PAIN. AGAIN.

 9:48 pm

Well, after hanging up here last night, I paced for about 30 minutes before I was fairly knocked to pieces by the aspirin-Advil combination finally ending in the blessed cool waters of oblivion.

Th't that kind of pain can actually exist—can make one cry out loud with as much fear as anything else—was a first, for me. And ʙᴇᴄᴀᴜꜱᴇ ɪᴛ'ꜱ ꜱᴏ ꜰᴜᴄᴋɪɴɢ ʀᴀɴᴅᴏᴍ . . . to the degree that it can **ᴘᴏᴘ ɪɴᴛᴏ ᴇxɪꜱᴛᴇɴᴄᴇ*—even smack in the middle of deep sleep . . . well, it makes for some industrial-grade paranoia.

At any acceptable rate, it chose to not erupt after my tea tonight. And I found that no matter how much Orajel I squeeze at it's location, all I end up with is a numb mouth and killer pain that is unrelenting, under the numbness.

Insidious. 

Anyway—I'd had enough earlier on today, so I called the good doctor, who—to his credit—sounded genuinely concerned, and set up an appointment for tomorrow at six p.m.

Now, if he were to do a root canal, what would happen? Would the dead part of the root still hold together?

OH FUCK. IT HAPPENED AGAIN! In a virtual repeat—I went to the kitchen to get my fuzzy water, after having finished my tea with no incident . . . and then it struck.

SHITE SHITE SHITE . . . I can't take this any more. Let me try and finish this later

Covi-D-elicious No-bake Chocolate Pie

This is a delicious no- or little-bake pie/cake that you can freeze or keep in the refrigerator—it's delicious frozen AND delicious just cold!

But there are a couple of discussion points before we get to the recipe:

1. There are literally thousands of ways this cake can be made but just a couple of ingredients are always the same, these being CREAM CHEESE, WHIPPED CREAM (made by you—do NOT use store-bought or CoolWhip) and lastly, COOKIES of some sort, bearing in mind that whatever cookies you choose will form THE CRUST.

2. Some recipes call for sour cream for the filling in addition to the cream cheese and whipped cream. We have tried it with or without, and the sour cream adds a slight twist to the taste that is most agreeable (in moderation) but overall the cake is perfectly good without. Also, some recipes call for instant coffee or vanilla flavouring; we like BOTH! Literally, the more the merrier with this pie!

3. Choosing the ingredients for the crust is super-important, but if you really can't be bothered, or are in a big hurry, there are store-bought ready-made pie crusts (usually called Graham Cracker crusts) that can be found in the baking section of the supermarket. But we think making your own crust is better, plus it's super-easy! A rhomboid parallelogram could make it with three arms tied behind its back!

4. You should make the crust on one day and then make the filling the next. That way you can freeze the crust overnight and have it all hard and cold so it does not pull up at all or crumble when you add the filling.

5. We use a food processor to crush the cookies, but you could just put them in a plastic bag and pound then with a rolling pin—we've done it both ways and both are equally delicious!

6. You can either whip the cream with the whisk attachment of a a hand-blender (this is a typical example) or you can use the old-style egg-beater-type blender. The object is to get stiff peaks, so it's not important how you do it (we've even used a hand whisk, but it took all day!)

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THE CRUST

The object of this crust is to make a tasty, crunchy base to put your filling inside.

One we like that's easy to find anywhere is Oreo Dark Chocolate cookies, but beware: we found they have a certain "processed" aftertaste that is common with large commercial operations like Nabisco.

The Oreos have a crumbly texture and in addition, since you include the "fudge" filling when you crush the cookies, they form a more stable base for the filling, but the tradeoff is that commercial aftertaste—who knows what it is but the large companies have armies of chemists whose only task is to make their product more "umami" for the customers; translate this as "addictive."

Another cookies we tried were the Leclerc "Celebration"-brand dark-chocolate-topped cookies which we include only so that you can see what kind of cookies are good—in this case they have a dark chocolate topping. But we found that the cookie itself had a rather fine texture that, when it's crushed, makes for a harder, tighter crust.

