HEAVY LIFT // GUT
Last week: a “FINAL NOTICE” that wasn’t. This week: the most underrated lift in your kitchen.
Nobody brags about fiber. It’s the beige minivan of nutrition: reliable, unglamorous, and the punchline of every “keeps you regular” joke. I get it. I used to think that was the whole job too.
Then I spent seven years rebuilding my gut after colon cancer at 50. This isn’t a cancer story. Cancer brought me here, and the results made me stay. What I learned is that the bathroom part is the least interesting thing fiber does.
Preflight 3-2-1
1. Fiber feeds your microbial metropolis. You can’t fully digest it, but your gut bacteria can. They ferment it into short-chain fatty acids like butyrate, which fuel the cells lining your colon. You’re not just eating fiber. You’re feeding the microbes that work for you.
2. Some fiber goes after your cholesterol. Soluble fiber, the kind in oats, beans and barley, helps lower LDL (“bad”) cholesterol. How? It grabs bile acids in your gut and hauls them out with the trash. Your liver normally recycles that bile, and fiber breaks the recycling loop. So the liver has to make fresh bile, and the raw material it uses is cholesterol it pulls out of your bloodstream. That’s why the heart-health research keeps pointing back to it, and why Cheerios gets to print a heart-health claim on the box while the sugary cereals have to settle for a toy inside.
3. Speaking of sugary cereals, fiber slows the sugar rush. It slows how fast carbs hit your bloodstream, so you get fewer spikes and crashes, and you stay full longer. To my fellow diabetics: this one’s for us.
1. “Where’s my fiber actually coming from?” If the honest answer is a powder, let’s start there. A powder beats nothing, but it’s one fiber feeding a few kinds of microbes. Real food brings a whole mix of fibers plus the plant compounds that come with them, so you feed your entire crew instead of just a couple of guys.
2. “Did I climb too fast?” Gas and bloating usually mean you added too much at once, not that fiber doesn’t work for you.
Pick one food from the oats, beans and barley crowd and add it this week. Climb, level off, climb. If your gut grumbles, hold steady for a few days before adding more. And drink more water. Fiber without fluids is flying without fuel.
CROSS-CHECKING YOUR INSTRUMENTS
Car: The dog stairs got their own video. Getting Gibbs and Wally in and out of a tall Tundra took engineering, and my back thanks the Big Ass Dog Company. Watch them load up. Next car week: two deals, one playbook.
Home: Last week’s “FINAL NOTICE” issue takeaway- if a mailer shows up in your mailbox, the rule stands: call the number on your statement, never the one on the mailer.
One more thing…
Here’s a couple parting gifts, my B-side Bangers of the week, deep cuts you’d never turn off IF they ever made it to radio:
“Earth Stopped Cold at Dawn,” Hootie & the Blowfish (from Fairweather Johnson, 1996) Listen →
Everybody remembers Cracked Rear View. Almost nobody remembers track 7 on the album after it. Darius Rucker slows way down, and the late great folk legend, Nanci Griffith, slides in on harmony. Three years later he returned the favor, Nashville’s version of “I owe you one.” Darius sang a duet with her on a re-recorded “Love at the Five and Dime.”
“Love at the Five and Dime,” Nanci Griffith ( from The Dust Bowl Symphony, 1999) Listen →
Jeff
Some credentials never expire.
