Gut Health and Military Flight Training- Learning to Fly

Last week we touched on the “Nickel Ride” or the orientation flight as the initial exposure to helicopters in the US Army. For gut health, it can be your first dose of education or exposure to how powerful improving your gut can be. The archives of this newsletter can be your “Nickel Ride”. I’ll even save you the nickel!

This week, we make the huge leap to “Primary Flight”. This is where fledgling student pilots get to touch the flight controls and learn to fly. For gut health, it’s where you start putting live microbes and fiber in your body and learn to thrive.

So lets fly.

As Mr. Nietzsche’s quote so eloquently reminded us, you don’t fly into flying. And in the case of helicopters, you have to learn to hover before you can fly.

Hovering is the art of keeping a helicopter stationary a few feet off the ground.

Sounds pretty easy right?

Here’s a quick rundown of how a helicopter takes and maintains flight. If we use a car as an example, there is a steering wheel, gas pedal, and a brake pedal.

In a helicopter, there is a cyclic, collective, and pedals.

But here’s where it gets interesting. Imagine you’re sitting in the left seat of this diagram. The pedals are at your feet (#1), the same as a car. But the steering wheel of sorts, the Cyclic (#2) is in between your legs, and the gas pedal, the Collective (#3) is at your left on the floor.

ALL of these controls need to be manipulated at the same time for controlled flight. And I almost forgot, the Collective lever on the floor? Yeah it also has an engine throttle on the grip that gets rolled back and forth like a motorcycle throttle.

Still sounds pretty easy right?

Here’s just a quick sample of “yaw” (left and right) aerodynamics in a helpful picture.

There are four more ways this animal can move, up and down (pitch) and banking side to side (roll).

So, to ensure you don’t spin the helicopter in a circle like a top, nosedive into the ground, or roll it over into a burning pile of twisted metal, microscopic control movements are needed in near perfect harmony to keep this beast in flight.

And to hover, make that perfect harmony.

In rotary wing, primary flight, you learn to hover, take-off, maintain forward flight, and safely land. It’s a process that begins with chaos and ends with complete calm.

Imagine we had a tracer on the bottom of the helicopter and compare these two images and you’ll understand beginning and mastering primary flight and the art of hovering.

Learning to fly a complex piece of machinery is dancing a ballet of flight control movements.

Chaos to calm.

Just as you don’t fly into flying, you don’t fly into gut health. If we can stipulate to the fact that one of the simplest ways to start improving your gut health is by changing your diet, specifically adding fermented foods and fiber to your diet, we need to learn how to walk before we can run.

The gut microbiome is every bit the complex beast a helicopter is, and then some. Just as we learn to manipulate flight controls for a desired effect, properly fueling your body for desired effects can be equally challenging.

Add in the fact that eating live microbes from fermented foods and expecting that soluble and insoluble fiber will affect your GI tract, easing into this change is essential.

Refer back to the two images above of scribbling and a single dot and let’s apply it to gut health.

Intentionally introducing fermented foods and fiber to your GI tract will require some trial and error. And until you find foods that you like, agree with you, and are well-tolerated, it might feel a bit like scribbling on a blank page.

But once you find the “hover button” and arrive at the right mix of the many fermented food offerings and fiber sources, a well-tuned GI tract transitions from chaos to calm.

Next week, we advance to learning to fly by “Instruments”. Everything is simpler when the skies are blue and the winds are calm. Helicopter pilots still need to fly when the weather is bad and we do that by using only the instruments on our dashboard. There is nothing visible outside the windows.

Learning to trust your instruments and using non-visual cues is very much a part of gut health.

When it comes to gut health, the magic happens mostly in the dark.

Thanks for reading,

Jeff