Vegetables & Fruits

I watched a very interesting program on Netflix called “Hack Your Health  The Secrets of Your Gut”.  The takeaway from all of it is that in order to keep our gut microbiome (which is essential to our health and wellbeing) as happy, well fed and diverse as possible, we should eat between 20 to 30 different vegetables and fruits each week.  They recommend an ABC (always be counting) approach to achieving this.  

I am sufficiently inspired by this program to start to take this seriously.  It really shouldn’t be that difficult.  If we eat 3 different vegetables and fruits per day, this would add up 21 per week.  The key of course is in prioritizing vegetables and fruits when we choose what to eat.   For me, it is a new habit that I need to adopt instead of mainly just eating carbohydrates, dairy products, proteins, fats and refined sugars.  It is too easy to overlook including enough vegetables and fruits on a daily basis, but I realize now that I need to change this. 

Update:  I have some additional thoughts and a brief warning about these reflections.  There was a part toward the end of this program I watched that was not for the faint of heart.  

I was a bit surprised, disgusted, and also amazed that toward the end of this program, a plastic storage container was removed from a freezer that contained a clearly visible human poop, which was then placed in a blender with water and clearly and visibly blended in order to be used to make poop capsules for a woman in the program needing help with her microbiome.  She had experimented with fecal microbiome transplant via capsules made from

donations from both her boyfriend and her brother.  At the time of filming, she was making boyfriend poop capsules.  It appeared that in their homemade version of encapsulated microbiome transplant, the content of the capsules consisted of the liquidity freshly blended microbial gold. OMG  It was a bit challenging to process this idea at first.  The purpose of course was to help a lady who was experiencing deficiencies in her gut microbiome to receive a greater diversity of beneficial microbes which could then become colonized in her own gut.  😲  Well that’s a bit of TMI but I suppose there shouldn’t be any taboo against the sharing of information that could be genuinely helpful to anyone in need of this information.  Well, I evidently needed to add a few more thoughts and reflections about this program. 🫢

And one final thing.  Wouldn’t it be ironic if the most valuable substance to aid in the treatment and healing of patients in the medicine of the future could be collected from freely available human waste.  There was one scene in the program where a scientist was using a cotton swab to scoop some poop from a small plastic vile.  He looked admiringly at the poop and commented that it was worth more than gold.  Maybe this is where I get my thoughts about golden poop.  As far as DIY poop encapsulation, they did mention that the downside of receiving the benefit is that the recipient can also receive harmful microbes that are part of the gut microbiome of the donor.  Okay I am done with my report. 🫨. This is what I get for deciding to watch something on television.

Additional updates:  It is actually a challenge to eat 21 different fruits and vegetables in week.  1. Because it’s very unlikely that we will completely change our normal habits overnight.  And 2. When we buy fruits and vegetables, we need to finish what we already have, so this means that we will be eating more of the same thing as opposed to having a different fruit or vegetable every time that we eat any over the course of a week.  It is more realistic to aim for a wider variety over the course of like a month.