellbeing, I find that so many people in our age range (not Pettigrew, of course) have chronic health problems. Just about everyone is taking blood pressure or cholesterol medication. People in their 50s and 60s have suffered stroke, heart attack, bypasses and stents. Many have diabetes, others have liver disease, kidney disease, and cancer.
When I met Bruce, he was taking six different psychiatric medications. After we married, he became very ill: he had a kidney stone that was infected with E.coli that got into his bloodstream. Before the problem was finally identified and the infected stone removed, he nearly died.
When we moved to Florida, Bruce weighed 235 pounds. He is 5'11. I weighed 165 pounds and was on the road to the same type of health problems I describe above, despite being as active as possible and believing myself to be “eating healthy.”
Now, Bruce weighs 173 pounds and I weigh 136 pounds. Both of us have a healthy BMI and our physicals show we have optimal or excellent levels of blood sugar, blood lipids, and other indicators. My resting heart rate is 48–50 (down from 70 in 2018), I have a VO2 Max of 36, and I have a fitness age of 35. I am 60 years old, about to be 61. Bruce takes no medications, and neither do I. We are both happier and healthier than we have ever been in our entire adult lives.
Every person I talk to here in SW Florida about health and wellness — when I tell them what Bruce and I do for our health — says in response, it’s like a broken record:
“I eat healthy.”
They are sitting there 50–60 pounds overweight, with obvious skin problems and mobility issues, shuttling back and forth to doctors constantly and taking dozens of pills, and they say to my face, “I eat healthy.”
If you eat anything that comes out of a box, bag, or package, if it is pre-made, if it is reheated in any way, and if you eat out at any restaurant more than once a month: no, you don’t “eat healthy.”
And if you are taking many pills per day and getting worse, not better, you do not understand the effects that your belief that you can “eat healthy” out of the center aisles of a grocery store or at any fast food place or 99% of restaurants has had on your body and mind.
Blow that picture I put of me and Gambit up and look at my skin. There’s no Facetune filter, no Photoshop. I hadn’t taken a shower, and I have on zero makeup. All I did was wash my face, comb my hair, brush my teeth, and get dressed for our morning walk. As I previously noted, “I am 60.” That’s also my own hair — I don’t color my hair. I was also concerned I was “going bald” — getting thinner hair. It is thickening since I purposely began to eat more than 30 plant-based foods per week. Yes, you could go to “Hair Club for Men” or … eat better (truly better).
I’ve been working to heal my microbiome through healthy diet and exercise for well over a year: really, since 2018. But back in 2018 when Outside Magazine evaluated the microbiomes of its staff and 7 elite outdoor athletes, I didn’t even know what the microbiome was.
Where Was I In 2018, Health-Wise?
I don’t want to admit it, but I’m sure I weighed more than 170 pounds in 2018 when Bruce and I took a trip to Monterey during the holiday season and I mentioned I wanted to get healthier and asked for a Fitbit for Christmas. I started wearing it in December 2018 and after 18 months, I’d improved my health and resting heart rate. When I started with “Fitty,” I didn’t understand many of the health metrics, so I started with one I did understand: sleep.
I deliberately started to have regular bedtimes and waking times, and aimed for 7–8 hours of quality sleep a night.
After a few weeks of improved sleep and moderate daily step goals, like 6,000 steps (not hard while teaching — walking on campuses) I upped my steps to 10,000 a day. I did 10,000 steps a day throughout 2019 and 2020. After we moved to Florida in March 2020, I upped this to 11,000 steps and that is where I am now.
Also, after a couple of years using Fitbit, I learned everything I could from it, and decided to move up in sophistication level to Garmin: I now use a Garmin Venu Sq and am considering upgrading this device.
Here’s a “secret” I learned from using Fitty (and Garmin). My resting heart rate would go up if I was “about to get sick.” I confirmed this by reading Garmin and Fitbit message boards where other active people would put information. Bruce poo-poohed this for quite a while when I told him.
I have a chronic, lifelong illness: IBS. My resting heart rate would rise when I was having an IBS attack, and when I was fighting a cold or flu. This also includes COVID, which we got Jan 1 2022 playing at the Punta Gorda Farmer’s Market (both vaccinated and boosted). I just jumped my RHR 7 points by eating a massive piece of carrot cake (plenty of sweeeeeeeeeeeeet frosting). It took over 24 hours for my body to deal with a piece of food that my dad used to call a “gut bomb.” Gut bombs are real — they “bomb,” disturb, or devastate the microbial community that lives in our gut. Our body responds by “fighting back” — i.e. inflammation.
I now believe that my RHR goes up because my body is working hard to deal with the inflammation that results from eating difficult-to-metabolize foods. Zoe Nutrition, the leader in microbiome-influenced diet and nutrition, explains the process.
Now that I actually “eat healthy” and am healthy, I see so clearly how harmful the poor-quality diet provided by processed foodmakers and the general U.S. food system is. And how ironic it is that the dietary advice given to us by our grandparents: “eat plenty of fruits and vegetables” — was exactly the right advice, yet forgotten in favor of one of the biggest lies in history: calorie counting. Fruits and vegetables don’t just feed us, they feed a healthy and diverse microbiome. And a healthy and diverse microbiome is a cornerstone of physical and mental health.
