"Stop Telling me How to Eat to Cure My Incurable Disease!" screams the title of a blogpost provided by Woo. Thanks Woo!
LOL! I could have written this at one time, but I don't feel that way anymore.
A long time ago, a few months after being diagnosed with lupus, I still wasn't feeling very well. I was getting discouraged by my inability to carry on throughout a normal day, thinking that I would never get better.
We got together with friends over the 4th of July, and I was talking about my illness with my friend, who has a BSN, so the conversations can get fairly technical at times and she is right there with me. I was also drowning my sorrows in non-local wine.
They had another new friend at the party, a guy someone met at the gym. At first he seemed friendly. But when the others left to get more beers or to go to another part of the roof for an ocean view, I was left alone with him. He got right into my face and started SCREAMING at me about what vegan food I should eat, what supplements I should take, how I should exercise. Just like a drill sergeant.
This went on and on. I was stunned. I couldn't move. I just sat there saying to myself, "Somebody rescue me! Please! Why can't they help me?" Eventually the others came back, and the drill sergeant went onto other things, but I don't think I moved out of that chair until we were ready to leave.
Then again, if someone had told me at the time that I shouldn't eat wheat, I wouldn't have appreciated it either. I didn't reduce wheat until over a year later. By that time, I had figured out the appetite-stimulating aspect of wheat, and started reading about a low carb diet. By the time Dr. Davis' book came out, I was planted firmly in the "wheat is poison" camp. After a couple of years of monitoring (and a stint with Robb Wolf's autoimmune Paleo diet) my rheumy told me I didn't have to come back anymore.
I sort of forgot that I had an autoimmune disease. And the concept that it might even be celiac was absolutely off the radar until I started reading Dr. Perlmutter. So I am really glad that people like Dr. Wahls and Dr. Davis and Dr. Permutter are still telling people what to eat to cure their incurable diseases. I just wish I had heard this information years ago.
Some time after the party, I mentioned the incident to my host. He had no idea that the nutritional bullying was going on. He still recounts the story to new guests, at every holiday, and he still keeps apologizing to me. By now it seems pretty funny to all of us, but at times I am just so surprised at how many people think they can attack sick people.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
The Birthday Problem
Maybe it was all the resistant starch beforehand, or a ton of time in the ice tub, but I just had the craziest dream the other night.
I dreamed I was with my friends, and the "Birthday Problem" came up. That is the one that many quant-y folks have run into in a statistics class. It goes like this:
There are 23 people in a classroom. What is the probability that at least one of them has the same birthday?
The probability is astoundingly high by most people, because the natural inclination is to think that this is very very rare. My students mouths always dropped open when the answer was revealed, and it really got them thinking that maybe statistics wasn't so useless after all.
I had one student who was a real go-getter, and in her spare time, she liked to rent roach coaches, create interesting menus and hang around the local sports stadiums for a quick buck. Unfortunately, many other folks in the restaurant biz hadn't run into the problem.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh yeah, the dream.
I decide to explain the birthday problem in great detail to my quant-y friends. We arrange for a short presentation at a hotel we're staying at. Other hotel guests get wind of the presentation, and by the time I am ready to start, the room is full of people with all sorts of interests and levels of understanding. It gets quite comical. I decide to start with some basics, and somehow I get into a discussion of the history of industrial statistics. My new students are enthusiastic, but needy and time-consuming, so I remind myself and them what the talk is really about. As I go back to the technical discussion of the birthday problem, most of the lecture-crashers leave, and I am left with my original presentation and my original friends.
As most dreams go, I never get to the presentation. I wake up to my house-flipping neighbor's construction crew jack-hammering their front porch, and I sit there for awhile with my day-brain, wondering how I could actually describe the birthday problem more easily, and for that matter, why did this dream even come up?
Earlier I was reading about the percentage of celiacs, which is now around 1 out of 100 people if you include the folks who don't know they have it yet. I had also gotten off the phone with a family member. We were planning another mandatory multi-day get-together. I was told I was "on my own" with the food situation, but also that we weren't going to make it a big-deal food-prep week like many of our gatherings. Basically, it was, "You can't eat and you can't cook." I was pretty mad about this. (Said relative has now thought, back-tracked, and decided better accommodation was a good idea.) But it got me thinking about how places like Starbucks and Panda Express pretty much say, "Hey Celiacs! You're on your own here. If you have some sort of problem, then don't eat ANY of our food."
