Personalized Nutrition and Pandemic Body Pressure + Recipe: Fermented Salsa
Issue No. 81
Sorry we’re a bit late this week! We may have breakthrough cases of covid-19. Or we may not. Waiting on test results. (That’s not actually why we’re delayed. But it’s a good excuse!) Nevertheless the pandemic ain’t over, and being vaxxed doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still take precautions.
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There’s a new advertiser filling up my instagram feed with photos of extremely beautiful people cooking rainbow-colored meals.
Zoe is a for-profit company that supposedly wants to help me “understand how [my] body responds to food” in order to “take back control of [my] health.” At first glance, it looks like any other trendy, slickly marketed diet company, which in essence is what it is. I generally scroll past any diet or “clean eating” sponcon, but Zoe caught my eye. Their schtick is all about personalized nutrition based on factors like genetics, lifestyle, and gut microbiome.
Perusing their website, I realized I had heard about Zoe in its infancy. In 2019, my favorite food podcast Gastropod did an episode about personalized nutrition. The co-hosts participated in the PREDICT study, a collaboration between scientists at major U.S. and U.K. universities. Participants spent several weeks eating lab-baked muffins, getting blood tests, wearing a glucose monitor, measuring to the gram every bit of food they planned to ingest, and taking notes on whatever went into and came out of their bodies. These gastronomy guinea pigs received a super detailed report that delved into how their bodies responded to different foods and what their ideal diet might look like.
THE HOLY GRAIL
Amy Fleming, a journalist for The Guardian who also participated in the PREDICT study, writes that geneticists appear excited by how this research might impact long-term human health:
Personalised nutrition is a public-health holy grail. Geneticists have striven for decades to develop diets based on genotype as a sophisticated form of preventive medicine. The idea is that eating what is optimal for your unique physiology could shield you from the particular diseases to which you may be susceptible, from certain cancers to diabetes.
Zoe is run by the same scientists behind the PREDICT study, which they’ve turned into a monetizable app-based diet program. Purchasers do a version of the scientific study at home, and then the scientists at Zoe analyze the results. Participants get a detailed personalized nutrition report and access to an app that helps guide food choices based on the results.
I am intrigued by Zoe for a variety of reasons. The first is purely intellectual. Food scientists appear on the cusp of a revolution in how to think about nutrition. I find research around personalized nutrition and particularly its relationship with the gut microbiome to be fascinating. I would love to understand better which foods play nicely with my gut microbiome, and which inflame them.
Additionally, as I round the corner on 35, I don’t have the bionic stomach of my younger years. The physical hangover from eating too much pizza or ice cream is just as real and unpleasant as the effects of too many glasses of wine. Could a better understanding of how my body processes different foods lead to fewer sour tummy episodes?
AN UNHINGED HERO’S JOURNEY
And of course there is the elephant in the room. I am no longer immune to gaining weight.
Before I go further, a disclaimer: At Sunshine + Microbes, Matt and I abstain from too much talk about healthy eating and how food choices impact individual health. As medium-sized white people with a lot of body privilege and very little expertise on nutrition, we don’t need to add our voices to the already immense amounts of bullshit everyone has to wade through about how to eat, look, and feel. And honestly, it’s just not as interesting to us as focusing on the big-picture impact of how our food choices impact the world around us.
But the reality is that having weird feelings about your body is damn near universal, and very few can escape the constant cultural bombardment about the aesthetically pleasing ideal du jour, and how exactly, in minute detail, I am falling short of that. Food choices get weaponized in an unhinged hero’s journey towards an unachievable physical ideal.
I’m still struggling with whether or not I want to try Zoe. Are my motivations pure? Am I just falling into the trap of diet culture? Is this just another scam for venture capitalists to prey and profit off of my insecurities? Will they follow the lead of those genetic DNA tests and mine my data for nefarious purposes? Will knowing what foods are physiologically better or worse for me actually ruin my ability to enjoy food?
