Health: Part 1
I want to start by saying that this is going to be a long multi-part blog. At least three parts and possibly as many as five parts. I’m going to publish them consecutively over the next few days. I almost never type out, edit, proofread, edit again, etc any of my blogs. Almost all of them consist of me thinking of a subject or two, sitting down, writing, quick proofread and posting. This entry is, in my opinion, too important to screw up or leave to chance. I’ve been writing it and editing it for a few weeks now and I think I’m finally ready to get it out there.
So, you might be asking, what’s so important? In my opinion, the single greatest controllable threat facing the Western world is our diet. Obviously there are all sorts of potential dangers lurking out there but most of them aren’t something you can really control. If Yellowstone decides it’s going to blow up (it’s overdue) and launch the world into a devastating volcanic winter then, well, so be it. We can’t control a supervolcano. But we can control our diet. Most people either don’t realize it or they simply don’t care but they are poisoning themselves. I’m no exception. For years I’ve eaten in an unhealthy manner and let my weight get out of control. It took a wake up call this past spring with a Celiac scare to snap me out of it. It isn’t that I didn’t know that eating lots of plant-based foods was better for me. It’s that I didn’t realize HOW much better it was for me. I also know a lot more details about diet, nutrition and health than I did six months ago. The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know yet. It’s an incredibly complicated world and I’m pretty convinced no one will ever solve human nutrition better than nature already has.
As you may recall if you read my blog back in May, I had some extreme stomach problems for a few weeks and basically couldn’t eat for seven days in a row. I was so lightheaded by the end of that period that I was having trouble walking. I almost passed out a few times. Oddly enough, I saw Elizabeth Hasslebeck (of all people) on her TV book tour to promote her gluten-free living book and she spoke about her personal experiences with Celiac disease and some of the symptoms. All of the symptoms I was having lined up with Celiac and I had increased my gluten intake before the stomach problems. So I figured, what the hell… I haven’t eaten more than 500 calories in a day for a week and I can’t even walk around without feeling like I might fall over so I might as well give the gluten-free thing a shot. I had an endoscopy done in Costa Rica on Monday, May 4th. I didn’t eat any gluten that day because I had to fast before the morning endoscopy and after the endoscopy was when I made up my mind to try the gluten-free thing. I felt a bit better on Tuesday, May 5th but I still didn’t feel all that good. I was able to eat a bit more and I managed to put down some Gatorade which made me feel better. I flew home to Grand Cayman on Wednesday, May 6th and I remember when I got on the plane the stewardess brought me a bowl of nuts before we took off. The dilemma was, should I eat then and potentially feel better? Or was it too big a risk that I would feel horrible and spend the flight in the bathroom? I decided to take it slow and see how it went. I probably ate one almond every two minutes until we took off. I didn’t feel worse. So I kept eating and about an hour later I had polished off the bowl and actually felt pretty good. For the meal on the plane the only thing that was gluten-free was a salad so I ate that and felt better still.
I changed planes in Miami and had some time to kill in between flights so I grabbed a salad at Au Bon Pain and I can’t even begin to describe how good it tasted. Just being able to put food down was a great feeling. But my stomach was feeling infinitely better even just 60 hours after my last bite of gluten-containing food. I thought to myself, wow, is this really the problem? Maybe gluten was the problem, maybe it wasn’t. It’s really hard to say because there were a host of factors in play but I really didn’t care. I obviously kicked myself for the PB&J sandwiches I’d eaten in Costa Rica but more so than anything I was incredibly relieved. I decided I had to get tested and read up on gluten. Obviously I hoped I didn’t have Celiac disease just because of the difficulty involved in follow such a diet when eating out but I was so happy to feel better I actually would have opted for Celiac disease in a second over feeling awful in the long run.
After returning to Cayman on May 6th I immediately jumped into the Celiac reading material. I also made a doctor appointment to get the Celiac blood test which, admittedly, is not all that accurate. But since I didn’t want to get another endoscopy done at the time and no one in Cayman is capable of doing a celiac biopsy, I figured the blood test was the best I could do at that time. In addition to all of that, obviously, I was eating a gluten-free diet. And it was probably the healthiest I’d eaten over the course of a few weeks in years. First, I couldn’t get dessert whenever I was out somewhere just because everything except for sorbet had gluten — and I don’t really like sorbet. Second, I was eating a lot of salads with oil/vinegar dressing because basically everything at restaurants has gluten in it. Even if you order something like chicken with vegetables, if there’s any sauce on the chicken you can safely bet that it has gluten in it. So I was eating healthier than ever and feeling better than ever. I never really realized that you could actually subsist on salads, fruit, nuts, beans, etc. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t realize it as much as I never really comprehended why in the world anyone would eat like that. Little did I know what I was about to find out.
The first book I read was a book about eating with Celiac disease. It was about 50-100 pages of actual information followed by another 100 pages of recipes. It made me feel better about my prospects by teaching me about which flours have gluten and a whole host of other stuff about eating with Celiac. Helpful for sure but nothing life changing. A high school friend of mine recommended I read a book called The Paleo Diet so I bought a version of it meant for athletes and off I went. The book’s premise is that humans evolved to eat fruit, vegetables, meat, seafood, certain nuts and relatively few other things. The crux of his argument is that grain and dairy were introduced to the human diet within the last 10,000 years or so which is only 300-something generations. In his opinion, that wasn’t enough time for our digestive system to evolve and it has led to widespread problems with milk products. This made sense to me on a basic level even before I read some of the science behind it. I’m sure everyone knows someone who is either lactose intolerant or gets an upset stomach from milk. Also, while grains were introduced thousands of years ago, processed grains have really only been introduced in the last generation or two. He makes a very convincing argument against grains (even more so against processed grains which have been stripped of all nutrients) and dairy and explains their role in disease and early death. The Paleo Diet left me convinced that dairy and processed grains had to go from my diet. I also decided that, although whole grains arguably have some health benefits, I wasn’t going to eat them either for the time being because I was still unsure about whether I had Celiac or not.
A few weeks after the blood test I got the results back (Cayman doctors have to ship the blood to labs in the US to get it tested so it takes forever) and the test indicated that it was possible I had Celiac. My antibodies or whatever gets produced in the autoimmune response found in Celiac sufferers happened to out of normal range. But it also wasn’t as high as the typical Celiac sufferer so it really didn’t give me a good answer. I decided, well, I guess I can try eating some gluten here and there to see how I react. But the thing was, I’d been forced to eating really healthy for the rest of May and I was losing so much weight and feeling so much better I really didn’t even want to go back to gluten. I basically just stopped caring about things like gluten in sauces but I still didn’t eat bread, pasta, cake, etc. Anything with larger quantities of gluten was out. While I know Celiac is triggered by even a tiny amount of gluten, my theory was that if I had some sort of intolerance or allergy then volume might make a difference. And I didn’t want to overdo it if that was the case. So I ate smaller amounts of gluten here and there and I felt fine. I’m pretty sure I don’t have Celiac. I should probably get the endoscopy done at some point but I haven’t done it yet.
My next few months were basically filled with daily reading of books and online material related to diet, health, disease, medications, etc. I learned a lot about death rates, ailments and tons of other things relevant to diet. My next part will start to focus on what I read and what I managed to take away from it all. Later parts will talk about the sources of the problem with our diets and also what we can do about it.
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