And I thought, they probably think that there isn't much celiac to accommodate, right? Isn't it like they are going to lose around .1% of their customer base by flipping celiacs the bird?
Like the birthday problem, the actual consequences of their decision are much larger. The way to solve the birthday problem is not to look at how many people have the same birthday, it is to look at how many ways the students in the classroom CANNOT have the same birthday divided by the total possible ways that they can all have birthdays. That is pretty easy to do, and then you just subtract that from one to get the answer.
So here's the restaurant problem. It is not that they will lose even 1 percent of business. People usually go to restaurants with other people. So in order to see impact on restaurants, you have to calculate the probability that NONE of the dining party has celiac and then subtract from 1.
I have done the calcs, and put together a little table, showing the reduction in business if a typical table of 4 or 6 decides not to eat there if the restaurant refuses to provide workable gluten-free options. The various percentages of celiac or wheat intolerances are also shown based on estimates by Drs. Fasano and Davis. Of course, this calculations assumes independence, and we all know by now that this is not really the case with dining families, since it is an inherited disease. So if one person has celiac, the others are much more likely to have it as well. But, the table does work for friends.
Percentage C or WI Table of 4 Table of 6
1% 4% 6%
7% (Fasano est.) 25% 35%
37% (Davis est.) 84% 94%
You can see that the lost business starts to get pretty high. Currently, it is pretty easy to ignore the celiacs, either by not offering appropriate menu choices, or improper preparation. But it is getting pretty hard to ignore the gluten-intolerant. This is probably what is going on with Lean Cuisine, bread stores, and even places like Red Lobster.
I dreamed I was with my friends, and the "Birthday Problem" came up. That is the one that many quant-y folks have run into in a statistics class. It goes like this:
There are 23 people in a classroom. What is the probability that at least one of them has the same birthday?
The probability is astoundingly high by most people, because the natural inclination is to think that this is very very rare. My students mouths always dropped open when the answer was revealed, and it really got them thinking that maybe statistics wasn't so useless after all.
I had one student who was a real go-getter, and in her spare time, she liked to rent roach coaches, create interesting menus and hang around the local sports stadiums for a quick buck. Unfortunately, many other folks in the restaurant biz hadn't run into the problem.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh yeah, the dream.
I decide to explain the birthday problem in great detail to my quant-y friends. We arrange for a short presentation at a hotel we're staying at. Other hotel guests get wind of the presentation, and by the time I am ready to start, the room is full of people with all sorts of interests and levels of understanding. It gets quite comical. I decide to start with some basics, and somehow I get into a discussion of the history of industrial statistics. My new students are enthusiastic, but needy and time-consuming, so I remind myself and them what the talk is really about. As I go back to the technical discussion of the birthday problem, most of the lecture-crashers leave, and I am left with my original presentation and my original friends.
As most dreams go, I never get to the presentation. I wake up to my house-flipping neighbor's construction crew jack-hammering their front porch, and I sit there for awhile with my day-brain, wondering how I could actually describe the birthday problem more easily, and for that matter, why did this dream even come up?
Earlier I was reading about the percentage of celiacs, which is now around 1 out of 100 people if you include the folks who don't know they have it yet. I had also gotten off the phone with a family member. We were planning another mandatory multi-day get-together. I was told I was "on my own" with the food situation, but also that we weren't going to make it a big-deal food-prep week like many of our gatherings. Basically, it was, "You can't eat and you can't cook." I was pretty mad about this. (Said relative has now thought, back-tracked, and decided better accommodation was a good idea.) But it got me thinking about how places like Starbucks and Panda Express pretty much say, "Hey Celiacs! You're on your own here. If you have some sort of problem, then don't eat ANY of our food."
And I thought, they probably think that there isn't much celiac to accommodate, right? Isn't it like they are going to lose around .1% of their customer base by flipping celiacs the bird?
Like the birthday problem, the actual consequences of their decision are much larger. The way to solve the birthday problem is not to look at how many people have the same birthday, it is to look at how many ways the students in the classroom CANNOT have the same birthday divided by the total possible ways that they can all have birthdays. That is pretty easy to do, and then you just subtract that from one to get the answer.