The key to making a good crust is first to use enough cookies (d'oh) but also, don't skimp on the second ingredient: BUTTER.

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Ingredients

One box of cookies, filling and all (24 cookies, if they're Oreos) or generally, just use one box of whatever cookies you've selected. Don't worry, your choice of cookies is good—you can't make a bad crust; only a different crust!

For a thicker crust, just use more cookies—up to two full boxes of cookies is good, but we'd probablymake it around one and a half packages.

1 stick salted butter



Method

Using a food processor, pulse-chop the cookies (in batches if need be) until they make an even sand-like texture. If you don't have a food processor you can put the cookies in a thick plastic bag and beat them with a rolling pin or empty wine bottle.

Melt the butter in the microwave—very soft is fine—and in a large bowl stir it into the crumb mixture until everything is WELL COMBINED.

Now take a Pyrex baking dish—a long rectangular glass one is preferred—and add the crushed cookie mix. Now using some kind of utensil—a large flat spatula is ideal—spread the cookie mixture out on the bottom of the baking dish, to an overall thickness of about 1/4 inch, or around 5mm, or half the width of your middle fingernail.

Try to get the crumb mixture as evenly spread out as possible. You can run it up the sides of the baking dish of just leave it flat on the bottom of the dish as you prefer.

Preheat the oven to 350° and bake the crust for about 8 minutes. Remove, let cool, then cover the baking dish with plastic wrap and put in the freezer overnight.

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THE FILLING

This is the fun part! Here's where you can go wild. Just use the measurements here as a guideline; with experience you can adjust it higher or lower as you make a new pie.

You'll need at least two large glass or metal bowls, and either a hand mixer (discussed previously) or a whisk attachment designed to whip cream.

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Ingredients

As with everything in this recipe, measurements are a guideline—you can never go wrong making a little more chocolate in this recipe!

1 to1½ cups of very good dark or semisweet chocolate—Belgian or Ghirardelli-type kinds spring to mind but just use the best quality chocolate you can find; 70% is a good percentage but higher or lower is acceptable if you can't find 70%—roughly chopped

2 small containers Kraft Whipped Cream Cheese (or equivalent)—about 2 cups

1½ cups of heavy (whipping) cream, divided

⅓ cup sour cream (if using)

1 cup powdered sugar, divided

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1 tsp. instant coffee

Method

Combine chopped chocolate and ½ cup of the heavy cream in a large microwave-safe bowl. Transfer to the microwave and heat in 20-25 second increments, stirring well in between, until chocolate is completely melted and mixture is smooth.*

Once chocolate is melted, stir in instant coffee, if using. Set aside and allow chocolate mixture to cool for at least 25 minutes or until no longer warm to the touch.

Meanwhile, prepare your whipped cream. Combine remaining 1 cup heavy cream and ¼ cup powdered sugar in a clean, medium-sized bowl and use an electric mixer to beat to stiff peaks (until mixture is thick and fluffy and resembles Cool Whip). Set aside.

Place your cream cheese in a large bowl and pour cooled ganache (chocolate mixture) over top. Use electric mixer to stir together until well combined and smooth and creamy.

Add remaining ¾ cup powdered sugar, sour cream (if using) and vanilla extract and stir until completely combined.

Add whipped cream that you prepared (above) to the bowl and use a spatula to fold in by hand until all ingredients are well incorporated. DON'T BEAT! Fold firmly.

Spread filling into chilled cookie crust, using a spatula to smooth the top. (We put the filling in in large dollops evenly distributed across the baking dish and then smooth it out with the spatula).

Top with candy sprinkles (in the baking section of your grocery store).

Transfer pie to refrigerator and allow to chill for 6 hours or overnight. Note: the pie is easier to cut when frozen. Use a sharp or serrated knife and cut into small serving-size rectangles. Keep frozen until you want to eat some; move pieces to the refrigerator for thawing overnight.

Serve with additional swirls of whipped cream!

*Always heat the chocolate in small bursts and stir well in between. If you heat it for too long or skip the stirring you might end up seizing your chocolate, rendering it unusable.

