Gut Health, Formation Flight, and Those Damn Geese

Last week we learned to fly instruments…in the “soup”. Each week we have built on the foundation of experience gained from the week before. For flying and gut health alike, we have a base of knowledge and some specialized skills at this point.

Now it’s time to get good. Let’s take our singular ability to fly both machine and gut microbiome and incorporate that into a team effort for greater efficiency and success in accomplishing a mission.

We called this block of instruction Basic Combat Skills in military flight training. On the gut health front, I call this leveraging your gut microbiome to positively impact every connected “axis” in the body.

Let’s fly.

The Basic Combat Skills phase during military flight training is essentially leaving the safer, traditional confines of airfields with runways and air-traffic-controlled airspace to a much more unforgiving landscape like the “field”.

Think of it like a car traveling on hard pavement and suddenly you’re driving off-road.

There are numerous obstacles and hazards to negotiate like landing on uneven terrain or slopes, operating in blowing dust and sand, and landing in tree-surrounded landing zones (LZ’s).

It starts to dawn on you that there is a slim margin for error with real consequences.

In addition to the aforementioned hazards and obstacles, there is one basic combat skill that is especially applicable to gut health- formation flying.

In the military, not much is done well alone. Flying is no different. Nearly every mission requires a sizeable amount of resources and that requires multiple aircraft to carry people, equipment, and logistical items. (the slang term is “beans and bullets”)

We have to be able to fly together and that is done in a formation.

Gut health requires the same integrated effort. But hold that thought for a minute.

Learning to fly by itself is not easy. Learning to fly in a formation, feet away from the next helicopter is much harder. It requires knowledge, skill, coordination, communication, and experience to do it well.

Do you know who flies in formation better than anyone not named Maverick or Iceman?

Geese.

As a guy who managed to learn to fly helicopters in formation, teach younger pilots to do the same, and even do it in the dark with night-vision goggles, I never tire of watching the effortless ballet in the sky, of a v-shaped formation of honking geese passing overhead.

It is the epitome of knowledge, skill, coordination, communication, and experience that is formation flight

.

Those damn geese make it look so easy.

Learning what I believe to be the singular skills of gut health is important. (Diet, exercise, good sleep, and stress management) For an efficient gut microbiome to do its job, they must be done together.

It’s gut health formation flight.

It also requires knowledge, skill, coordination, communication, and experience.

And what exactly is the job of the trillions of microbes we call the gut microbiome?

For simplicity and in keeping with the aviation theme, let’s narrow it down to the roles of being the air traffic controller for the immune system, an able-bodied copilot for the nervous system (that thinks it might be the pilot), and functioning as the pilot-in-command of our metabolism.

Trivial stuff right?

Hardly.

Imagine our flight of helicopters is in a “V” formation on a mission in support of our immune system. The lead aircraft for this mission is our diet. The success of our mission really begins and ends right here. If we fail to eat a healthy, whole food, fiber-filled, and fermented food-inclusive diet, our chances for good immune system support are slim to none.

When we don’t feed our gut bacteria what they need to support our immune system, the lack of diversity makes it hard to tell who is a friend and who is a foe. We lose the ability to signal to the immune system to throttle inflammation and disease follows.

Next in the “V” is exercise. Exercise is like a goose honking in the second position, but it can’t keep up and falls out. This impacts the central nervous system when the gut and endocrine systems that use neurotransmitters to send signals to the brain are interrupted.

Further on back in the flight is poor sleep. Too much late-night television forces the exit of good sleep. Sleep deprivation mucks up so much related to metabolism. From triggering hormones like cortisol to making insulin’s job harder to process sugar and starches into energy, poor sleep is a gut health killer.

Lastly, the trail aircraft in the “V” formation is stress management. Stress can hurt your gut flora, upsetting the balance and allowing bad bacteria to thrive. It can impact nearly every job we rely on our gut microbiome to get done.

An absence of good bacteria results in the likelihood of gut lining cells loosening and a leaky gut to occur. This affects the immune system, the central nervous system via the gut-brain axis, as well as metabolism, as the onslaught of digestive and gastrointestinal disorders manifest.

Next week, we’ll wrap up our flight training/ gut health discussion with Advanced Combat Skills. We’re ready to apply everything we’ve learned and use some very specific skills to execute the plan. More importantly, this knowledge base will allow us to analyze data and make rapid changes to ensure success.

It’s especially true in the gut health arena.

But I will share a specific situation where I had a front-row seat to rapid data analysis in a flight environment. This particular incident involved a 2-star General (he eventually retired with 4 stars and is a current military analyst on Fox News).

I thought sure he was going to kill me.

Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading,

Jeff