So here's the restaurant problem. It is not that they will lose even 1 percent of business. People usually go to restaurants with other people. So in order to see impact on restaurants, you have to calculate the probability that NONE of the dining party has celiac and then subtract from 1.
I have done the calcs, and put together a little table, showing the reduction in business if a typical table of 4 or 6 decides not to eat there if the restaurant refuses to provide workable gluten-free options. The various percentages of celiac or wheat intolerances are also shown based on estimates by Drs. Fasano and Davis. Of course, this calculations assumes independence, and we all know by now that this is not really the case with dining families, since it is an inherited disease. So if one person has celiac, the others are much more likely to have it as well. But, the table does work for friends.
Percentage C or WI Table of 4 Table of 6
1% 4% 6%
7% (Fasano est.) 25% 35%
37% (Davis est.) 84% 94%
You can see that the lost business starts to get pretty high. Currently, it is pretty easy to ignore the celiacs, either by not offering appropriate menu choices, or improper preparation. But it is getting pretty hard to ignore the gluten-intolerant. This is probably what is going on with Lean Cuisine, bread stores, and even places like Red Lobster.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Meeting my Acquaintance
One of the advantages of going completely gluten-free is that I have more energy. That is, more energy to be snarky ----------- or angry --------------or ranty.
Yesterday I was whiny. I am already obsessing about what will go down during the next big holiday. 'Course, in order to make everything all better, I talked to MOM for a long long time over several days. Mom was so great, having gone through severe bouts of autoimmune disease herself. I spend a good part of my early youth shuttling around to different people's spare rooms while she was in the hospital for lupus, or whatever else they thought she had that day. So, she has developed this really cool attitude about chronic debilitating illnesses and such.
She said it would be absolutely no problem, since she regularly cooks for other family members with such severe allergies that they routinely land in the hospital. (Not from HER cooking.) She is skilled in keeping the wrong foods out of the wrong hands. But I am really fretting about another relative who does much of the cooking for our big family gatherings. Her life is filled with 20 kinds of pasta and bread boards, and cakes, and hundreds of gluten-infested baking containers. She carries a cloud of flour around her like Linus. If she had an "In Case of Emergency, Break Glass" box for her life, behind the glass would be a box of cake mix.
I imagine my kitchen littered with drying bread-crumbs, flour from the cinnamon rolls and muffins and pumpkin pies strewn about. I see her moving from dish to tasty dish, her various fingers and utensils stuck into every one. Now I know why I have been getting so sick every Thanksgiving. It is from the stuffing, made with half corn bread and half whole wheat, and somehow drenched in Campbell's cream of mushroom soup in a way that no one else has ever been able to duplicate. And from the mashed potatoes with real milk, drenched in giblet gravy with even more flour.
How can I tell her that we have to do it differently this time?
I was supposed to get together with relatives over the Easter holiday, but I just didn't have the energy to do it, but truth be told, I wasn't looking forward to the food confrontations either. Initially I had hoped to find an ally, or at least get some good help from someone who can read Hyperlipid like its the back of cereal box. But that was not going to happen.
How can I tell her that the diet that she detests so much is the only thing I can eat?
After missing the big Easter gathering, I checked her facebook page for posts and pictures from other attendees. What I found instead was a link to that awful paleo fantasy book interview, and a couple of snarky comments. (OK, guess snark runs in the family along with several copies of HLA-DQ2.) The poster could actually read and understand Hyperlipid as well, but won't.
I don't know why, but seeing this post upset me so much. I whined. I cried. My husband told me to get a life. I thought I might have to unfriend her, or at least leave another snarky comment before I cut the cord. But I couldn't unfriend the family chef!
I acquaintanced her. And, changed a few settings.
I just hate that Paleo is mandatory. I just hate Dr. MacDougall. I just hate Joel Fuhrman. I hate it all.
Yesterday I was whiny. I am already obsessing about what will go down during the next big holiday. 'Course, in order to make everything all better, I talked to MOM for a long long time over several days. Mom was so great, having gone through severe bouts of autoimmune disease herself. I spend a good part of my early youth shuttling around to different people's spare rooms while she was in the hospital for lupus, or whatever else they thought she had that day. So, she has developed this really cool attitude about chronic debilitating illnesses and such.
