Food

So, a couple months ago, my sister, the Shivan Dragon, was bored, had a very few spare minutes (not enough to do anything productive or artistic), and did a web-search on short pinkies.

What does this have to do with food, you may wonder?

Well, she found (she said, and I’m typing this at work with no internet to be imported into LJ later, so I’m not attempting to recreate her Google-fu) that short pinkies are statistically associated with celiac disease. As are Irish ancestry, bad teeth, kids with ADD/ADHD, intestinal cancer, sleep problems of one sort or another, and a variety of other things that describe people in my birth family. (There’s also a variety of things that celiac can cause that do not afflict anyone in my family.  But no one with Celiac has all the possible side-effects.) Dragon also told me that, particularly among people of Irish ancestry, there’s a form of celiac that does not cause the typical gastrointestinal problems. Or maybe it’s that there are people who tolerate wheat and/or gluten poorly who suffer from something that isn’t exactly the same as Celiac, I'm not sure.

It was an interesting conversation, and I went on with life.  But Dragon kept finding new correlations (which I have conflated in the above paragraph), which led to me, pretty much on the spur of the moment, thinking, I can try living without wheat and barley (rye has never been food) for a few weeks. After all, I have all these LJ friends who manage it. I expected nothing to come of it, but almost immediately I noticed some subtle but important differences. My feet felt better, and I didn’t get spacey and grumpy if I got really hungry. And I wasn’t as mentally foggy if I was short on sleep. And my flatulence diminished suddenly and dramatically.

(Did I mention that in discussing this with various family members, I found that one of the things that first “impressed” my mother about my father’s cousins was how many jokes they knew on the topic of breaking wind?)

Well, those first couple of weeks, I hadn’t gone shopping for “gluten-free” things. There was rice in the house, and milk, meat and vegetables. But then I got this job, and had less time to cook, and needed stuff I could carry in for lunch. So I started picking up some of the pre-made things—did you know that almost all gluten-free breads and chips (and other products) have corn in them?

Oh, yeah—corn. I tested  (mildly) positive to corn as an allergy when I got tested as a teenager. It never seemed to cause me any problems;however, on general principles, I tried not to eat it too often, or if I were having more problems than usual with the inhaled allergies.

So, suddenly I’m eating more corn, both deliberately (corn chips) and incidentally (just about all the rice cakes/chips and even some of the gluten-free noodles, protein bars, etc.), and eating some just about every day. I even got some gluten-free cornbread mix because I missed bread. After a while, I started to correlate the frequency and severity of certain gastrointestinal symptoms—discomfort, frequent calls of nature, and the return of the ever-so-pleasant flatulence—with how much corn I’d eaten the day two before.

Um. Corn is in practically everything, if you count corn starch, corn syrup, HFCS, corn oil, and corn meal.

I kept planning to go off the diet to see what would happen (and to eat some of the things in my house that I’d already bought, like the girl scout cookies that arrived after I started this experiment), but it never seemed a good time. Finally, last Thursday, I was tempted by a cookie, and went off the diet, I thought, for a couple of weeks. Friday night I kept being awakened; I got up and had some nice imported Irish oatmeal and went back to bed, to sleep all day. I never imagined flatulence could steal a night’s sleep more effectively than the sleep apnea does, if I don’t wear the machine!  I still didn't feel very rested when I finally got up at dinnertime.

So, I didn’t get to the Filk Saturday, and didn’t get much writing done to make up for last week's dragginess due to the time of the month. So I’m behind on Fireborn, missed #fridayflash, and still haven’t finished the new battleflute-mage story.

Do you know, I’m sure I could have written at least four flash-stories in the amount of time I’ve spent reading ingredient labels over the last two months? *sigh*

All I can say is Thank Goodness for Chocolate!

And for Haagen-daas 5-ingredient ice creams. (And for the ones that could have that label (like Strawberry) though they aren’t marketed that way.)

You know, my life is rarely the adventure I expected.

So, I have to re-plan my diet, yet again.  I may be sharing some gluten-and-corn-free recipes.  Assuming I find time to develop any well enough to share!

Footnote: For those who want Coke without HFCS, apparently it’s bottled with cane sugar in Mexico, and you are likely to be able to find it at your local Mercado.