How Small Are Viruses?

've already talked about bacteria, and now we know that they're very, very small. They're so small that there are no microscopes that you and I could conceivably buy that would enable us to see a bacterium.

A staphylococcus bacterium—they live all over us and rarely cause trouble until they become food poisoning or the dreaded necrotizing fasciitis, or flesh-eating disease—and oddly enough, probably the source of a small infection that's taking place on my foot as I type (and causing intense pain)—is a fairly typical bacterium, so let's take it as our example.

How small is a single staphylococcus? Well, if you assembled, say, 100,000 of them—if they were human beings, that would be roughly the number that would fit into the Melbourne Cricket Ground, being the tenth-biggest stadium on Earth—well, they would all easily fit in the punctuation mark known as a period "." with no trouble at all.

Okay, are you getting a picture of roughly that size?

Check out the flu virus (blue)

Well, the staphylococcus happens to be shaped like a sphere—coccus in ancient Greek means "grape"—but if it were an E. coli, the one most of us have heard of that causes food poisoning (although E. coli live inside our guts in huge numbers usually causing no problems at all) they're more shaped like torpedoes, but they're still small enough that 100,000 of them would comfortably fit inside a "." .

So let's blow up one of those E.coli until they're the size of a Boeing 747. You know how big a 747 is, right? It's the biggest passenger jet ever built—it seats 500 people, when you have a full flight.

So now a bacterium is the size of a 747 passenger plane. And if that bacterium was a passenger plane, how big would a human being have to be?

What the fuck is wrong with you?? Are you nuts? Pretty fucking big—let's just go with that.

Now: imagine you're going on a trip, but you're going to bring your cat. So you put your cat in a little carry box and you put it in the 747. The cat is a virus . . . about the same size as, say, a single virus of the influenza species.

Now check out the Staphylococcus bacterium (purple). The flu virus is that little blue thing next to the green rabies virus.

So now imagine getting infected with coronavirus.

Now when they talk about "micro droplets" or "micro-particles," you're still talking about Olympic stadiums-worth of size compared to the actual virus. Millions and millions of actual viruses can be contained in a single micro-particle . . .

Our only consolation—or perhaps it's just our most horrific realization—is that viruses aren't alive, in the sense that we understand life. They're more related to minerals than they are to animals . . . try to imagine that: that you're being infected by a bunch of very, very tiny rocks, because that's really what they are.

So how different are viruses from bacteria?

1. Viruses can't move. They don't have arms, or hairs, or wheels, or anything else. They're inert. They go wherever the current of fluid or whatever medium they are in dictates.
2. Bacteria can move. Just like their (gigantic) brethren, insects, bacteria come in an array of different appendages; cilia (hairs) flagella (the name means "whips," but it just means arms—or feelers. (Eww.) But some bacteria don't have any appendages and don't move.

We tend to forget that at the scale that bacteria and viruses exist, mediums like water appear more like a gel, or syrup, if not quicksand. And creatures as small as bacteria and viruses exist in air that for them is more like water is for us. In short, existence at that scale is an unimaginably different experience than it is for us at our scale.

Life Under Lockdown: Day 3, Montreal, Mar. 26

9:19 a.m.

Can it only be three days since they put this place into a lockdown? I listen: normally, the streets below on a Thursday morning at this hour would be exploding—a continuous roar of traffic. Now? Nothing.

Yesterday when I went out to get some groceries the streets were pretty quiet . . . not dead, but, well, Sunday quiet. On a Wednesday.

And the grocery store has become a nightmare.

I suppose for the workers it's even worse, but the way they've set things up are a puzzle: they've reduced the Human checkout lines—that's where you get served by an actual human being—to one, so that means everyone has to go through it. That means both the people, like me, with two or three items, and the people with their week's worth of groceries, plus another cartload of un-necessities, like toilet paper, because pandemics have a side effect of making people stupid.

But of course they have on hand this bank of automatic checkout machines, which they've had in place for about six months, and which I refuse to use; putting them in meant that several people lost their jobs, and in the machines' case they're extremely difficult and unintuitive to use, so they need someone on hand (who could be working a checkout line) to explain to all the dolts how to use the machines.