I’m not sure what to make of it all. I mean the science sounds really freaking cool, but my skepticism feels reasonable.
‘BODIES CHANGE’
On the same day that I saw the first Zoe advertisement, I also saw this post from Ijeoma Olua, New York Times bestselling author of the book “So You Want to Talk About Race.'" Ijeoma always looks gorgeous and mega-polished in all of her posts, with fun clothes and perfect makeup. But in this photo, she was makeup-free and looking a bit, well...over it all. In the post, she talks about trying to be more physically active after a sedentary pandemic year. While trying to do a good thing for her body, she injured her ankles playing basketball.
I've been crying on and off. I'm hurt. I'm scared. All over some twisted ankles — and the idea that maybe, just maybe, my body has changed forever.
And, you know what? Maybe it has. Bodies change. I'm trying to remember my own words that I wrote years ago about how sometimes healing is about reconciling with the ways in which we've been changed.
So, what does that mean for me and my ankles? It means that I need to give myself time, care (I will be seeing a doctor tomorrow), and love, and look at whatever state my body is in as a testament to how I've survived and know that it is still mine.”
My body has changed over the last year too, like many of us thrown into an unprecedented time. My relationship to my body has changed. I don’t quite know how to navigate all this change. But I am grateful for reminders that bodies do in fact change, and that is right and good. I have the power to reframe my response to this very real part of living and growing older. Perhaps I’ll decide that Zoe can be a healthy part of my response. Either way, I’ll keep trying to be gentle with myself.
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🌬️🐕 Are Wind Turbines a Danger to Wildlife? Ask the Dogs. | The Atlantic
To wean itself off fossil fuels, the U.S. will need more wind energy. But there’s a grim downside to wind turbines. In North America, they kill “600,000 to 949,000 bats and 140,000 to 679,000 birds a year.” To understand the extent of this problem (and to get wind farms and regulators to think more seriously about it), conservationists are turning to the dogs.
One study showed that “dogs found 96 percent of dead bats, whereas humans found just 6 percent.” After training, they’re able to sniff out baby bats or shards of wings that human eyes (or nostrils) could never detect. Conservation-detection-dog companies like Rogue Detection Dogs and K9 Conservation work best with overly active dogs — so obsessed with play that they often exhaust their owners. Many of the canines trained by these companies are rescues or owner surrenders.
The work can be exhausting for handlers and the dogs with jobs, since they might spend hours circling a wind farm together to complete a day of bat detection. Naturally, it can be depressing for handlers to come across so many deceased bats in a day (or stressful for the dogs when they scour a farm without any bats). But this twisted version of fetch will serve an important cause, and help scientists get a comprehensive grasp on a serious issue. That’s a good dog.
💩 You’re Missing Microbes. But Is ‘Rewilding’ the Way to Get Them Back? | NY Times
The controversial “rewilding” movement supports the theory that preindustrial humans had certain beneficial bacteria in their microbiomes that protected them from diseases like obesity, diabetes, and IBS. At some point in our history, perhaps around the time of industrialization, we lost those microbial populations.
To manipulate and repopulate the microbiome, some people have taken matters into their own hands...or butt, as it were. Like Jeff Leach — a now disgraced scientist — who in 2014 in Tanzania “inserted a turkey baster filled with another man’s feces into his rectum and squeezed the bulb.”
And before you ask, no, science does not support this DIY approach. There are also a slew of ethical concerns regarding taking the genetic material of another person, often an extremely poor person.
While scientists want to “put the brakes on” the controversial rewilding movement, there is still a good deal of interest in the science behind it, and its potential implications for human health. It started in 2013, Dr. Jeffrey Gordon transplanted the fecal samples of human twins, one with obesity and one without, into mice. The mice that received feces from the twin with obesity also developed it, while the others did not.