She said it would be absolutely no problem, since she regularly cooks for other family members with such severe allergies that they routinely land in the hospital. (Not from HER cooking.) She is skilled in keeping the wrong foods out of the wrong hands. But I am really fretting about another relative who does much of the cooking for our big family gatherings. Her life is filled with 20 kinds of pasta and bread boards, and cakes, and hundreds of gluten-infested baking containers. She carries a cloud of flour around her like Linus. If she had an "In Case of Emergency, Break Glass" box for her life, behind the glass would be a box of cake mix.
I imagine my kitchen littered with drying bread-crumbs, flour from the cinnamon rolls and muffins and pumpkin pies strewn about. I see her moving from dish to tasty dish, her various fingers and utensils stuck into every one. Now I know why I have been getting so sick every Thanksgiving. It is from the stuffing, made with half corn bread and half whole wheat, and somehow drenched in Campbell's cream of mushroom soup in a way that no one else has ever been able to duplicate. And from the mashed potatoes with real milk, drenched in giblet gravy with even more flour.
How can I tell her that we have to do it differently this time?
I was supposed to get together with relatives over the Easter holiday, but I just didn't have the energy to do it, but truth be told, I wasn't looking forward to the food confrontations either. Initially I had hoped to find an ally, or at least get some good help from someone who can read Hyperlipid like its the back of cereal box. But that was not going to happen.
How can I tell her that the diet that she detests so much is the only thing I can eat?
After missing the big Easter gathering, I checked her facebook page for posts and pictures from other attendees. What I found instead was a link to that awful paleo fantasy book interview, and a couple of snarky comments. (OK, guess snark runs in the family along with several copies of HLA-DQ2.) The poster could actually read and understand Hyperlipid as well, but won't.
I don't know why, but seeing this post upset me so much. I whined. I cried. My husband told me to get a life. I thought I might have to unfriend her, or at least leave another snarky comment before I cut the cord. But I couldn't unfriend the family chef!
I acquaintanced her. And, changed a few settings.
I just hate that Paleo is mandatory. I just hate Dr. MacDougall. I just hate Joel Fuhrman. I hate it all.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Gluteny and Sloth - The game changes
I know I know I have been awol. Not for lack of things to say.
Just 'cause I don't even know where to begin.
I have celiac disease.
Yuk! What was formerly a bunch of fun "food experiments" now becomes a medical necessity.
I don't want to be one of THOSE people!
There is more to this story. Please stand by while I collect my thoughts.
Just 'cause I don't even know where to begin.
I have celiac disease.
Yuk! What was formerly a bunch of fun "food experiments" now becomes a medical necessity.
I don't want to be one of THOSE people!
There is more to this story. Please stand by while I collect my thoughts.
My Resistant Starch Experiment - LOL!
or, cry out loud. Whatever.
I have been following the RS debate for awhile now, carefully trying to avoid some of the prominent "C-word" websites all along. But, you see, I already invented it. I am lower carb, not VLC, and not keto much of the time unless I forget to eat or skip a meal. This is more and more common for me to skip breakfast, but to also eat similar foods with more carbs than for keto.
And I think last season I grew around 100 pounds of Jerusalem artichokes. (nuf said?)
This year, due to hoards of rabbits burrowing under the chokes and eating a great majority, I toyed with the idea of eating more potatoes instead of relying on my now-shorter choke season. In addition, all the chokes that weren't eaten either by myself or the rabbits started sprouting early, making them not as fit for eating. The little wascally wabbits even stole the tubers out of my basket that I leave right outside the kitchen. (I wasn't bringing them inside due to all the pill bugs.)
So it didn't seem all that weird for me to buy a few potatoes and try them out. As I was preparing them for my family, I had a bit of raw potato. Resistant starch, right? How hard could it be?
A couple of hours later, I didn't feel so well. I was burping something, my arthritic knee started hurting, my other knee started hurting. In fact, everything in my body that had sustained an injury in the last several months started hurting. Then a huge headache, weird cramps, then chills, then I couldn't walk without bumping into stuff. I decided I was done with that and went to bed. I couldn't take an aspirin or anything because I thought I would throw up. I slept sitting up, and woke up several times to drink more water and to try to mentally calm my racing heartbeat.