So that was the situation yesterday. They had some guy standing out front asking stupid questions in his almost-unintelligible Quebecois French: had I been out of the country in the past two weeks? Did I know anyone who had the coronavirus? Did *I* have the coronavirus?

I guess the surgical mask and the gloves I was wearing wasn't enough to persuade him that I was not about to start infecting the shopping carts or sneezing on the produce.

But now there's this new paranoia (completely unfounded, in my opinion): that objects can harbour the virus and make you sick. Quarantine that Amazon package for 24 hours because the virus lives for 24 hours on cardboard!

What they mean but seem unable to say is that the virus is detectible on the surface after 24 hours—that means that they can find fragments of its RNA and capsids—not necessarily that whole viruses lie there, pulsing like leeches, just waiting to leap from the box onto your unsuspecting face, then covering your nose and mouth like the Face-hugger from Alien . . .

In fact, you need a whole bunch of viable viruses—a whole lot more than have been living on cardboard for 24 hours—to cause an infection.

So they're wiping down shelves—shelves emptied of things like Ritz crackers (you need six boxes of Ritz crackers, people? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?) or toilet paper. Wiping down the empty shelves, as if that's going to stop anyone getting infected with Globus-16, or Crowsfeet-26, or whatever else nasty virus is lurking there, waiting to leap onto your face like a—oh, sorry.

I know the likelihood that I will catch this thing are literally a million to one: I haven't had a cold or the flu since my son was a baby, and that was 18 years ago. I've always been ultra-careful when going out of my house. It's why I have a fur-covered key case; all the better to push elevator buttons or cover door handles so I don't accidentally touch them.

I've always carried hand sanitizer and I've always used it. I really don't think that I will get this thing in a month of Sundays, but just in case I've upped my game, if that's even possible. Now, I wear the surgical mask everywhere when I go out, even though "they" say that they won't prevent me getting infected. I say, no, they won't if a coronavirus patient is standing in front of me, coughing into my face.

But otherwise, it's just one more barrier. My N95 mask is in the mail. I use my gloves wherever I go. It will only become a problem when the weather gets too warm to wear gloves, but never fear; I have rubber gloves.

They've closed my favourite coffee shops, so I can't even go get a cup of coffee (and play chess with my friend, but it looks like those days are over for a long, long time).

And with all the contradictory news flying around, I really don't know just how dangerous this virus really is. This guy's report (normally I never link anything to Twitter—I despise it, but of some reason this respected doctor seems to think it's the way to get his message across) has put the fear of Bob into me—someone who has actually HAD Ebola says he's more scared of Covid-19 than he is of Ebola?

12:20 pm

Just got back from shopping. To be clear, I'm currently wearing one of those surgical masks—you know, the blue one that attaches around your ears—which is definitely not an N95 mask. And I'm wearing my usual winter gloves. So imagine my surprise when I get to Metro—it's a large grocery chain here in Montreal, and the one near me used to be open 24 hours (I believe they've been limiting their hours from 8 to 8 every day, to "give the staff a rest and to restock," although the empty shelves of toilet paper seem to be permanently "unstocked," so I'm not sure what they mean)—and am confronted at the entrance by one tall guy carrying a spray bottle. There's a security guard stand just behind him at the side of the entrance.

I saw this guy yesterday. I held up my gloves, as if to say "I'm not touching anything," but he didn't seem to understand—he just started waving the spray bottle. As there was a line forming behind me, I ventured "I just wanted to go in and check the apples—then I'd be coming right out again," but they both said in chorus "Non, non."

Instead of arguing with them I just left. There is no sign explaining what they're doing, although when I got home and called to find out they told me that "They would spray your gloves, m'sieu!" and to that, I had absolutely zero comment.

It seems that with great calamity there must also be great stupidity, and this phenomenon is manifesting itself in droves.

