Pain, Pain, Go Away!

My tutorial on uploading your lab results to the Inner Circle website: 

If you've found Dr. Davis's Inner Circle website hard to navigate, you're not alone. There's a lot on the site and it's not intuitively organized. So I've made a video highlighting the most useful features: how to bookmark pages, print the cheat sheets, take the online courses, find advanced protocols and the best probiotics for you, search the site, and where to get the latest information.

This recipe is adapted from the New York Style Cheesecake recipe on Dr. Davis's site. Despite some kind members there recommending gum-free brands of cream cheese and even cultures to make your own, there's no acceptable cream cheese sold near me, and using ricotta cheese is less trouble than adding another fermentation project.  Using ricotta gives the cheesecake a fluffy texture and adding lemon extract gives it more flavor. I used Simple Truth ricotta (Kroger's organic store brand), which didn't need to be drained since it wasn't runny.  The net carb count of Dr. Davis's recipe is 4.7g per slice (assuming 8 servings); that figure should hold true for this recipe, also. Crust 1½ cups almond flour  1½ teaspoon cinnamon  ½ cup Splenda 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons pastured lard  1 egg  1½ teaspoon vanilla extract
 Filling 16 ounces ricotta cheese (with no emulsifiers or gums) 1 cup sour cream ½ cup Splenda 1 dash salt  3 eggs 3 tablespoons lemon juice 1½ te

It can be hard finding prepared foods like dairy, sausage and sauces without emulsifiers (food thickeners). These additives can damage the mucus lining of your stomach, if only temporarily, and allow bad bacteria into your system. That's how Dr. Davis explained what he thought was happening when I talked about it at the last Inner Circle meetup.  Thickeners like carrageenan, guar gum, gellan gum, locust bean gum, even palm oil (used as an emulsifier in almond butter) and others are in foods you wouldn't suspect. I've had to toss out cream, protein powder, cream cheese, coconut milk, deli chicken--I even had to return a package of raw chicken once. Raw chicken! Why does raw chicken need anything added to it but butter, lemon and heat? Are they trying to make people sick? It must have been making me sick because I've felt so much better without emulsifiers and thickeners. I can do physical work without wearing myself out, my palpitations are gone, my puffy face is gone,

 After suffering with heart-pounding palpitations for eight years, I finally have an answer: endotoxemia brought on by emulsifiers, which thin the mucus in your digestive tract and allow toxins in your gut to get into the rest of your system. I finally realized the cause (emulsifiers in food) and Dr. Davis suggested the effect (endotoxemia). He said in the Zoom meeting last night that was probably the cause, and that endotoxemia was a big factor in heart disease.  Since cutting out emulsifiers like guar gum, gellan gum, lecithin, locust/carob bean gum and even palm oil (used in almond butter to homogenize it), the palpitations have gone and so have my puffy face, neck pain and TMJ pain. I'm sleeping better, feeling better and thinking more clearly. Did I mention it's been eight years since I felt this well?  Victory! Photo from Unsplash . You know how you feel after you've had a very long day--or several in a row? That's how I felt for five days. It was such a relief t

I may have found a reason I have a lot of ups and downs in how I feel: energetic sometimes, then sluggish; feeling great, then slowed down by stomach aches, neck pains and headaches. It reminds me of when I felt so awful I ended up in an ambulance after drinking almond milk that had carrageenan . Carrageenan is a emulsifier. I looked at the cream cheese I'd been using to make cheesecake. (I love low-carb--dessert for breakfast and dip for dinner.) It all had locust bean gum: an emulsifier.  I didn't feel anything until I'd been eating the stuff for a few weeks, and then every time I had some cream cheese, it felt like it was sitting on my stomach and I didn't feel like doing anything. So maybe it's cumulative. After a few days without it, I'm starting to feel back to normal.  These are your guts on emulsifiers. Photo from Pexels . Dr. William Davis says, "Emulsifiers are added to processed foods to keep the ingredients mixed and to prevent separation....The