I woke up in the morning still very groggy and miserable, and whined to my family, "I feel like I am dying. I don't want this to be my life from now on." It felt like my whole body was liquifying, like I had been visited by Harvey Keitel and had been "cleaned".
I went back to bed, but forced myself up after awhile, and forced myself out of the house. By afternoon I was fine. There were confounding factors. Had I been glutened?
You know, I am really done with potatoes for awhile. I don't care if there are confounding factors. I'm too chicken-s to go through liquification again.
I have been following the RS debate for awhile now, carefully trying to avoid some of the prominent "C-word" websites all along. But, you see, I already invented it. I am lower carb, not VLC, and not keto much of the time unless I forget to eat or skip a meal. This is more and more common for me to skip breakfast, but to also eat similar foods with more carbs than for keto.
And I think last season I grew around 100 pounds of Jerusalem artichokes. (nuf said?)
This year, due to hoards of rabbits burrowing under the chokes and eating a great majority, I toyed with the idea of eating more potatoes instead of relying on my now-shorter choke season. In addition, all the chokes that weren't eaten either by myself or the rabbits started sprouting early, making them not as fit for eating. The little wascally wabbits even stole the tubers out of my basket that I leave right outside the kitchen. (I wasn't bringing them inside due to all the pill bugs.)
So it didn't seem all that weird for me to buy a few potatoes and try them out. As I was preparing them for my family, I had a bit of raw potato. Resistant starch, right? How hard could it be?
A couple of hours later, I didn't feel so well. I was burping something, my arthritic knee started hurting, my other knee started hurting. In fact, everything in my body that had sustained an injury in the last several months started hurting. Then a huge headache, weird cramps, then chills, then I couldn't walk without bumping into stuff. I decided I was done with that and went to bed. I couldn't take an aspirin or anything because I thought I would throw up. I slept sitting up, and woke up several times to drink more water and to try to mentally calm my racing heartbeat.
I woke up in the morning still very groggy and miserable, and whined to my family, "I feel like I am dying. I don't want this to be my life from now on." It felt like my whole body was liquifying, like I had been visited by Harvey Keitel and had been "cleaned".
I went back to bed, but forced myself up after awhile, and forced myself out of the house. By afternoon I was fine. There were confounding factors. Had I been glutened?
You know, I am really done with potatoes for awhile. I don't care if there are confounding factors. I'm too chicken-s to go through liquification again.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Um, Honestly???
Sooooo, sales of Lean Cuisine PLUMMET???
Jimmy sent out a link to this blog post about Lean Cuisine's sagging sales. Honestly, I have never had many of these "TV" dinners, but I know lots of folks who eat them all the time. Back in the day when I was doing Weight Watchers and got plenty of coupons, I did try a few of these "healthy"-type frozen dinners. But I thought they were bland and the portions and ingredients left me starving.
Lean Cuisines are big with people watching their weight at lunch. You can bring them into the office, pop them in the microwave, and when you are done, that's it. Great for portion control, but I don't know anybody who confuses them with real food.
Roz O'Hearn (yes, that looks like a real name, not just a St. Paddy's name!) says that Nestle (the company, not the Marion) uses "the same quality ingredients our consumers purchase when cooking from scratch."
Being data-driven as I am, I had to check this out. I checked out the ingredients list for the first entree I could find, something called "Glazed Chicken". Yum. Embedded in the long list of ingredients were lots that I never use when I cook from scratch. And here they are:
High Fructose Corn Syrup
corn oil
modified corn starch
sodium phosphate
caramel color
partially hydrogenated vegetable oil
wheat berries (OK, might be some disagreement on this. Some consider it natural, some consider it a natural poison.)
maltodextrin
canola oil
Sorry to break it to ya Roz, but I don't think I could even buy modified corn starch at a store. I think that is something people use when they are freezing things, not when they are cooking it from scratch.
Curious, I went to their website to check out more lists. I noticed a new brand name, Honestly Good. Now be careful and not use that phrase when describing food, since it is trademarked. I guess it is just a brand, not an actual description of the actual food, which isn't as Honest as it first seems.
