More than a year ago I started taking a daily dose of “greens” by consuming a shaker full of AG-1. I am not exactly a poster child for healthy eating and especially not for anything resembling health food. Nonetheless, I started the regime of shaking up a canister of this green stuff every evening after dinner. Somewhere along the route, I decided to switch to a morning regime because it seemed easier. It has become a regular part of my routine just as my appetite has started to recede, which I have made note of earlier this year. In the last month or so I have noticed that my system is back to its old tricks of never feeling completely settled. Very little that I eat agrees with me past a few bites. It’s nothing violent or extreme, just mildly off-putting.
About 5 days ago I just stopped taking my AG-1 for no particular reason except to change things up. I noted to Kim that this change seemed to quiet my system and bring me some degree of gut peace. That was helpful during our two-day Phoenix and back road trip this past weekend. It also caused me to think I might not even take my usual supply of AG-1 powder envelopes and the shaker with me on this upcoming cruise. Now, as we get into the week, my gut is starting to tell me a different story and I am starting to feel those old discomforts that led me to AG-1 in the first place. It hasn’t helped my confusion over all this that I’ve recently read more about how unproven AG-1 and all manner of other supplements are. For such a huge global business, it’s truly amazing that they cannot find supportive research to validate their usage. I’m ok with people saying AG-1 is just a more expensive version of other concoctions, but when they definitively say there are no proven benefits and perhaps some detrimental effects on kidney or liver health, I get more concerned. In a phrase, what the fuck is going on here?
I just watched Kim go through an elaborate process of putting together her supplements in multicolored pill boxes for the next month. It requires the entire kitchen island and makes automotive assembly lines look simple by comparison. And she is hardly alone in this endeavor. It seems everyone I know has a pile of supplements on the table next to them at breakfast. In some ways I feel more enlightened by thinking my packet of pineapple-flavored powder mixed in water is a more efficient delivery system for all this supplemental hoo ha. The voodoo-like grip of dietary supplements on modern and aging adults is quite a phenomenon and worthy of more than meandering thought. Clearly it is a cultural and societal issue of huge proportions and vast reach.
I’m sure it has mostly to do with our modern processed foods issues compounded by our extended longevity. Some people (especially those old codgers walking the hill towns of the Caucasus Mountains) have cast iron guts that just digest any and everything and make done with it. Whatever their plumbing cannot handle, the microbes in their plumbing despatch without incident. Other people are born with delicate systems prone to IBS, Crones, gluten intolerance and God knows what other frailties. As much as I envy the first category, I feel bad for the latter. But most of us fall somewhere in the middle and make varying degrees of effort to keep our systems on an even keel. It is only natural that indulgence, convenience and modern food marketing work against us. So why should it surprise anyone that commercial instinct takes over at that point and people start formulating some version of snake oil to hawk to the public to cure what ails them? It’s about as natural as any outcome I can imagine. And the same instincts that got us into trouble in the first place, indulgence, convenience and marketing, naturally litter the pathways of the attempted panaceas.
At this very moment, I am sitting here listening to my gut sound like a pod of whales heading into mating season. The muffled and deep groaning is being caused by whatever little is in my 30 feet of GI track. I say little because Kim served me a nice hot bowl of tortellini for dinner and I ate perhaps 1/3 of it and sent the rest back into the compost bucket. In high school I would have treated the entire bowl as an appetizer, but now some combination of my lap band and dwindling appetite makes a taste plenty to satisfy me.
As I continue my quest for intestinal stability I have added chewable Pepto Bismol tablets to my regular medicinal armory. I probably pop three of those puppies (I always overdose over-the-counter medications on the theory that my sheer bulk demands upward field adjustments to any prescribed dosages and that FDA caution keeps dosage amounts on the low side) every five days or so. The bismuth subsalicylate in the stuff seems to smooth out my intestinal kinks for a few days before the pod of Orcas return to their mating grounds. I just took three. I’m thinking of restarting my AG-1 powder this morning as well. Why take a control-based approach to healthcare when you can flood the zone with multiple remedies and improve your odds of success, I always say? It’s not like a patient controlled approach on an unstable and constantly changing black box system like the human gut can be expected to yield reliable empirical results that have sustainable validity in this quest for intestinal stability.
Clearly you can tell I have no answers, just anecdotal voodoo remedies. I recall back in the late 80s when I suffered from a bout of gall bladder disease that culminated in the removal of my gall bladder (no fussy arthroscopy back then, this was a 9-inch incision, two-handed surgical removal that would have made Hannibal Lecter wince). The gastroenterologist I was seeing explained to me the vagaries of the human gut and how his entire practice was about trial and error. Medical science may have improved in the past 40 years, but I doubt this gut discipline has moved very far forward simply based on the proliferation of supplements thrust upon the market and the aging population still searching for some modicum of relief.
Joe Rogan says he has faithfully taken AG-1 since 2012. He swears by it and a massive audience that clearly wants answers to the universe swears by him. I’m not a Joe Rogan fan and that alone should have put me off to AG-1, but those Orcas make me hesitant to lose any solutions from the kit bag. I sort of like my blend of old world science ala Pepto and new world voodoo ala AG-1 to keep me on my game. About the only thing I know for sure that seems to help my system is change. Instead of travel throwing my system into disarray, it seems to calm it. New foods and microbes seem to help. Combining them with AG-1 and/or Pepto Bismol chewies should add another adventurous dimension to my gut journey. It’s like when I used to wrench my old motorcycles in Rome. Gap the plugs too much and they wouldn’t spark. Too little and they gummed up with carbon deposits. Come to think of it, when out of sorts, my old Ducati used to sound like those orcas in my stomach. God forbid I have to revert to eating fruits and vegetables (note that doesn’t keep Kim off supplements). Instead, I guess I will just keep wrenching my gut to keep it from being too gut wrenching to handle.