Dr. Davis's Podcast Added; Quest Bars get Worse

After adding some new blogs and YouTube feeds yesterday, I added Dr. Davis's podcast feed so that readers can simply click and listen to his latest episode. Just to be clear for email subscribers, all of these are on my site (https://relievemypain.blogspot.com/) and the three bars at the top right (where you can click to see feeds and other features) are for people with smaller screens. If you have a bigger screen, you should be able to see all the feeds on the right side of the page.

If you'd like to put some YouTube or podcast feeds on your site, leave a comment and I'll reply with instructions since there's no widget in Blogger for putting them in and the RSS feed widget doesn't work. Nor does the podcast player from Elfsight. At least, I couldn't get them to work.

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Quest bars used to be a great snack--they were one of the first healthy, low-carb protein bars out there. Ten years ago, the ingredients were

Protein blend (whey protein isolate, milk protein isolate), isomalto-oligosaccharides, almonds, water, natural flavors, sea salt, lo han guo [monk fruit], sucralose.

I first heard about them from Jimmy Moore--and since then, they've both gone down the drain. I've heard Jimmy Moore is in jail, and nine flavors of Quest bars now contain carrageenan. Carrageenan once put me in an ambulance. It's an emulsifier. It thickens food and thins the mucus in your gut lining, allowing toxic bacteria to get into your bloodstream. When you get enough bad bacteria in your bloodstream, you get endotoxemia.

Other flavors like chocolate chip cookie dough now contain lecithin (another emulsifier) and erythritol, which gives me immediate regrets when I eat it and is now linked to cardiovascular risk based on a 2023 study. Correlation isn't causation, but Dr. Davis is concerned enough that he's advised members to limit or eliminate erythritol.

Quitting food with emulsifiers went a long way towards getting rid of the palpitations that bothered me for eight years. Some years ago, my heart would sometimes start pounding when I ate a Quest bar.

Now I grab a bag of Whips if I need something when I'm out and about. They're just baked cheese; the asiago flavor has spices.

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Paleo Diet: Eating Differently from Everyone Else is Fine!

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Robert F. Kennedy shows up at the FDA

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Palpitations Gone with Iron

Thanks to my internet friend Larcana, who alerted me to the connection between iron deficiency and palpitations, I doubled down on my iron supplements and, for good measure, washed them down with Emergen-C. It's a cold medicine with a mega-dose of vitamin C, plus B vitamins and minerals. I don't think vitamin C does anything for a cold (a friend bought the stuff and left it at my house the last time she visited), but vitamin C does help iron absorption. After doubling up on iron in the last three days, I feel back to normal. (I'd already been taking quite a bit of magnesium and potassium, so I probably had sufficient levels of those.) How did I get so low on iron? Maybe it was too many Quest bars instead of red meat when I had odd cravings during my dental infection recently. Maybe because it's too hard to find liver at the grocery store and I haven't eaten much of it lately. Maybe the antibiotics damaged my intestines . And apparently, I'm a heavy bleeder .

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

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