There does seem to be a connection between our health and our microbiomes, but how will we practically and ethically apply these new theories to benefit human health? Scientists are exploring more palatable approaches to rewilding, like combining the beneficial genes found in “paleofeces” with bacteria that already have a foothold in our guts. One thing they do seem to agree on? No turkey basters, please.
🎤👨🍳 The Anthony Bourdain Documentary Faked His Voice. Would Other Filmmakers Do the Same | Slate
The new documentary, “Roadrunner”, on the life of author, chef and adventurer Anthony Bourdain was released to rave reviews last week. But then things got weird and testy when director Morgan Neville gloated in a New Yorker interview that parts of Bourdain’s narration were created using artificial intelligence. The director had employed a “software company to create audio readings of three passages that Bourdain wrote but never spoke out loud, at least one of them taken from a personal email never intended for anyone but its recipient.” Neville wouldn’t reveal the other two lines spoken by A.I.
To fans, something felt icky about hearing the beloved public figure and globetrotting gourmand — who died by suicide in 2018 — speaking words he never actually said. Slate’s Sam Adams spoke to documentary filmmakers on how they interpreted the debate. One side referred to it as blown out of proportion since documentarians often use editing tricks to bend reality while still telling a truthful story, and evolving technology will continue to lead to new ways of experimenting with storytelling. But director Robert Greene’s issue was the lack of clarity about what’s being manipulated and to what purpose.
“Roadrunner” acts as as sort of suicide note, trying to make sense of Bourdain’s life. Greene thinks a little more honesty about why Neville used Bourdain’s voice in this way might’ve dulled the controversy now surrounding the film:
Greene imagines an alternate version of Roadrunner that takes us inside the creation of the synthetic voice, where instead of blurring the transition, the movie highlights the attempt to make sense of Bourdain’s life, using the pieces he left behind. For him, it’s not the tool so much as the transparency with which it’s used—or the lack thereof.
A Funky Fermented Salsa
Add some fun(k) to your salsa with a quick fermentation. Salsa (and many things!) tastes better if left out for a few hours so the flavors marry. Same deal here, with the addition of beneficial lactic acid bacteria! Feel free to play around with the ingredients. Try it with your favorite salsa recipe. Although be careful not to make it too sweet — don’t use too much fruit or super juicy tomatoes — as that could produce boozy flavors in the fermentation.
Makes 3 cups
ingredients and special materials
1 small onion
2 ripe but firm tomatoes
1/3 of a pineapple or half a mango, peeled
optional: 1 bell pepper, green or ripe
2-3 cloves garlic
1-3 jalapeños
2-3 tablespoons fresh cilantro, chopped
juice of 1 lime
1 teaspoon salt
spices of your choosing: hot pepper, chipotle, cumin, coriander, dried oregano, etc
1 wide-mouth quart mason jar with lid
a fermentation weight (a smaller mason jar filled with water, clean stones, a ziplock filled with water, etc)
step by step
Dice all the veggies. Mix with lime juice, salt, and spices. Taste and adjust flavor as needed. At this stage, it should already taste like a really good salsa.
Pack salsa into a clean mason jar. Press down on veggies, releasing any air pockets. There should be a good amount of juice rising above the veggies, which will act as a fermentation brine.
Weigh down the salsa with the weight so that the veggies remain under the brine. Because this is a quick ferment, it’s okay if some bits float above the brine.
Loosely cover and allow to ferment at room temperature for 2-3 days. Using a clean spoon, taste to decide when the fermentation is complete. I like it with just a hint of additional acidity, but before it gets too fizzy.
Store salsa tightly covered in the fridge. Consume within a week or two.
👉Try this classic ferment:
ONE SIMPLE TRICK
CHEFS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW!!!!
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Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is a cook and kitchen educator based in Stuart, Fla . She runs Otto’s Bread Club and is co-founder of the Florida Ferment Fest. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a communications strategist at the ACLU of Texas. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes other scraps to each issue.