Notes from Maine - 2023/07/02

It’s a no-breakfast morning for Albert (young German Shepherd). There’s nothing wrong with him. He just doesn’t eat breakfast sometimes. Other times he will eat half a breakfast, or a full breakfast but only half of his dinner. Albert is just not a food-oriented person. He eats when he’s hungry, I guess, and stops when he’s done eating. His weight is perfect. Albert is a little bundle of springy muscle, ready to chase after any frisbee thrown within fifty miles of his current position.

Then, there’s Finn. 

When I was growing up, it was practically illegal to call a police officer a “cop.” The worst possible thing you could do (punishable by firing squad, if I recall correctly) was to push your nose up, call a police officer a “pig,” and then snort. 

That’s precisely what Finn sounds like when he’s eating dinner. Finn weighs about a hundred and sixty pounds (72 kg) and every time he eats it looks and sounds like it might be the first glorious meal of his life. Snorting, pushing, licking, and slurping, he devours his food in an instant. Meanwhile, Albert’s food is across the room in a lonely bowl, untouched. I’ll have to pick it up before I leave the kitchen or Finn will sneak over and vacuum it up when nobody is looking.

Finn’s weight is fine too, but that’s because I carefully measure out an exact ration. 

I would be surprised if we don’t start paying more attention to food in the coming years. That probably sounds silly. People pay plenty of attention to food. There’s always talk about different approaches to nutrition and how much we need of what. I have a blood test coming up this week. I’m certain that they’ll tell me I’m deficient in this or that. That knowledge will impact my habits for a month, if I’m lucky, and then I’ll wander back towards ignorance until next year’s blood test. 

But I believe that we have the tools to make a real change. For years, I recorded everything I ate in an app. It was fun. Somewhere on one of my computers (or probably in the cloud), I have a big database of every calorie I ingested for several years. I was militant about measuring and recording. I didn’t eat a tic tac without logging it. 

I should have been recording my mood as well. My understanding is limited, but I’ve read that there’s a connection (vagus nerve maybe?) between the gut and brain. Some theorize that the health of our gut microbiome impacts our overall mood and mental health. If you feed the right gut bacteria, you feel good. Feed the wrong ones and you might be lethargic or depressed. This relationship seems like a natural application for machine learning. If we pump in the right data, we might be able to optimize our happiness. Eat an orange now, and you’ll feel contented within an hour. Maybe we’ll find out that cravings are a subconscious signal that we’re lacking a specific nutrient that would balance things out. 

I guess this all assumes we’re going into the experiment with a decently healthy gut biome. When I had my appendicitis, they pumped me full of IV antibiotics that ruined me for almost a year. My body couldn’t process anything properly. Suddenly, I was lactose intolerant, bread made me bloat, and complex carbohydrates knocked me out as soon as they hit my stomach. Finally, it was a gastroenterologist who started me on the food diary so we could figure things out. That took a long time. 

From what I understand, I had to build back a healthy, diverse biome so that I could return to eating normal foods. That was more than ten years ago now, and I’m doing great. 

The stupid thing about that whole experience was that it took me three or four doctors before anyone (the gastroenterologist) came up with the solution. My GP started by looking for disease and parasites. When that was all negative they sent me to a proctologist, who figured the problem must be at the end of the line. When that all checked out, I went in for diagnostic imaging. I don’t remember how I ended up in a gastrointerologist’s office, but their explanation was the only one that fit all the symptoms. My ability to digest was broken because all the “good” bacteria had been flushed out. Since then, I’ve read that, “While limited data are available on the microbial composition of the appendix, it has been postulated that this organ could serve as a microbial reservoir for repopulating the gastrointestinal tract in times of necessity.”

That quote is from a paper titled, “Microbial Composition of Human Appendices from Patients following Appendectomy,” from 2013. There are tons of charts and graphs in the paper, but it reaches the conclusion that, “It is plausible that these bacteria are present in biofilms on the epithelial layer of the appendix and may serve as a reservoir for replenishing populations that have been eradicated from the gut.”

If that’s the case, then it’s no wonder that it took me so long to bounce back from the appendectomy. The only surprise is that nobody sat me down after and explained what I should expect. 

“Hey, in order to keep you alive we had to completely break your ability to digest. You’re going to have to help your intestines figure that out again.”

That would have been a really useful piece of information.

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about as I listened to Finn inhale his breakfast.