*Starch, or the Decline and Fall of the AS Organism!*

Post Reply New Topic

"Perhaps they WILL? To me, they already are. Lawyers don't pretend to be anything but what they are. You can trust them to be what they are supposed to be. They understand the concept of rules. And they value logic. They're the ultimate geeks.

Me too.

I haven't been to a dentist in 26 years, my 9 year old son has never been, and we only go to the doctor for "fitness certificates" for his Karate etc, and years ago for the obligatory infant-medical exams.

The last time I went to a doctor for anything else was 13 years ago when I was "anxious and depressed", ( I was eating anything and everything ), taking sick-leave from work as a result, and asked for counselling services rather than the anti-depressants that she had prescribed the previous time two years before.
.

Last edited by ouinon on 18 Mar 2009, 9:11 am, edited 4 times in total.

Either, and it might not be a mild version.

Hidden allergy/intolerance can have a serious effect on health, ( depression, anxiety, mood-disorder, brain-fog/loss of cognitive function, insomnia, headaches, fatigue/lethargy, irritability, aggressivity, aswell as multiple physical symptoms ), without people realising that it is a food which is causing the problems.

This is because food intolerance works a bit like addiction; so long as you keep dosing yourself you won't get clear signs that a food makes you ill, in fact you may even feel better for a few hours after eating it than otherwise. It gives you a hit/buzz, like a fix, a hair-of-the-dog, and so you don't associate the food with illness but with nice feelings. Many people need their breakfast not because they are hungry, but because they are "hungover" and need their wheat, dairy, citrus, sugar, "hair-of-the-dog", before they can function.

Until you have gone on an exclusion diet, at least 7 days on a diet of fairly "safe" fruit, ( no citrus ), vegetables, ( no potatoes or onions ), and fish or meat, ( no chicken or pork ), you may have no idea that you are intolerant to wheat/gluten, dairy/casein or lactose, eggs, potatoes, corn, or whatever, because eating them everyday "masks" their true/full effect. The only fairly reliable, even "classic" sign is if you tend to crave/love a food, or feel unsatisified after meals which did not, for some reason, include the food.

After a week of exclusion however you will probably notice, ( when first eating the food again ), and it can be a considerable shock. People who have happily been eating eggs, or bread/wheat, or dairy, etc, every day of their lives, may experience a violent physical, emotional, or mental reaction, sometimes within minutes of eating it.


I get that too.
Unfortunately it is exactly that sort of attachment to a food which may indicate an intolerance to it.

I don't know about gluten-free flours, because I don't bake much, and am not very interested in a pizza which has neither wheat nor cheese in it! ( me too, I loved pizza ). The ready-made g-f products can be expensive, but apparently there are recipes for making pizza without gluten. There are lots of g-f sites on the net which have recipes, and/or advice for how to manage without.

I agree, ( one of the greatest anyway ! ).
.

I've just been rereading this thread to collect refs together for my presentation at Autscape in August on the links between diet and mental health.

I found out about the connection at a time when I was so desperate, ( total breakdown, aged 29, after several years of increasing mood-disorder; hypomania and depression ), that I was prepared to try anything, even something as radical/revolutionary as a change of diet. I "wish" that I had known about it before, when I was 10, 15, 20, when my brain was still pretty "elastic", while I was still at school/uni/had job prospects, before the "crash".

Apart from a few fairly minor physical symptoms of food intolerance, I had no idea that food ( gluten especially, but also dairy, and, as discussed in this thread, complex carbohydrates ), was having an effect on my ( mental ) health. I simply didn't realise. It had never occurred to me that the food I ate every day, had eaten for 29 years, might be a problem, the origin/cause of increasingly serious mental health issues.

And it is only because I had had a weird, and wonderful if very brief, out-of-body experience a couple of months before, which had made me realise the importance/value of my body generally, that I was ready to investigate diet at all. In case-studies it is often the people who think they can eat anything, "No problem", who have the most violent/extreme mental/emotional reactions to foods that they have been eating for years, after a week or more of exclusion dieting.

.