I scanned down the list of ingredients and found fewer than in the regular brand. I don't have rice starch or dehydrated chicken broth in my pantry at the moment. But wait, what is in this chicken broth? My own scratch-chicken broth is chicken cooked in water and a few veggies for additional flavoring. This chicken broth mix has added "flavor". Yum, sounds flavorful. They also add "natural flavor". That's good. I have lots of natural flavors in my food too. I guess the difference between "flavor" and "natural flavor" is that one of the flavors is unnatural.
Its probably MSG. They wouldn't "man-up" enough to admit that, in such an Honestlie-Good product and such.
Here's what I think about the sales plummet. People aren't eating pasta anymore. So many people are going wheat-free, and if they are going to blow it, a real pizza is a much better choice. Just for fun, I started looking through all the ingredients lists for all the entrees. Twenty-four out of the 24 I checked had added wheat. When I tried to do a search, I found only two entrees that had no wheat at all. People trying to avoid wheat altogether would also have a problem with the website. When I entered "gluten" to exclude I got twelve pages of items, plus a gluten-ey list of entrees they somehow thought I would like at the bottom.
The one "Honestly Good" entree I checked had an astounding (to me anyway) 29 grams of carbs, and that included 6 grams of sugars that were hidden in various ways.
Honestly, Nestle, people aren't buying your dinners because they suck. They are either pasta or potstickers or whatever you want to call it, or bread or pita or whatever, and the few entrees that have the "safe" rice have either added gluten or wheat-based soy sauce. We just don't want to eat that stuff anymore. (And you should never have sold Peter's chocolate.)
Jimmy sent out a link to this blog post about Lean Cuisine's sagging sales. Honestly, I have never had many of these "TV" dinners, but I know lots of folks who eat them all the time. Back in the day when I was doing Weight Watchers and got plenty of coupons, I did try a few of these "healthy"-type frozen dinners. But I thought they were bland and the portions and ingredients left me starving.
Lean Cuisines are big with people watching their weight at lunch. You can bring them into the office, pop them in the microwave, and when you are done, that's it. Great for portion control, but I don't know anybody who confuses them with real food.
Roz O'Hearn (yes, that looks like a real name, not just a St. Paddy's name!) says that Nestle (the company, not the Marion) uses "the same quality ingredients our consumers purchase when cooking from scratch."
Being data-driven as I am, I had to check this out. I checked out the ingredients list for the first entree I could find, something called "Glazed Chicken". Yum. Embedded in the long list of ingredients were lots that I never use when I cook from scratch. And here they are:
High Fructose Corn Syrup
corn oil
modified corn starch
sodium phosphate
caramel color
partially hydrogenated vegetable oil
wheat berries (OK, might be some disagreement on this. Some consider it natural, some consider it a natural poison.)
maltodextrin
canola oil
Sorry to break it to ya Roz, but I don't think I could even buy modified corn starch at a store. I think that is something people use when they are freezing things, not when they are cooking it from scratch.
Curious, I went to their website to check out more lists. I noticed a new brand name, Honestly Good. Now be careful and not use that phrase when describing food, since it is trademarked. I guess it is just a brand, not an actual description of the actual food, which isn't as Honest as it first seems.
I scanned down the list of ingredients and found fewer than in the regular brand. I don't have rice starch or dehydrated chicken broth in my pantry at the moment. But wait, what is in this chicken broth? My own scratch-chicken broth is chicken cooked in water and a few veggies for additional flavoring. This chicken broth mix has added "flavor". Yum, sounds flavorful. They also add "natural flavor". That's good. I have lots of natural flavors in my food too. I guess the difference between "flavor" and "natural flavor" is that one of the flavors is unnatural.
Its probably MSG. They wouldn't "man-up" enough to admit that, in such an Honestlie-Good product and such.
Here's what I think about the sales plummet. People aren't eating pasta anymore. So many people are going wheat-free, and if they are going to blow it, a real pizza is a much better choice. Just for fun, I started looking through all the ingredients lists for all the entrees. Twenty-four out of the 24 I checked had added wheat. When I tried to do a search, I found only two entrees that had no wheat at all. People trying to avoid wheat altogether would also have a problem with the website. When I entered "gluten" to exclude I got twelve pages of items, plus a gluten-ey list of entrees they somehow thought I would like at the bottom.