GLOBAL PANDEMIC

Life Under Lockdown: Day 1, Montreal, March 24

Note: I'm hijacking my Microbiome blog to post about life in the time of the coronavirus. Check back every day for a post on how we're coping here in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

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Tuesday, March 24, 7:44 a.m.

esterday was the day the premier of Quebec declared that "gatherings of more than two people will henceforth be banned."

I entered into a semantic argument with my chess pal Nathan, the frontline ER nurse, that "more than two does NOT equal two. Therefore you and I can still get together at the Second Cup and play chess as we have been doing at 7 a.m. twice a week for a year and a half."

After all, I argued, if the ban was for "more than two" it did not include two—only more than two. Alas, semantics notwithstanding, the entire point was brought to a screeching halt after I called the Côte des Neiges branch of the Second Cup coffee shop and was told by owner Hassan that his superiors, the coffee chain magnates, decreed that he could receive heavy fines for allowing us to play chess in the back room.

(No, the management didn't specifically mention Nathan and me by name—public surveillance has not yet reached that degree in Quebec—but Hassan had earlier yesterday informed me cheerily that "It will be okay if you and your friend play chess in the back room, away from any other customers!"

Now he realized he would have to be shuttering the entire shop—there was no way he was staying open just on the hope that a few people would be dropping by for takeout.

"Now I don't know how I'm going to be able to pay the rent," he mused almost tearfully over the phone.

I was speechless.

I called the Duke (Duc de Lorraine pastry shop) in the vain hope that they would be able to allow us to sit at their table and play chess while drinking coffee. "We're sorry," the girl on the other end of the line informed me, "we can only do takeout. The restaurant is closed."

So that seems to be that . . . no more early-morning chess for the foreseeable—and maybe even unseeable—future.

I was horrified.

Mind you, it might be for the best. You see, Nathan works as a triage nurse in an emergency room (ER) at a large hospital on the island. He's the one who will be the first medical worker to see the people off the street as they hack bits of their lungs over the Triage Desk while he takes down their vitals. It might not be in my supreme interest to be greeting Nathan a couple of hours after his shift with a bear hug and a "How ya doin'? The bug getcha yet?"

And it must be admitted that Brigitte too has greeted all this with a sigh of relief. After all, her immunocompromised lungs—she has a severe form of COPD that can't be treated, and is undergoing treatment for rheumatoid arthritis that leaves her immune system severely weakened—would be swiftly overwhelmed by the coronavirus.

She wouldn't last 24 hours.

So our Lockdown had begun.

Yesterday the count for the coronavirus in Quebec was 628 confirmed cases, one death and one recovered, but these numbers are sure to explode as more testing comes online, mirroring the experience in many other countries (although despite what some Quebecois would want you to think, it is not a country. Yet.)

So for me there was only one thing to do: go back to World War II and go walk in the cemetery.

So I turned on my earphones and prepared to go out, only to be horrified that only one ear of my earphones was working. This was truly bad news, because I listen to audiobooks throughout the day while either walking in the cemetery, shopping at the grocery or drug store for essentials, and then doing chores around the house.

I certainly could not survive all this without both earphones working.

No matter, thought I, I'll just order up a new pair on amazon.ca. They'll be here the day after tomorrow with my Prime service.

I went ahead and created the order for the exact same earphones and then prepared to go out. But a last-minute doubt prompted me to check the delivery date on the earphones.

April 21st? I was aghast. I double-checked. Yes, it was a "Prime 2-day shipping order." So why would it not be shipping for another month?

I checked other pairs of earphone brands.

All were the same: Prime delivery on April 21st.

I tried to call Amazon using their "call me at home" function. They called all right, but delivered a message about getting help on their website and hung up.

I tried again four times with the same result. "No one is answering," Brigitte commiserated. "The banks, the doctors, the stores, no one is answering their phones. You can't even leave a message."

Luckily I managed to rustle up an old pair of earphones I had discarded a year or so earlier because I had lost a collar clip for it. It worked fine. Pretty damned well, in fact.

So I was back in business . . . now I'm looking forward to a month or more of audiobooks about World War II—my current book is about Torpedo Squadron 8 in the Battle of Midway and next I plan on a 30-hour tome about the Battle of Saipan—so my downtime is already booked.