Food

So, a couple months ago, my sister, the Shivan Dragon, was bored, had a very few spare minutes (not enough to do anything productive or artistic), and did a web-search on short pinkies.

What does this have to do with food, you may wonder?

Well, she found (she said, and I’m typing this at work with no internet to be imported into LJ later, so I’m not attempting to recreate her Google-fu) that short pinkies are statistically associated with celiac disease. As are Irish ancestry, bad teeth, kids with ADD/ADHD, intestinal cancer, sleep problems of one sort or another, and a variety of other things that describe people in my birth family. (There’s also a variety of things that celiac can cause that do not afflict anyone in my family.  But no one with Celiac has all the possible side-effects.) Dragon also told me that, particularly among people of Irish ancestry, there’s a form of celiac that does not cause the typical gastrointestinal problems. Or maybe it’s that there are people who tolerate wheat and/or gluten poorly who suffer from something that isn’t exactly the same as Celiac, I'm not sure.

It was an interesting conversation, and I went on with life.  But Dragon kept finding new correlations (which I have conflated in the above paragraph), which led to me, pretty much on the spur of the moment, thinking, I can try living without wheat and barley (rye has never been food) for a few weeks. After all, I have all these LJ friends who manage it. I expected nothing to come of it, but almost immediately I noticed some subtle but important differences. My feet felt better, and I didn’t get spacey and grumpy if I got really hungry. And I wasn’t as mentally foggy if I was short on sleep. And my flatulence diminished suddenly and dramatically.

(Did I mention that in discussing this with various family members, I found that one of the things that first “impressed” my mother about my father’s cousins was how many jokes they knew on the topic of breaking wind?)

Well, those first couple of weeks, I hadn’t gone shopping for “gluten-free” things. There was rice in the house, and milk, meat and vegetables. But then I got this job, and had less time to cook, and needed stuff I could carry in for lunch. So I started picking up some of the pre-made things—did you know that almost all gluten-free breads and chips (and other products) have corn in them?

Oh, yeah—corn. I tested  (mildly) positive to corn as an allergy when I got tested as a teenager. It never seemed to cause me any problems;however, on general principles, I tried not to eat it too often, or if I were having more problems than usual with the inhaled allergies.

So, suddenly I’m eating more corn, both deliberately (corn chips) and incidentally (just about all the rice cakes/chips and even some of the gluten-free noodles, protein bars, etc.), and eating some just about every day. I even got some gluten-free cornbread mix because I missed bread. After a while, I started to correlate the frequency and severity of certain gastrointestinal symptoms—discomfort, frequent calls of nature, and the return of the ever-so-pleasant flatulence—with how much corn I’d eaten the day two before.

Um. Corn is in practically everything, if you count corn starch, corn syrup, HFCS, corn oil, and corn meal.

I kept planning to go off the diet to see what would happen (and to eat some of the things in my house that I’d already bought, like the girl scout cookies that arrived after I started this experiment), but it never seemed a good time. Finally, last Thursday, I was tempted by a cookie, and went off the diet, I thought, for a couple of weeks. Friday night I kept being awakened; I got up and had some nice imported Irish oatmeal and went back to bed, to sleep all day. I never imagined flatulence could steal a night’s sleep more effectively than the sleep apnea does, if I don’t wear the machine!  I still didn't feel very rested when I finally got up at dinnertime.

So, I didn’t get to the Filk Saturday, and didn’t get much writing done to make up for last week's dragginess due to the time of the month. So I’m behind on Fireborn, missed #fridayflash, and still haven’t finished the new battleflute-mage story.

Do you know, I’m sure I could have written at least four flash-stories in the amount of time I’ve spent reading ingredient labels over the last two months? *sigh*

All I can say is Thank Goodness for Chocolate!

And for Haagen-daas 5-ingredient ice creams. (And for the ones that could have that label (like Strawberry) though they aren’t marketed that way.)

You know, my life is rarely the adventure I expected.

So, I have to re-plan my diet, yet again.  I may be sharing some gluten-and-corn-free recipes.  Assuming I find time to develop any well enough to share!

Footnote: For those who want Coke without HFCS, apparently it’s bottled with cane sugar in Mexico, and you are likely to be able to find it at your local Mercado.