Skip to main content

Frustrations! GERD, Masks and Carrageenan

I'll start with the good news: my Thanksgiving vacation didn't give me COVID. Since I don't have any major risk factors and I'm not 80 years old, I'm not surprised. Yesterday I was able to whip the yard into shape with the mower, rake, hedge trimmers and a sawzall. It was a beautiful sunny day, like winter in Denver, and most of my coworkers who give me work were in training. I was outdoors in a t-shirt. The thyroid problems seem like they're behind me. 

But my GERD is back. After coming back from Ohio, I bought a magazine full of delicious looking keto recipes and made some of them: keto pound cake, keto brunch, keto enchiladas, and keto broccoli soup. The last two were heavenly going down--then they started pushing up acid. It's thought to be too much bacteria that creates gas and causes GERD; I wonder if the culture in the cheese has something to do with it, too. 

Cheese: my love for you is way out of line.

So I was suffering after having the enchiladas for lunch today. Then I went for training on some new machines at work, while standing and wearing a mask. After half an hour, I was so light-headed I had to lie down on the floor in my office for ten minutes. If I had to wear a mask all day, I'd have to find another job. 

I've also had to either return or throw out groceries. This morning, it was a carton of organic cream contaminated with carrageenan. Readers may recall that carrageenan put me in an ambulance once. Yesterday, I had to return a raw chicken because it had carrageenan. When I went back to the store, I looked at the roast chickens. They were laced with carrageenan, too. WHY? I can understand adding salt for flavor and to preserve them. But an inflammatory? I ended up buying some thighs from what I knew to be an Amish farm.

Wanting some uncontaminated cream, I went to Trader Joe's on the way home from work tonight, but they were "close [sic] due to reasons beyond our control." I backtracked and went to Whole Paycheck. They had cream-that's-just-cream and chicken-that's-just-chicken. They may be about to get more business from me.

Labels:

Comments

Lowcarb team member said…
Pleased to read that your Thanksgiving was all ok :)

So good that you were able to purchase some cream-that's-just-cream and chicken-that's-just-chicken!

All the best Jan
December 11, 2020
Lori Miller said…
I ran over something on the highway on the way to Trader Joe's and woke up to a flat tire this morning. At least my GERD is gone!
December 11, 2020
Lori Miller said…
Thanks, Jan. It shouldn't be that hard to find food that's just the food!
December 11, 2020
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Long-Term Experience Eating Safe (and Other) Starches

Years ago, before the Perfect Health Diet came out, I followed a program that involved eating quite a bit "safe starch." It was called Body for Life. It involved eating six small servings of carbohydrate along with six small servings of protein, plus two servings of fibrous vegetables per day. (A serving was the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.) There were six workouts a week (three weightlifting, three cardio) and one free day every week where you ate whatever you wanted and didn't exercise. In all fairness, these two programs are different: BFL allows certain grains, legumes and low-fat dairy and discourages fat. It doesn't call for a wheelbarrow full of vegetation. Nevertheless, my experience eating lots of fruit and lots of starch is relevant to the PHD because the amount and type of digestible carbohydrates are similar, and for the first few years, I didn't eat wheat except on free days. At first on BFL, I felt great. Before, I was continually...
17 comments
Read more

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...
24 comments
Read more

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more