The one "Honestly Good" entree I checked had an astounding (to me anyway) 29 grams of carbs, and that included 6 grams of sugars that were hidden in various ways.
Honestly, Nestle, people aren't buying your dinners because they suck. They are either pasta or potstickers or whatever you want to call it, or bread or pita or whatever, and the few entrees that have the "safe" rice have either added gluten or wheat-based soy sauce. We just don't want to eat that stuff anymore. (And you should never have sold Peter's chocolate.)
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Where's the Beef? Part 1
I could have written this:
http://letthemeatmeat.com/post/386123924/the-history-of-my-diet
Well, maybe not as well. And my own situation wasn't as dramatic. I was a vegetarian long-term, but only vegan for a short while because I went downhill more rapidly than he did.
Like Rhys, I was tired on the vegan diet. I also struggled with restless legs, lots of skin problems and I caught every cold and flu version that passed my way.
For me, being vegetarian did "fix" certain problems, like weight and monthly hormones, but eventually it caught up with me. I tried dozens of prescription and non-prescription creams and lotions for my skin, every type of shampoo and soap for my scalp, and every kind of laundry detergent on my clothing, but nothing helped.
Like Rhys, my gateway drug back to omnivorism was not bacon, it was a bottle of omega 3 capsules. My skin and hair improved considerably. My restless legs mostly stopped when I started taking Cal-Mag tablets. My peripheral neuropathy stopped after I went on a low-carb diet. I haven't gotten sick ever since I started supplementing with vitamin D over two years ago, so even a Paleo/Primal diet with sunshine didn't fully help.
However, unlike Rhys, I think it was my whole-foods macrobiotic diet that allowed me to be a vegetarian for so long without such severe consequences. At least I had seaweed and a goodly amount of brown rice for my carbs, instead of wheat. For me at least, I think an excess of wheat was the main culprit the whole time. I remember when I became a vegetarian for the first time in my teens. I had a huge bowl of wheat germ with milk for breakfast every morning, and my skin started to break out more. Eventually I stopped eating the wheat germ so constantly, because it came in a little jar and I got tired of buying so much of it.
This winter I have allowed a bit of wheat back into my diet. I was always following some sort of 80/20 rule, and didn't worry too much about going out to dinner, or the occasional cookie. Right around Thanksgiving, we had a few goodies around the house, then with all the other holidays, there were more wheat options. I tried to eat wheat only every other day, but eventually I started eating more.
You see, I work in the food rescue business, and most days I am working with mounds of bagels, boxes and bags of pastries, wonderful artisan loaves of bread wheat pasta. So, a bagel here, a piece of broken cookie there, well you know the drill.
I started gaining weight around the holidays, and then I fell. 4 times! Every time I fell, I would hurt my knee or something, then get stiff, then trip over something else in the garden. My last fall was the worst. I tripped on the vacuum cleaner, went sailing into a hope chest, and rolled down right on my already-injured knee. My baby toe got numb and I still have problems with my knee several months later. But then something really weird started happening. My other toe got numb, and then my baby fingers. I started running into everything and losing my balance. And perhaps how I was sitting was causing a problem. I used to sit anywhere, usually cross-legged on the floor and I could no longer bend my knee that far, or get up off the floor without damaging my knee further. I couldn't do strengthening exercises or walking either.
I suspected that wheat was causing the problem, since the same symptoms happened after Thanksgiving. I did a bit of reading and found that there is a condition called "gluten ataxia". I don't think I have that, since my condition improved immediately after stopping all wheat. I have been totally wheat-free for about two weeks now, and I am also doing Dr. Davis' wheatlessMarch challenge. I know there is something else that is causing problems, and if I am not 100% better in a month, I will be eliminating other foods that could either be contaminating or cross-reactive.
This is so weird! Who knew wheat could cause me to lose my balance? Who knew it could cause nerve damage that may be permanent? (OK, maybe Dr. Perlmutter.) Currently, I am experimenting with non-gluten grains to see if they are also a problem. I don't know if it is due to the wheat proteins or the high-glycemic index of wheat products. I KNOW that certain other foods are still a bother. Now that I have drained the wheat swamp, other problems present immediately and dramatically.
