Monday, July 11, 2016

What Osama Bin Laden Taught Me About My Microbiome

  O  nce, a long long time ago, I had a Great Job.

I'd get up mornings and shuffle from bed into the living room and over to my computer.

I'd drink my coffee (or a beer—I wasn't choosy at the time) and play with my mouse all day, putting pretty pictures on the screen, writing giggly things and then digitally crumpling them up.

Then, occasionally, I would summon The File, and carefully erase the figures entered in it with new figures, save it as a PDF and then send it off in an email.

There. I might have just sent off an invoice for $12,764.54.

No, really. Happened all the time.

Maybe not $12,764.54, every time—maybe just $453.21, or $76.87, or $5572.83—you get the picture.

I usually just made up the figures out of thin air. How much aggravation should I bill them for this time? And then I'd type out what looked to be a very carefully calculated number—except that it wasn't. I'd just make it up, right there, right then. The only calculation I did was how many jackets, or stereos, or TVs, or cameras, or restaurant dinners I'd buy with my winnings.

I was, from 1996 to 2001, the sole graphic designer for the entire company of Air Canada Cargo. Not Passenger, you understand—Cargo. But Cargo was pretty big. It occupied an entire floor at The Base, at Dorval Intl/YUL, or in the unmarked Air Canada building in Vendôme, where it moved later on.

I did all their ads, all their newsletters, all their posters. All their brochures, all their business cards, all their logos, all their calendars. And finally, I singlehandedly designed Air Canada Cargo's first-ever website.

All out of my home, in my slippered feet, with a beer or a coffee at hand, day or night, day in, day out, for five glorious years. And I raked it in. They had dumped the ad agency they had been dealing with before me in disgust, and I had somehow stumbled onto the job because a friend was the son of one of the top managers there.

It was a great partnership—I dealt with a tiny group of Air Canada Cargo people and they told me roughly what they wanted and I made it happen.

I was having the time of my life, making more money than I'd ever seen before, looking forward to a rosy, $$$-filled future.

And then Osama Bin Laden brought it all crashing down.

Air Canada's recent run of profitability—one could say profligate profitability, since they seemed not to care too much whether I charged $8,762 for a calendar or $12,987—ceased right then and there on September 11, 2001.

The towers fell on Tuesday, and I was out of a job by Friday. "You understand," my boss said regretfully, "there's no way we can continue to spend like this now. We're going to bring all this in-house."

So what was the problem? Get another job!

Not so fast! During the time I had spent with Air Canada I has scrupulously avoided moonlighting—I hadn't wanted anything to get in the way of The Job. I didn't even want rumors of my having other interests to reach their ears—I created montrealfood.com in complete secrecy while I was working for them.

So my job diversity had been limited to one, and now that was gone.

And what, you might ask, does that have to do with my microbiome? Diversity, diversity, diversity.

This article points out, rightfully, the perils of removing whole categories of foods from your repertoire.

Remove gluten, for example, and the bacteria that prefer gluten—bifidobacter, for example—might diminish and let other bacteria, say, prevotella, move in.

Since the jury is still lunching at McDonald's about all of this, we have no idea what a gluten-deficient diet will actually do to your microbiome, especially if your normal state has always been glutenous.

It's been reconized that a healthy microbiome is a diverse microbiome, and that makes sense. In lean times, when a particular food, say, sugar, was off the menu for the hunter-gatherer dudes that the Paleo Diet so wants to emulate, the diversity of their repertoire swallowed the gap quickly and with little overall effect. When the honey suddenly became available again, the population adjusted quickly, as a smaller segment had to be moved around; the prevotellas didn't particularly mind being reduced from 1.75 trillion to 1.24 trillion.

And one notable characteristic of the Western diet compared to more primitive diets like the Hadza tribe, is a severely curtailed repertoire of bacterial diversity.

So if your microbiome's diversity is small to begin with, as is the case with most of our western diets, then the removal of a whole food group—gluten, say, or fats—will have far more signifcant consequences on the population as a whole.

Looking back now, I was a fool to put all my cards into the Air Canada pot. I had nothing to fall back on, and no alternatives waiting in the wings. It would take years for me to regain my earnings levels—years that continue to this day.

The lesson I learned, in work as well as diet, is keep a lot of options open. The more cards you have on the table at a time, the less you're going to miss it when a few—or all—are removed from the equation.

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