I don’t profess to know much about the more in-depth workings of our bodies. Like many older folks, my long-term memory is vastly better than my short-term recollection of events.
To make it even more interesting, I seem to draw on the long-term memory as I make comparisons of then and now.
Then
Right through school as I grew up in a small Zululand village in South Africa, I can only remember one obese student. My parents explained she suffered from a medical condition, and we were to be kind, not ever mentioning her weight.
Now
Fast forward now. Obesity has become so commonplace that stats from the World Obesity Foundation predicts more than 51% of the world (four billion people) will be obese by 2035. It is literally becoming a huge, weighty problem, from both economic and health standpoints.
Every week I notice the foods that crowd shopping carts in the supermarket, so many in packaged items, huge amounts of fizzy drinks. These are all ultra-processed foods. If they are your main source of nourishment, your prognosis of health is not too good.
But why?
Like most folks, I thought the simple secret to obesity was caused by over-consumption of food.
That was before I started to realize that food itself has changed. I wrote about this here.
As my interest in this topic grew, more facts about our digestive systems grew. It seems not only good food is important for health, but knowledge of something called a microbiome helps to support it.
In fact, you don’t even need to have a dog or cat in your life. Your personal microbiome can be looked after and appreciated with the nourishment and caring you provide.
I’m guessing most of us don’t really think too much about the trillions of microorganisms that live in our bodies. Usually, they live together quite peacefully. The only time we think of them is if there is an infection. That’s when we team up with a doctor to kill the offending ones with antibiotics.
How much is a trillion?
Short and sweet--1000 billion (1,000,000,000,000) is 1 trillion. Those tiny microbes seem to practice tolerance as they glom together. They all have a lot of work to do, so that keeps them busy and out of mischief, as long as their host bodies (that’s you) treat them fairly. This huge collection of microbes is referred to as your microbiome.
Scientists seem to agree that our microbiomes are considered by them to be a large organ in the body, weighing from 3-5 lbs, in most cases. Imagine! All those tiny microbes are distributed throughout your body, but mostly in the large and small intestines.
You can see by this that what you eat would have a huge effect on your microbiome. Your DNA determines your beginnings of it when you’re born, but later on it’s your diet and where you happen to be on our planet that continually helps in its health protectiveness or its lurch towards your ill health, depending on the balance of your particular microbiome.
It’s pretty well established by the food scientists now that their Ultra-processed foods (UPF) have achieved their objectives of creating new taste delights and convenience for global appetites. Intertwine those guys with the marketers the lawyers, and the internet. Now you’ve really created a whole new nutritional system for humanity.
If you don’t really care to treat your precious microbiome to UPF, knowing they’re not real foods, there are some defensive measures you can take.
Admittedly it takes a while longer to do your food purchases. But it may be worth it for the sake of your body.
- Read the labels. Learn to make sense of them.
- Walk around the perimeter of a grocery store, and buy your whole, unprocessed foods there. ( this used to work quite well, but now I notice those convenience foods aggressively intruding there.) You may see an entire freezer case of pizzas at rock bottom prices. Spices, dressings, meats already lathered in sauces ready for you to use.
- Feed your gut microbiome with prebiotic foods, like apples, artichokes, bananas, barley, oats, chia and flaxseeds, alliums like garlic and onions, beans and legumes, green and black teas, and even cocoa. Adding chia seeds to oatmeal, cooking with a generous amount of garlic and onion, incorporating chickpeas into a salad, can all help your health.
Then again, some members of the microbiome team really appreciate you providing them with fermented foods like kefir, yogurt with live active cultures, pickled vegetables, tempeh, kombucha tea, kimchi, miso, and sauerkraut.
The essence of all this is that much research is going on to give people the help they need to eat satisfying food. It’s very well documented now that sugar should be eliminated. Sugar-free artificial sweeteners are also apparently just as much a problem, according to several studies in the Canadian Medical Journal Association. They are linked to weight gain, not weight loss.
In those days, so long ago, we ate lots of sugar. It was always cane sugar. There weren’t artificial sweeteners. There weren’t processed foods. There was no internet, so countries weren’t subjected to ultra-processed advertising. Countries all used their own local whole foods to a major extent.
So, it’s confusing. Probably the best bet is to remember the size of your stomach, and not overfill. Eat a variety of whole foods, but not too much.
What you eat is going to either delight your microbiome, or stress it out trying to cope with food that it doesn’t recognize as being real food.
Autumn’s new arrivals
I love to cross over the little bridge in the mornings, and see the different stages of plant life. Animals too, the squirrels, as they gather walnuts and bury them for the winter.
Saw these fascinating fungi amid leaves dropping quietly from the massive trees.
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Alemy
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