I am not sure if I am ready to be one of those people who can't have absolutely any wheat. In the meantime, I will continue to be one of those faddy people swept up in the anti-gluten craze.
Here's more info on gluten ataxia.
http://letthemeatmeat.com/post/386123924/the-history-of-my-diet
Well, maybe not as well. And my own situation wasn't as dramatic. I was a vegetarian long-term, but only vegan for a short while because I went downhill more rapidly than he did.
Like Rhys, I was tired on the vegan diet. I also struggled with restless legs, lots of skin problems and I caught every cold and flu version that passed my way.
For me, being vegetarian did "fix" certain problems, like weight and monthly hormones, but eventually it caught up with me. I tried dozens of prescription and non-prescription creams and lotions for my skin, every type of shampoo and soap for my scalp, and every kind of laundry detergent on my clothing, but nothing helped.
Like Rhys, my gateway drug back to omnivorism was not bacon, it was a bottle of omega 3 capsules. My skin and hair improved considerably. My restless legs mostly stopped when I started taking Cal-Mag tablets. My peripheral neuropathy stopped after I went on a low-carb diet. I haven't gotten sick ever since I started supplementing with vitamin D over two years ago, so even a Paleo/Primal diet with sunshine didn't fully help.
However, unlike Rhys, I think it was my whole-foods macrobiotic diet that allowed me to be a vegetarian for so long without such severe consequences. At least I had seaweed and a goodly amount of brown rice for my carbs, instead of wheat. For me at least, I think an excess of wheat was the main culprit the whole time. I remember when I became a vegetarian for the first time in my teens. I had a huge bowl of wheat germ with milk for breakfast every morning, and my skin started to break out more. Eventually I stopped eating the wheat germ so constantly, because it came in a little jar and I got tired of buying so much of it.
This winter I have allowed a bit of wheat back into my diet. I was always following some sort of 80/20 rule, and didn't worry too much about going out to dinner, or the occasional cookie. Right around Thanksgiving, we had a few goodies around the house, then with all the other holidays, there were more wheat options. I tried to eat wheat only every other day, but eventually I started eating more.
You see, I work in the food rescue business, and most days I am working with mounds of bagels, boxes and bags of pastries, wonderful artisan loaves of bread wheat pasta. So, a bagel here, a piece of broken cookie there, well you know the drill.
I started gaining weight around the holidays, and then I fell. 4 times! Every time I fell, I would hurt my knee or something, then get stiff, then trip over something else in the garden. My last fall was the worst. I tripped on the vacuum cleaner, went sailing into a hope chest, and rolled down right on my already-injured knee. My baby toe got numb and I still have problems with my knee several months later. But then something really weird started happening. My other toe got numb, and then my baby fingers. I started running into everything and losing my balance. And perhaps how I was sitting was causing a problem. I used to sit anywhere, usually cross-legged on the floor and I could no longer bend my knee that far, or get up off the floor without damaging my knee further. I couldn't do strengthening exercises or walking either.
I suspected that wheat was causing the problem, since the same symptoms happened after Thanksgiving. I did a bit of reading and found that there is a condition called "gluten ataxia". I don't think I have that, since my condition improved immediately after stopping all wheat. I have been totally wheat-free for about two weeks now, and I am also doing Dr. Davis' wheatlessMarch challenge. I know there is something else that is causing problems, and if I am not 100% better in a month, I will be eliminating other foods that could either be contaminating or cross-reactive.
This is so weird! Who knew wheat could cause me to lose my balance? Who knew it could cause nerve damage that may be permanent? (OK, maybe Dr. Perlmutter.) Currently, I am experimenting with non-gluten grains to see if they are also a problem. I don't know if it is due to the wheat proteins or the high-glycemic index of wheat products. I KNOW that certain other foods are still a bother. Now that I have drained the wheat swamp, other problems present immediately and dramatically.
I am not sure if I am ready to be one of those people who can't have absolutely any wheat. In the meantime, I will continue to be one of those faddy people swept up in the anti-gluten craze.
Here's more info on gluten ataxia.
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