2025 Q2 Weekly Blog #4
5:28AM-5:45: #17mins
Home-Branford
Aim: 7 minutes
4/22/25
April
1000words
[[Power of the Microbiome]]
[[Power of Book Integration]]
[[Power of Sleep]]
[[Robynne Chutkan]]
[[Matthew Walker]]
[[Site Blog]]
[[Books]]
[[Why We Sleep]]
[[GutBliss]]
[[The Microbiome Solution]]
My dad recently had a Urinary Tract Infection, also called UTI, and afterwards he had to get surgery so he could pee again, through a HOLEP procedure. So right now, I am super curious about how our microbiome works, and recently I finished another book, called [[The Microbiome Solution]], by [[Robynne Chutkan]], similar to her previous book, [[Gutbliss]], which I read last year, and there’s a lot to dive in, but I genuinely am super grateful to these authors, who just have this amazing capability to teach such intense knowledge in a meaningful way, where I actually care about what they’re saying. And it’s tough, in the capitalism world that we live in, money moves everything. And a lot of things that are mass-produced, they have chemicals that hurt our microbiome. There are good bacteria’s in our body, that actually help us.
And the antibiotics, and so many different medicines, and even fast processed food, they all contain so many chemicals that disrupt our microbiome, killing the microbes that actually support us. And that’s genuinely such a horrific thing, that we have to acknowledge as people, as we move forward, in our current society. I love what capitalism can do, but people who aren’t knowledgeable, do what they’re told, and then they suffer as a result, if they don’t ask the right questions. And that’s really a shame.
My dad has been a devoted pro-medicine person his whole life. Coming here in 1985, and working at a Diner, first starting as a dishwasher, and then rising up to be a cook, and then eventually retiring in 2020, he’s done what he’s been told his whole life. But with age, comes the bitter repercussions of just following what you’re told, and not realizing the harm you’re doing to your body, when you don’t actually know, what the the things that you consume, are doing to your body. One of the reasons, why I read so many books, it’s because, I know, we’re always learning as people. And what we knew even 20 years ago, it’s actually going through massive transition, with the discovery of new knowledge.
Let’s say, for example, something, for me nowadays is simple knowledge, what REM sleep does to us as people. At some point, dreaming was a notion that something that was extraterrestrial, as in it was the gods that gave us dreams. That was actually an accepted view at one point, because people didn’t understand why we dream. And then Freud, actually helped us realize, that dreaming actually happens in our own mind, but then he wasn’t even fully correct after that. And this was 1899, when he wrote one of his books. The truth of the matter is, there’s evolution in knowledge, that happens, once we learn more things.
For me, I genuinely know dream is important, because it helps us regulate our emotions, that we have in a typical day. The intense emotional feelings that we have, we actually soothe ourselves when we dream, and those intense feelings, slowly dissipate. And the next day, if we get proper sleep, and REM sleep, we actually are not that agitated by the intense feelings that we had the previous day. And that’s an amazing phenomenon. And reading [[Matthew Walker]]’s [[Why We Sleep]], is genuinely opening up so many things about sleep that I didn’t really know. And of course, this is today, but it’s not that Matthew knows everything, but because of scientific experiments, he is more sure than ever, that dreams are not just our unconscious hidden desires, per say, as Freud would say, but rather they pacify the intense feelings that we have.
And I’m not fighting with Freud or anything, but it’s super important to understand, with new knowledge, comes the tumbling of old knowledge. And even though Freud has helped us to understand that so many things happen in the mind, and we do have a lot of control, that occurs in the human body, that is not from an external source, like say an almighty god that controls people, but rather, our mind has the capacity to create things, so we make sense out of what happens to us, in a typical day. And I think that’s important to understand.
And back to [[Robynne Chutkan]], it’s important that we know what is happening in our body, and the microbiome is even more important, because it’s not only the brain that matters, our whole body matters. And we have to feed ourselves the right food, if we want to live a long peaceful life, that is worth living, with health and vigor. I still have a long way, till I really understand, and am content, with what is happening in the human body, but these individuals, these gods of the past, the ones that are confident enough to express their views, and write books, trying to understand things that we previously did not understand, I think that is such an amazing phenomenon.
And I hope to keep learning, and implementing new ways, the ideas these authors, and past historical figures so prominently fought for. And of course, you have to build your audience, if you want to grow, and understand what is happening, and actually have a legitimate reason for why, we do the things that we do. And it’s amazing the number of things that I am learning nowadays. And I hope to build my own audience as well, on this site, because I genuinely think people don’t know enough, and as a result we do so many things, that don’t actually help us, and they don’t actually help us live as more healthy individuals.