About Me — Nina Vinot
The girl obsessed with poop
At age 7, I dreamt of becoming a writer. In my wanderings in the dusty attic of our country house, I found my mother’s old typewriter and spent my holidays typing stories about aliens landing in Arizona, carnivorous plants, and about a boy who lived in Quito and loved his rabbit pet. My teacher read my stories to the whole classroom while I blushed from a mix of shame and pride.
In middle school, I wanted to become a scientist, fooling around with test tubes. Or a businesswoman walking through airports with my suitcase. In high school, a film director, scenarist, and a film critic. I was encouraged to pursue science, so I projected myself as a vulcanologist or a paleontologist. At university, my love for biology bubbled and broadened. I had fantastic teachers who made their wonder for life contagious. The absolute perfection of a mere insect or flower was awe-inspiring. I will always remember the revelation when my amazing biology teacher Bruno Anselme said “We live in a world of bacteria”. We’d lived in a world of bacteria all along, and I’d never known!
“We live in a world of bacteria.”
Bruno Anselme (and allegedly, others before him)
At university, I was the nerd taking notes in the big empty amphitheater when the nearly 200 other students were still sleeping and sick from partying the night before. I was happy to share my transcripts with anyone who wanted them. So when I started working as a sales engineer and travelling to expensive conferences, filling entire notebooks with the latest science, it felt like the natural extension, to write a report and share it. I posted such reports on LinkedIn and was stunned that my industry peers were reading them and thanking me at coffee breaks. These reports got featured in the Microbiome Times and other magazines specialized in nutrition and probiotics - and that’s how my Sunday blogging hobby started.
Today, I sell bacteria for a living. It’s the best job ever, by the way. Free travel to 20 countries so far, the chance to meet amazing people all over the globe, standing right at the heart of the revolution of the century in what concerns our relationship to health, nutrition and medicine.
There’s one thing that didn’t change since I was a toddler, though, across all my explorations of life possibilities. That is something only my closest friends and family know. My malicious attraction to poop! I always laughed at jokes about poop and my mother was amused / worried that it didn’t stop with my growing older.
I will never forget my stupefaction in the very first conference about probiotics I attended. Serious and grave speakers pointed out the dangers of bacteria whose names seemed exotic, like the lethal Clostridium difficile. They explained with a deadpan expression that the most effective treatment was the ultra-modern Fecal Microbial Transplant. FMT. It took me a moment to understand what the speaker meant. A transplant of bacteria from a donor to a recipient. Poop pills. Poop enemas. Poop through gastric tubes. Poop teaming with tiny warriors who could defeat Cdiff much better than antibiotics. I had stepped into poop wonderland. Poop connects us all, and contains life-saving microbes and phages, beyond other riches that could benefit agriculture, production of energy, recycling waste, etc.
Recently, I joined Medium to contaminate you with my awe for life and microorganisms. To raise awareness and open a discussion with people like you who are not attending the latest conferences on the gut microbiome, but are interested in the change of paradigm our time is living — the Holobody Revolution. All these discoveries will impact your life, your health, and the ecological harmony around you. Are you interested in diving into the real story of evolution, the one that doesn’t evince the first 3 billion years of life? Are you interested in understanding what is your gut microbiota? How to best nurture it? What difference it can make? To realize that your food and drugs get to your microbes before they get to your blood? To discover how harnessing the powers of bacteria will help us oppose climate change, plastic pollution, bees extinction, coral reefs bleaching, and much more? Then follow me, I am setting sail in this direction.
Plus, there’s something else I want to write about. Other intimate revelation. I discovered at 16 my mother’s deep desire to die. It broke something in our relationship, at emotional level. I could never ask again a simple “how are you?” as I knew it was forcing her to lie. It raised many questions about myself too. Since depression is in a great part genetic, and transmitted by kids learning to react the way our caregivers show us, how could I avoid her fate? So I took on an early quest to learn about psychology, happiness, joy, gratitude, optimism, emotional intelligence, the meaning of life. Given the increasing prevalence of mental distress, I am also keen on sharing these learnings, as I tried to do with the 10 lifestyle strategies for fighting depression, and potentially help others in their struggles.
I guess I’m still the little girl who couldn’t settle for one thing in life.
Thank you for taking the time to know me. Please send a comment, I’d love to know you too!
