Updates

Dear friends,

I’m going to cut to what you’ve all been asking.

The new job: I’m now editor for the Center for Scientific Integrity’s Medical Evidence Project. The project started in June and I started October 1, although because I had so much travel scheduled before the job started, it really started in earnest just a couple of weeks ago. I am loving working with this group of stats geeks in the shop of my old friend Ivan Oransky, who you most likely know as the co-founder of Retraction Watch.

My job is basically to take the forensic metascience our analysts are doing – research that sniffs out bad data in important medical studies and guidelines, including fraudulent data – and turn that into journalism by helping reporters. This position is all kinds of wonderful. The people are terrific and they’re deeply passionate about seeking real evidence and rooting out bullshit and slop. I’m using so many of my skills – literary, journalistic, managerial – and I love feeling so useful.

Because we are still gearing up at the Medical Evidence Project, I can’t  yet point you to the results, but I will be able to do that soon. I’m also providing a helping hand to Kate Travis, the newish and very excellent editor of Retraction Watch. (On many days, she helps me more than I help her.) The first time I got to see a piece posted at Retraction Watch that I had helped edit – squeeee! Turns out that was a life goal I didn’t know I had.

To answer some people’s questions about the job shifts: I’m no longer with Heterodox Academy. I left that position a couple of weeks before my gig with the Medical Evidence Project started. (This is a much better fit.)

Aron’s presidency at Rosalind Franklin University started a week ago today. While I enjoyed having a wife for the first time in my life while Aron was done at MSU and not yet starting at RFU, that glorious period of six weeks came to an end, alas. Now that his job has begun, I definitely have to fix his new office and we’re still figuring out the bike path he might be able to use in warmer weather. But all in all, he’s settling in nicely. (Thank you, Mike, for the wonderful new bikes!)

This past Saturday, I showed up for the RFU students’ Turkey Trot and ran the 5K. Actually, I only ran about 4K, because an M2 wanted to talk to “the first lady” about some ideas he has regarding student debt and the endowment, and he couldn’t keep up with me, so he asked me to walk and talk for part of the race. What he really wanted, of course, was to get a meeting with Aron, and I assured him that Aron will always take a meeting with a student.

By the way, I was not running so fast; I was getting over a lousy little virus and doing at best an 11-minute mile, but medical students don’t get a lot of time to exercise. I told him to (a) just go get a meeting with Aron and (b) start exercising with Aron at the lunch hour because they both need it, lol.

The house: Yeah, so the house quickly revolted at being left alone as we set up in Highland Park. The thermostat broke – one of the friends keeping the house company discovered this and let me know it would not go above 58 – so I’m already back in East Lansing. Last night was one chilly experience. I had to sleep human panini style: electric mattress pad on high below me, electric blanket on high atop me. The thermostat was replaced late this afternoon. I have to say, 68 degrees never felt so warm. Luckily I had the cottage to work in today. That has its own reliable electric heat.

Having to head back to East Lansing meant I missed the “welcome to the new president” reception at RFU today, so it’s a good thing I showed up for the Turkey Trot as that way the RFU folks don’t think Aron is pretending I exist. We are thinking we may have to do a “meet Alice” reception just to really prove I’m real. Plus, I could wear my Disney tiara and knight people, since I hear you’re allowed to do that as a first lady.

In all seriousness, it is pretty great to be generally living only an hour or two from our son. We all met up at the Lyric for Carmina Burana on Friday, and then the kid came to dinner Saturday night and stayed for That Little French Guy brunch the next day. We don’t need to see each other every weekend but it was a treat.

Setting up the Highland Park place has been fun, and since it's a small apartment, it was pretty easy. (Thank you, Ikea.) We found Gladys, shown above and below, at a local housewares shop. They told us her name was Eloise but she corrected the record when we brought her home and hung her up. I would say she is my spirit animal, but I'm pretty sure I am hers.

My microbiome: I know this is what you really are dying to know about, lol. But since some of you asked: I’m doing much better now that I’m off sucrose and starches.

It never occurred to me when I had to give up gluten on top of having had to give up dairy that my gut might grow even more intolerant, like some old geezer watching too much Newsmax or Maddow, shaking a feeble fist at the television screen. But yeah, here I am now unable to eat starches or sucrose, too.

I remember a couple of months after I had to give up gluten (a long time ago now) wondering how it was I had not gotten myself very fat during my days of toasted bagels and real beer. The pickings seemed so slim after the admission that such things were rendering me far too much time in the bathroom.

Now that I’ve had to give up starches and sucrose, too, I wonder how it is I didn’t grow enormously fat before this. After all, even off gluten and dairy, I could still eat (some) French fries, latkes, chocolate mousse, brown-rice pasta lasagna, crepes, corn chips, tortillas, and the like.

No more of that. I have become a shrinking Alice – there is sixteen pounds less of me than there was in April – because there just isn’t that much to eat anymore. If you saw the mass of food I eat in 24 hours, including so much protein (eggs, fish, tofu, meats, nuts), you would think I am getting plenty of food.

But it turns out to be really hard to get enough effective calories without starches, as one Dr. Atkins discovered well before me. I wake up at 3 a.m. with my stomach growling. I schedule two lunches (one at 11 a.m., one at 3 p.m.) on my to-do list each day now. I eat two servings of everything.

If you have managed to avoid my miserable tale of how I got here, the short story is that I figured out by accident that my latest round of gut troubles (which had been going on for a good two years) was due to the fact that the bad bacteria I’m housing really love to party on starches and sucrose.

How do you find this out by accident? Well, you eat lots of white rice and bananas (high sucrose foods, oops!) in the hopes of calming down your gut. Then you add lots of fiber to deal with the Long Island Expressway-like traffic jam in your gut. Then you end up with – oh, you don’t want to know.

Then you decide well, if nothing else, I’ll try losing some weight to feel less bloated and ugh. So, you go off all starches and sugars because Atkins, and boom, suddenly your gut turns into a model for those ads they push at you on your phone. (“Gastroenterologists say eat THIS ONE THING to have perfect movements!” And they’re not talking about symphonies.)

A couple of weeks after the accidental discovery that I feel far better off sugars and starches, I had a previously-scheduled video visit with my gastroenterologist. When I asked her why on earth this would be a dietary change that would matter, she said, ‘Ohhhhh, you must now have sucrose and starch intolerance. It’s a well-known sequela to small intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO),” which I had been diagnosed with previously.

It may seem like it would be impossible to stay on a diet where you can’t eat gluten, dairy, starches (all grains including corn, oats, rice, etc; all potatoes; etc.), and anything that contains more than a trace amount of sucrose (white and brown table sugar, apples, bananas, most onions, carrots, sweet peas, stone fruits, almond flour, etc. etc.). But if you have gone through a lifetime of rounds of gut misery plus success with a new diet, it turns out that mentally, it isn’t that hard.

Practically – well, practically, it is hard. Eating at a restaurant is now a high-wire act. And, even if it works out, isn’t worth the money. And, as mentioned above, it’s not easy to feel full. Before the sprint triathlon I did in August, I could not carb-load. Instead, I ate a pound and a half of chicken the night before. When I travel, I have to carry a ridiculous amount of food (hard-boiled eggs, flat-pack tuna, walnuts) and I have to pack much more than I will probably really need, in case my flight or train is cancelled.

But I’m finding ways around it. I’ll tell you about that soon in a blog that is less newsy and more an ode to raw ingredients. Soon, I promise!

Meanwhile, peace and pomegranates,

Alice