Herbie Neil's Zoe Diary

 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...

 Well, yesterday's challenge was to put together all they had taught so far about blood sugar and to try to achieve a more level graph by eating according to the rules.  so . .   For lunch  (after a thirty minute brisk walk) I knocked up a small salad of bits out of the fridge - beetroot, lettuce, cucumber, diced red onion, thinly sliced apple and celery and dressed it with a splash of cider vinegar and olive oil. It was yummy.  I ate this first then followed it with half a cheese sandwich made with wholemeal bread.  Cider vinegar has been found to be good for blood sugar control, the olive oil provides good fats to mitigate the carbs, the salad provides the fibre which should precede the carbs, then the carbs in the bread were mitigated with fats from butter and cheese.  All as taught by Zoe. Did it work?  Well yes, my afternoon graph was much flatter than usual.  Maybe there is something in all this science. Earlier in the day though I...

 The Zoe course runs through a variety of nutrition related topics. There are a lot more to come but I'm mostly through the blood sugar experiments now, although I have a few days left to play with the monitor.  Watching my results and reading through the Zoe lessons has taught me some very interesting stuff and made me think about not only what I eat but how and when. Apparently in order to have a gently rolling blood sugar profile an excellent  diet would be to just eat butter and drink alcohol both of which suppress sugar spikes! Sod's law sadly intervenes here in that sadly there seem to be other reasons why that might not be altogether a good idea. So here are the things I didn't know until now Carbs eaten on their own are the worst thing.  Never eat carbs naked apparently. Carbs eaten with fats do slow down the sugar rush and subsequent crash. So eating bread and butter will last you longer than just bread.  Better still with some cheese.  I suppose i...

 Last night we went out for a special meal at the expense of our son Peter, and I suspect it was about as difficult for my blood sugars as I ever get.  The 24 hr graph looks like a mountain range. This was about as far from my daily food routine as I ever get.  We started off with drinks, then a main course of lobster and chips(!) with some prosecco then sticky toffee pudding with ice cream then a coffee liqueur, then home for some whisky, after eight mints, and some crisps. Well you an see the graph.  I'm guessing the zig zags in the night reflected the different foods and drinks reacting at different times. I'm nearing the end of blood sugar week now although I still have the monitor for another 7 days.  I have had a couple of problems with the app which moves you through the challenge tests, as if you miss one of the challenge tests one day then it moves on to the next, whereas I'd rather pick up where I left off.  By and large though, it all works well ...

Well for my 'challenge' breakfast I had 57 grams of cheddar cheese and a glass of water and a couple of hours later  I checked my blood sugar graph and interestingly it only showed a relatively mild rise and fall - nothing like the sharp peak of yesterday's bagel.  Tomorrow I have to eat the cheese with the bagel. Will that make it worse or will the cheese slow down the bagel sugar release?  I have no idea. For lunch I tried a poached egg with one slice of bacon on one slice of white bread toast.  It didn't produce much of a peak but I got really hungry by four o'clock. The this evening, having driven to Cambridge we went to Peter's local pub where I had a mushroom and lentil bolognese with a smallish portion of penne and garlic bread.  Unsurprisingly the blood sugar just escaped the safe/normal range, no doubt helped by two pints of Ghost Ship Ale.  Well you have to test these things out.  That spike fell quite rapidly and at bedtime was down at ...

 Today I'm back in guinea pig mode.  Actually it was supposed to be yesterday but I ate a normalish breakfast before I noticed that I should have had a particular one, so I'm a day adrift.  No matter, I'm back on track now. So for breakfast today I had one plain bagel and a glass of water.  I guess they might choose a bagel because its contents are pretty well known.  After three hours with nothing else to eat I then look at how my blood sugar responded.  Tomorrow I have three (measured) slices of cheddar cheese for breakfast.  The next day I have the cheese and the bagel, and the day after that some physical exercise after the bagel and cheese.  You can see it's all about learning what different foods, food combinations and exercise do to your blood sugar levels. Ooh er! An hour and 45 minutes after eating just the bagel my blood sugar has shot up dramatically and is still rising. I'll post another picture at the next reading.   Later h...

 I only have the blood sugar monitor for 14 days in total so I'm anxious to get the most out of it while I can.  Comparing dinner on Saturday and Sunday gave some food for thought.  I'd bought a pork tenderloin fillet and we had half each day (that's a quarter for me and a quarter for Kath)  with different accompaniments On Saturday I sliced it into medallions and stir fried it with mixed vegetables and egg noodles.  As a sauce I knocked a mix of soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, ginger, garlic and a teaspoon of honey (yum!).  A couple of hours after eating it I got quite a steep blood sugar spike. On Sunday I roasted the other half of the tenderloin and ate it with a few spuds, some spring greens and some leeks sweated with a knob of butter, a few small slices of chorizo and some creme fraiche and mustard stirred in.  (Yum again!)  After eating that the blood sugar graph showed a much gentler rise than the previous day.  Good news because I parti...

 First a couple of pictures. The Zoe kit comes in a big box containing four smaller boxes, each containing a different test and each having an instruction leaflet. Just for the record here are two of the boxes and a leaflet. Sadly I cant show you the kit because the samples have now been sent off to the lab. The leaflets are double sided so you can only see one of the sides here.  The instructions are very clear and are duplicated on the Zoe app.  Providing you are careful, there's little chance of doing anything wrong. Here is one of the test cookie packets These cookies have exact measures of fats and sugars in them so that my blood sugar response and blood fat sample can be calibrated accurately.  The lunch cookies were blue because you have to log when you first notice that your poo is blue so that they can gauge how long it takes to get through your gut.  Mine was blue next morning and the one after. (Too much information? Sorry) You might want to see the b...

This might be fun. Join me dear reader, in my journey of exploration into what food does to my body.  At great personal expense and effort I'm using the Zoe programme to undertake a series of tests and experiments and learning courses to understand how food affects me. Not you or anybody else, but me. Only me because it seems that because of the make up of the microbiome in our guts we're all different in how we digest our food and this affects what we should be eating and how and when.  Nevertheless, you might find it interesting if you care about the food you eat. Or you might have heard of the Zoe programme and be interested in how it works and whether it might be something you are considering for yourself. Zoe calls itself  The personalized nutrition program from the world's largest nutrition-science study Why am I doing this?  Well readers of my Herbie boating blog will know that I'm partial to a bit of data and generally interested in science.  I'm also fa...