Bankok Report:

Overview: While traveling to Bangkok and visiting adjacent Samut Prakan for a few months, I experienced some rather unusual physical impacts, such as increased in weight/water retention, irritable digestive, slow bowel movements, excessive lethargy and oversleeping, headaches and nausea, and more.

N: in this case is 1 when accounting for my own body. N: 15 when accounting for the other countries I’ve been to and have to compare to Thailand. As I travel to each country, document the effects to my health, digestion, energy, clarity of thinking and metabolic markers. N: 20+ if accounting for my observations of people and lifestyle in each of the countries I travel to.

As I travel to different countries and states within the USA, I keep notes, and qualitative observations about how my body has reacted to each. Many times, it has been difficult to account for some of the most subtle changes because of jet lag and change in diet or routine. My body is sensitive so I treat it like a Canary in a coal mine. I maintain a high level of fitness and prioritize a healthy routine when I am home. With a stable baseline, I know the direct affects of travel, time zone and dietary changes. I understand how each has affected my health as well as my athletic stats, such as run time, recovery time, bowel schedule, and the required amount of recovery and detox to get back to baseline as I age. For the past 20 years, I have tracked my runs, activities and levels of perceived effort while holding different jobs, while traveling, in my quest to find a place like Alaska, where the air is fresh, where I have access to healthy resources and education.

I wish I could say I had a better experience in Thailand becuase I love the way healthy Thai food makes me feel in general, when I’ve had fresh from jungle, farm and quality restaurants. However, the city food, water and air in Bangkok had a tremendous, negative effect on every aspect of my health.

My energy level quickly faded, along with my ability to digest, rest, learn, study, focus and stay stable. I even experienced a few times when my mood seemed to be on a roller coaster but it always went down to the point where I seemed slow and depressed, wanting to cry for no reason. My soul fought to keep stable ground.

The air made me sick. The food lingered in my gut. The heat did not help When I returned to Alaska, I tested my blood fo r H.pylori antigens. Thankfully the results were negative. I’m sure there were other microbes, I should be watching for such as candida, but having dealth with that before, know my lifestyle back home is enough to balance my gut microbiome out.

Contrary to logic, I had expected my digestive system to actually be better in thailand because it is a nearly tropical climate where fruits grow very well. So I had expected it to be similar in effect to traveling to Colombia, where I experience more bowel regularity and less inflammation from eating fresh fruits, and meat there. The farming practices are fairly clean, they don’t use as many chemicals. However, Thai food had the opposite effect regardless of what I ate. My body became inflamed, I became tired, retained more water and digested much slower, except when traveling to the towns out in the country.

In order to get a sense if it was me or not, I took note of the people I talked to, and making assumptions. While the assumptions might not prove anything, they are worth looking into. I started looking at people I see on the streets, how people moved, how they talked and interacted on a regular basis. I did see about 2-3 in 10 males who looked to be over 30 had a distended belly, bloating. Half of these were chunky all over, but another half of them just had the belly bloat. It wasn’t as common in the females. About 1 in 10 Thai women were “chunky” but rarely had the belly bloat only. Another peculiarity: Tall younger thai boys of 17-30, of good stock” the type that looked like they had played sports at one point, the type destined to be chosen by society for success because of symmetry and constitution, seemed to be overweight. They were often accompanied by an attractive Thai woman with skin-lightening and typical K-pop influence. This adds several potential dynamics which work in this scenario. 1. Tall guys do attract the better-looking girls. Their bone structure and height signal better access to nutrients/food resources (wealth) and the overweightness indicated less of a tendency to conserve, to consume more calories than they spend. Also, the women that were with them could have a propensity to treat them well, cooking, so the men would get fed more, not just for comfort but women subconsciously wanting to protect their investment. Because of the dual feedback, no causality can be linked directly to health.

However, Thai culture revolves around food and entertainment. People eat when they’re hungry, they eat when they’re bored, they eat to appreciate, and they eat even when they’re full. Like the “muckbang” culture, it not only is acceptable to overeat, but encouraged.

This is an okay trend in mountain, farm and sports culture, where you can easily work off 5,000 calories in a day, but with the intense heat in Thailand, eating too much just creates a breeding ground in the gut for parasites and inflammation in the body.

Walking down the street, and jogging around the block, I was the often the only person engaging in anything health related. Work crews would be sitting under shade every time I walked by. Hardly any work got done in the construction zone where they were paving the small section of street I lived on and observed.

I wish the government would do something about it for the sake of the Thai people, but its a big city and people just accept the system they’re born into. I will say no more because I know more than I should. It is what it is.