Did I say mental health? Yes, I did. Depression runs in my family, both sides. But I am not even vaguely depressed. Because I am slowly, inexorably, healing my microbiome. I am still waiting for my Zoe nutrition kit, which will provide me with details as to how I metabolize food as I consume it, and which foods I can add, and which I should leave behind.
If you have any chronic illness, you can help yourself by improving your diet in the way that experts in the microbiome recommend. It’s not rocket science. Eat 30 or more different plant based foods each week. Avoid processed and prepared foods (in my case — completely). Eat lean proteins: focus on fish and poultry. Some of the top elite athletes (see the Outside article above) are completely plant-based (i.e. vegan). The world’s strongest man is vegan. I am slowly reducing my animal protein and increasing protein from plants. I do feel better, and I do have more energy. I work many hours a day and I am very physically active (1+ hour a day vigorous exercise). I need the energy.
The Simple Explanation Of All This For Regular People
Our Western medicine has provided a lot of PR and marketing to the effect of how sophisticated it is, able to solve any health challenge. The reality is, U.S. life expectancy has gone down for the past 6 years. Not only do we have the opioid epidemic and ongoing deaths from fentanyl, a drug that’s supposed to be used in hospitals for post-operative pain and anesthesia, 75% of adults really are overweight or obese — over half of adults have high blood pressure. There’s a pill for that, right? Lots of pills.
About 10% of U.S. adults have a mood disorder, from depression to bipolar disorder. There’s pills for that, too — except they lose effectiveness over time. This phenomenon is why Bruce was taking 6 different psych medications, yet experiencing less relief every day until it became no relief at all.
What I am suggesting that people do, can be done for very low cost. Sure, it might cost more to buy a lot of varied fruits and vegetables, beans and grains. It could cost you some money to take cooking lessons in case you don’t know how to prepare those foods since most of the food in the center of the grocery store comes in a box or bag, and is already prepared.
I know that 99 out of 100 people reading this will be saying, “I eat healthy.” And, as I said, if you eat any prepared foods, in any quantity at all, you are not eating healthy. We need to eat not just to feed our selves, but also the microbes that live inside of us and that help us to stay in equilibrium — physically and mentally.
The U.S. has the least diverse microbiome of any nation studied so far. This is because our prepared, processed foods feed only a few sugar and carb-philic bacteria that play important roles in the development and worsening of chronic disease — physical and mental. Our foods feed these “bad” gut bacteria that promote inflammation. I linked the Zoe study above that shows exactly how the process works.
The microbiome also influences our epigenetics: this is at the root of premature aging and probably contributes to cognitive disorders. I found Zoe Nutrition while searching for information on “Type 3 Diabetes” — aka Alzheimers disease. Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disorder that is very closely related to the microbiome. By healing the microbiome, thousands of people have recovered from Type 2 diabetes. And, with Alzheimers, the situation is probably such that by the time a person has symptoms, they may have already suffered so much inflammatory damage that an improved diet and microbiome may not be able to make much difference.
Here is another benefit that my working to heal and strengthen my microbiome has had: skin cancer. With my fair skin and multiple sunburns throughout my life, I should be covered not only in wrinkles, but in skin cancer. But I’ve only had one, and it was right in the corner of my left eye. I got rid of it using a natural treatment (eggplant & organic apple cider vinegar). It has not only not recurred, the spot has completely shrunk and is now invisible (as are several other scarred areas) …
Since I have been eating to heal my microbiome.
The Prostate Cancer Foundation has a chart of “microbiome-friendly foods” that you can get for a donation to their organization.
The chart of “microbiome unfriendly foods” looks like this:
When I ate that piece of carrot cake, I saw evidence on my fitness tracker and in the way I felt for the following day (tired, logy), that my body was combating what that cake had done inside of me — upsetting the bugs in my gut, creating a host of other chemical reactions, putting excess glucose and fats in my bloodstream. It took about 24 hours to stabilize.
And when you do this to yourself every day, day in and day out, you will be feeding gut bacteria that love the sugars, starches, salts and fats in prepared foods and starving the ones that like fiber from vegetables and whole grains and micronutrients in fruits.
When I was a little kid and got a McDonalds treat, it tasted so much better than the plain food I got at home. And we’ve all eaten something very sweet, and realized that even very sweet orange juice can taste bitter afterward.
These are short-term signals that show how these foods interact inside our body. When we put food in our mouth, we aren’t just feeding ourselves, we are feeding these trillions of bacteria that live inside of us. They are part of us and they play a role in our health that is only now beginning to be understood. The overwhelming majority of U.S. physicians either know nothing about this (only one hour of nutrition is provided in most medical schools) or they know very little.
The microbiome influences how people respond to the pills that U.S. physicians love to prescribe, from cancer medications to antibiotics.
Just don’t tell me you “eat healthy” unless you really do. I’m tired of hearing it. It’s a form of denial that helps neither me nor you.
*Prevotella is a gut bacteria found high quantities in the gut of vegetarians, and is being studied for potential benefits.