I'll go walk in the gorgeous cemetery across from my house and feed the crows while Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto gets his comeuppance for the 25,000th time and I lose myself in an age before the coronavirus came along to kill my chess game.

Here's to April 21st. May you speed to me my old life back, ASAP (As Soon As Prime).

What ARE Bacteria?

ou know, I just don’t think people have any real idea of just what bacteria are.

I mean, when someone tells you to “Wash your hands! You don’t want all those nasty bacteria on you when you come to dinner!” I don’t think you seriously conjure up an image of a real bacteria really on your hands, let alone hundreds of millions of them. I know I don’t—I just have this abstract picture of this invisible “thing” called “bacteria” all over my hands, or the kitchen counter, or the toilet, or whatever.

But these things are very, very real. They are not “invisible.”  They are alive, and if you had, right this very minute, a very, very powerful microscope, you would be able to see bacteria, right this very minute, all over everything.

To get a better idea of the reality of bacteria in your environment, right now as you read this, imagine:

If bacteria could somehow all glow fluorescent green, all of them, all at once, what would the world look like?

Well, to put it simply, the entire world, and especially the parts of it that are alive, like plants, animals, people, YOU—would be one incandescent mass of green.

Illustration not to scale. Bacteria are larger than they appear in this picture

The green would cover everything and everybody, and if you started to dig in your garden, the soil would glow bright, bright green down as far as you could keep digging, all the way down to a mile . . . and if you weren’t exhausted by digging you could probably go down another ten miles and still the earth would be glowing green.

If you went to your kitchen right now and dribbled out one teaspoon of water from the tap, that teaspoon would contain five million bacteria.

But wait—what ARE bacteria, and why are they different than, say, viruses? Can bacteria move by themselves? Do they live a long time? Could you see them if you got a microscope?

Well, hold on there, little feller, one thing at a time!

Here’s a very enlightening thing to know about bacteria, and one that gives you an idea of just how small they are: You, as a normal everyday individual, would probably not be able to buy, rent or borrow a microscope powerful enough to see single bacteria.

Sure, you’d be able to see bacterial growth, but only when you get accumulations of billions of them—and even then, the sample would probably have to be coloured with a special lab stain, because, you see, to the naked eye bacteria are mostly completely transparent. (In fact, right now, on your naked eye, there are millions of them swimming around . . . do you see them?)

Okay, then, how long does an individual bacterium live?

Well, unless you kill them off with, say, an anti-bacterial hand soap, an individual bacterium won’t die—it will simply divide in two, and the new duo will go on living until they, too divide in two, and so on . . . neat trick, huh?

But it will take between 12 minutes and 24 hours for a bacterium to divide in two, so let’s say the average bacterium lives for around 12 hours. You can slow the bacterial growth by reducing the temperature, or stopping it altogether (mostly) by freezing. But remember; freezing the bacteria simply stops them from dividing—it doesn’t kill them. So if there were a million bacteria hanging around when you froze them, there will be a million bacteria around when you thaw them.

But then—what about viruses? Are they bacteria, just smaller?

No.

The simplest way to think about bacteria and viruses is this: they’re like the mafia. Like them or not, they’re gonna be around. But the bacteria are like the Don and his capos: they can be tough and vicious, but they can also be generous and fair-minded. The viruses, though, are like the hitmen—small, brainless and without mercy.

I know, I know . . . but what does this gotta do with ME?

Well, let’s do some simple math . . . we saw that there were five million bacteria in a single teaspoon of tap water.

So how many human cells—that’s the tiny parts that all together make up your body—are there, say, in your little toe?

Well, imagine those small green peas that you love with your roast beef and mashed potatoes. Now imagine that you took an 18-wheeler semi transport truck and filled the the back of it from the very floor to the very roof with those tiny little green peas . . . go on, cram them in there—an entire transport truck container—the same ones that you see loaded onto those massive container ships.

You would need fully three of those truck containers packed with little green peas to equal the number of cells in your little toe—about six billion peas altogether.

This thing. Times three. Six billion peas. One pinkie toe.

