Herbie Neil's Zoe Diary

I don't intend to post here all that often but here's an update with some (I hope) interesting snippets. Doing Zoe has been fun so far and it is changing our eating habits without banning anything we like.  I log the meals we eat and each week I get a summary of how I did on : Limiting ultra processed foods - I scored excellent last week Plant diversity - score excellent, I ate 36 different plants Fibre - I need to improve this from 20g a day to 30g  Protein (important for over 70yr olds), good but I need to up it Lower quality fats - good but I need to limit further. Here's a part of it For each of the above there are hints and tips on how to improve.  Here's a sample screen shot There's a lot more when I scroll down. I do try to heed the advice and it is motivating me towards improvement.  For instance we intend to eat more of various types of beans and legumes which are good for both fibre and protein. e.g. butter beans in a stew or a curry, or a mixed bean salad...

 Now that I have my scores, I've been using the app to explore the scores for all sorts of food and logging what I eat so I can monitor my daily scores and I'm pleased to say that I'm doing OK so far.  Kath and I are making a number of subtle changes in our diet and enjoying the changes.   Here are a couple of examples and how they scored.  I'm not going to bore you with this stuff everyday, but I thought a couple of examples might   On Tuesday I made a tasty veg curry and instead of having it with rice I just made a green lentil dahl.  Of course that scored really well.  Sadly I didn't have any mango chutney with it but that's a small sacrifice. I had a cheesy omelette with some spring onions and sliced red pepper in it for lunch and my normal fruit and yoghurt and sprinkling of all bran for brekkie.  And my overall day score was 71.  That's pretty good Yesterday Claire and Grace came round for dinner and we had 'fishy dish' which ...

 My Zoe scores have arrived and there is a lot to take in and loads and loads of food suggestions. I've shown a lot of examples here for you to look at. First things first. I'll tell you my three main results before explaining about all the goodies that follow. Each category result is a score out of 100 and broken into Bad, Poor, Good and Excellent bands My blood sugar control score - as measured by the monitor after eating the prescribed cookies.  The not so good news is that I scored 35 which is in the middle of the poor range.  However people of my age and sex generally score between 31 and 39 so that makes me about average. My blood fat control measured in the blood sample I took 8 hours after eating the first chocolatey cookie is a similar story.  I scored 42 (poor) but people like me score between 26 and 53 so again that's about average.  I didn't take my usual statin pill on the day of the test, so I might be a bit better than this suggests. I'll put in a...

 Interesting lesson today.  We've all heard of probiotics , but today I learned about prebiotics which are the foods your microbes eat and postbiotics which are the chemicals which the gut microbes produce after eating the food you send them.  This is what it's all about really because you need these postbiotics to produce vitamins, immune responses, enzymes, things that keep body cells going etc.   Getting the right prebiotics in your food is a matter of eating a good variety of foods, especially plants. The Zoe poo analysis looks for the presence of 15 'good microbes' that produce the important postbiotics and 15 'bad' ones that produce harmful postbiotics or just get in the way of the good stuff.  Research shows that people with the 15 good ones in their gut have all round better health e.g less belly fat, lower blood pressure, better sugar handling etc. Hmm I think I might have a few of the bad ones.  We'll see.  The good news is that Zoe will...

 While I wait another couple of weeks for my full test results, daily lessons continue. On the subject of the test results, they sent an article describing the processes they use to analyse the poo sample you have to send in.  You might just think this was a microscope job, but far from it.  Apparently they use very new and very advanced techniques to strip the microbe DNA from the sample and all sorts of stuff I don't understand to look for the presence of the individual DNA of a large number of known gut microbe 'species'.  There are some good ones and some bad ones they look for.  This is something that couldn't be done even a few years ago.  Using the data they get from the sample them to identify foods that are good and not so good for my personal microbiome.  Meanwhile, today's short lesson was all about dietary fibre, outlining it's effects and benefits and suggesting some challenges to help increase your intake.  Tomorrow, I'm going to swa...

 My continuous glucose monitor is now finished after 14 days of readings.  I thought you might like to see it now I've removed it from my arm. Here you see the side that was against my arm The little spike is what penetrated the skin.  It's very fine and I felt no more than a pin prick when I attached it, and felt nothing after that.  It came with a spring loaded applicator that fired it onto my arm in a jiffy where it stuck immediately and stayed put the whole 14 days. The main body stuck to the arm with some sort of sticky stuff.  The whole thing is disposable now, I don't have to return it, so I might try and get it apart later today to better see the circuitry. Actually I feel a bit deprived now it's finished.  It was interesting to get the readings each day, but I learned a lot and the results go to Zoe to add to the analysis and to the report I'll receive later. So now I'm on to a new phase of lessons in the app, focusing on gut health.  I've alr...