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.
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