But we're not talking about the human cells in your pinkie toe. We're talking about the number of bacteria in your gut microbiome.

How many just bacteria—because of course there are viruses and fungi and other kinds of microbes beside bacteria in your microbiome—how many bacteria are there in a typical human gut microbiome?

Try 37 trillion.

This means that if you took your container truck packed with two billion peas, you would need 500,000 of those trucks—that's five-hundred-thousand—to get just ONE trillion peas.

Imagine 500,000 of those trucks, parked as closely as you could together . . . that would be, what, ten Central Parks, just filled wall to wall with those giant trucks? How big is Central Park? It's fucking HUGE!

But get ready, because you would need not 500,000 trucks packed to the brim with little green peas to be the equivalent of bacteria in your gut microbiome (note: I'm just including your inner number of bacteria, not the billions that live outside your body) . . .

No. You would need another eighteen million of those trucks, packed to the brim with little green peas . . . 18,500,000 container transport trucks packed with little green peas, to equal the number of bacteria in your tummy . . .

How big would that parking lot have to be, to park 18.5 million container trucks side by side, nose to tail, in one, huge unbroken mass?

Well, I figure you would need a parking lot the size of the state of Wisconsin.

How big is the state of Wisconsin?

It's fucking HUGE.

FCAS: My "Crash" Diet

ven though my microbiomic samples are still filtering through Viome's complex analyzation process, in anticipation of doing a third sample—to find out how my greatly modified diet is standing the test of time—I will be sticking to this reduced fat, carbs-and-sugar diet, which I've dubbed FCAS (pronounced "EF-Cass," in a nod to that Boeing 737 MAX nose-into-ground software, MCAS, or "EM-Cass").

FCAS is my friend, and it should be your friend, though hopefully with the "Reduced" always in front of it (because Lord knows, most of my life like my Boeing friends I strove mightily to place "MAX" in front of it).

Adhering to my "simple is better" worldview, my diet is composed primarily of the four major food groups for vegetarians: vegetables, nuts, legumes and chocolate.

As a lacto- ovo- pesky-vegetarian (the last meaning I can eat fish), the only animal I'm including for now is shrimp, although when I start branching out I'll start with chicken and maybe later meringue, but all that will only happen after I see my first microbiomic results.

The way I see it, the main demon perching on my shoulder with the most vested interests in my progress is the Sugar Demon, a fact I recognized as long as five years ago in a now-defunct blog.

As I'm sure you all know by now—as Sauron was to Mordor, Ancel Keys was to the keeper of the Sugar Flame—sugar in your diet does not always come wrapped in little pretty foil wraps or in 1.5-Megaliters of Mountain Dew.

It more frequently comes in that mound of home fries or bowl of rice . . . your liver does not know the difference, and furthermore, doesn't give a shit (although your colon will beg to disagree).

So I had to give up my two favourite foods: rice and pasta; with potatoes and bread just falling all over themselves to get to the top of my food pyramid.

This, my friends, is like a crime against living; at least, to me it was. Deprived of my late-night Delverde Linguine Fini with my favourite Japanese pasta sauce, or a huge dish of scalloped potatoes or a thick slice of cracked wheat toast and Bonne Maman Confiture de fraises, not to mention the nightly dessert feasts of ice cream with strawberries and nuts and whipped cream . . . all . . . gone with no possibility of return . . . well, that's just a crime, folks.

But as usual, we think of these things as isolated events. I'll go back to my regular no-ice cream diet soon. Today's splurge was just today. It won't hurt.

But when that's what you say, every day, well, it will hurt.

It's been now exactly two weeks since I went on my Reduced FCAS regimen, and what can I say? My blood sugar has normally been around 7.0 mmol/L/126 mg/dL and yesterday I got out of the car and felt a strange sensation, as if my pants were falling down! But my pants were falling down!

My new FCAS routine, crafted over these past two weeks, has been relatively easy to adopt, and barring the occasional lapse—allowed by any sane diet counsellor—will never result in a failure like its relative, the MCAS . . .

The message here at BiomeMechanic II is So Far, SO GOOD.