Zoe

There’s a new woman in my life. We began to meet online. Then she shared some videos with me. And I was hooked. But T need not worry. I’ve not joined a strange Russian dating site. Zoe is a nutrition and gut health improvement programme run by eminent scientists from Kings College, London, and Harvard Medical School. And I’ve just become one of their thousands of guinea pigs.

Oddly enough, you begin the progamme by eating muffins. But not any old muffins. The specially prepared ones they send you. After the first meal of muffins you monitor your blood sugar, via a sensor in your upper arm. After a second meal of muffins you monitor your blood fat, by doing a pinprick blood test. Then you send them a sample of your poo. To some, this might sound a bit off-putting. But it’s very easy to do. Your results arrive fairly quickly.

My blood sugar response was graded good (in comparison to all participants) and excellent (in comparison to people of a similar age and sex). So my body processes carbohydrates very effectively and I’m not at risk of diabetes anytime soon. My blood fat response was graded poor in relation to both sets of comparators. To some extent I already knew I had a problem in this area. I’ve been taking a statin for some years to lower cholesterol. But now I need to do more. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my microbiome was graded as excellent. The poo sample showed that my gut contained a preponderance of good bacteria and very little bad bacteria.

So what next? The Zoe app has inputted my results. When I log the food I’m eating into the online diary, it scores every item on the impact it will have on my blood sugar, blood fat and microbiome. It also puts each food item I’m eating into four categories. Eat rarely. Enjoy in moderation. Enjoy regularly. Enjoy freely. Zoe has an enormous database of foods, so you can look up different items to see how they have been scored. Then you can change ingredients or substitute healthier alternatives. This is helpful, as I’m trying more actively to control the level of fats in my diet.

Joining Zoe isn’t cheap (it costs several hundred pounds for one year). But it’s already proving to be a valuable investment.

Celebrating Ciaran Carson

Next week sees an international gathering at Queen’s University Belfast to honour and celebrate the work of the late Ciaran Carson. As befits such a multitalented man, there will be music and art as well as readings and discussion. And all events are free. I will be reading a few poems at 4pm on Wednesday13 September in the Canada Room, along with colleagues from the Writers’ Group that Ciaran led so successfully for over a decade. He was a man with a keen attention to every detail of language. And when editing a new piece, I still find myself thinking, what would Ciaran say about that?

I first met Ciaran about 15 years ago. I crept away from my day job at the University to attend the meetings of the Writers’ Group, which were held every Wednesday afternoon. I’d just begun to write poems that were stimulated by real-life stories. Ciaran was most encouraging. These weren’t ‘found poems’. The real-life story was the ground from which the poem emerged, a launch point. Ciaran christened them ‘discovered poems’ and told me I had ‘found my metier’.

My own small contribution to the commemoration is a new book of poems, ‘True’. It is dedicated to Ciaran and brings together the ‘discovered poems’ I wrote during his years of mentoring the Writers’ Group. The book will be published later this year by The Black Spring Press. You can read more about the book in the leaflet that the publisher has prepared (see below). I will be reading poems from ‘True’ on Wednesday 13 September. The event is hosted by Paul Maddern. I hope to see some of you there.