Pain, Pain, Go Away!

I used to love Quest bars. They were an easy snack or even a light meal replacement with low carbs and no junky ingredients. Those ingredients have changed, though. They now contain erythritol (sugar alcohol) and corn fiber. Since I'm one of those people who can't eat erythritol without getting stomach cramps, I won't be eating any more Quest bars.  Likewise, certain brands of coconut milk. Several brands contain guar gum, a thickener, which also gives me a stomach ache. Emulsifiers like guar gum can thin the mucus in your gut, allowing things into your bloodstream that don't belong there. I was feeling bloated and getting facial edema after having coconut milk with guar gum. Since changing to a brand without it (Native Forest), the problems have disappeared.  Oddly, Splenda (sucralose) doesn't seem to bother me.  * * * * * A friend who gave me a little bit of a hard time about being unvaccinated just got COVID. Fortunately, he's doing OK. Three years ago, I tho...

Ah, the Fourth of July. The summer weather, the fat, juicy burgers, the fireworks, the last day I didn't have a cold for over a month. I woke up feeling good, got a lot done, but by evening I didn't even feel like standing on the corner to see fireworks. I called in sick the following Monday and Tuesday. On August 4--one month later, I took a turn for the worse and saw a doctor, who wrote a prescription for antibiotics and cough syrup. I called in sick for the next three days. Then I went to work--still coughing, coworkers telling me it would be OK to go home--and picked up my natural desiccated thyroid (NDT). I started taking it that Saturday--and soon my cold started getting better. As the week went on and I needed to up my dose of NDT, the cough started coming back to the point that I thought about going back to the doctor. But I upped the dose--and again, the cough mostly went away. I was thinking I'd need Sheriff Grimes on the case to kill the cold that wouldn't ...

It's been quite an adventure riding this sparking and sputtering thyroid. It started back in the highly stressful year of 2014 when I had mountains of work on my desk, an hour-long commute, and aging parents who themselves were sputtering along and constantly needed me to come over to help them. Then my coworker quit and I had all the work to do. I asked if I could go live with her in Mexico, only half joking. My father died. My mother nearly died of kidney failure. Then stayed with me for two weeks during and leading up to the estate sale. We surrendered her dog when she couldn't take care of him. In thanks for my hard work, I was accused of elder abuse. (The county found no grounds for the accusations.) I had a root canal and three courses of antibiotics. Then I moved across the country: I bought one house before selling the other (albeit in Denver's hot real estate market) and had no permanent job lined up in Indiana. Then finding my best friend had changed quite a ...

Over the past few months, my stomach is feeling a lot better and I think it's thanks to low-carb lattes I've been having for breakfast. Plus a lot of Pepto-Bismol. Doing a little research, it turns out that all the ingredients in the latte (coconut milk, cocoa powder, peppermint extract, and even coffee) are antibacterial. So is Pepto-Bismol. I've also been avoiding high-FODMAPS foods that cause bloating. So I think my problem was SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth) after taking too many probiotics...and maybe some carb creep. Something felt off. I was tired, I'd gained a few pounds, and felt puffy. I got a new blood glucose meter and tested my fasting and post breakfast levels (breakfast being bacon, eggs, two lattes and some dried seasoned tomatoes). That was about 18 grams of carbohydrate. My blood sugar went from 91 to 146. Not good! After two hours, it went to 109 and stayed around there for the next four and a half hours, when I stopped taking readings...

Feeling stuffed, gassy or bloated? Got acid reflux? A few tips from someone who suffered from upper GI problems for years: Go for a walk. Don't strain yourself--a leisurely stroll is fine. If your blood sugar is up, a little exercise can help lower it, and walking helps your GI system get things moving.  Take an antacid if you have a sour taste in your mouth. If your throat is burning, mix a half teaspoon of baking soda in a glass of water and drink it. (This is also an antacid.) If this happens to you often, you should probably cut back on the carbs.  If you're gassy, it'll just have to wear off. Again, though, if this happens often, eat fewer carbohydrates. Dietary fat doesn't produce gas, protein produces a little or no gas, but carbohydrates can produce a lot of gas.  Why do so many people feel lousy after Thanksgiving dinner? Partly, it's from eating too much. But as I've written before, Thanksgiving is a carbohydrate orgy . Not everyone is suite...

Nuts seem like the perfect snack: they're portable, they keep well, they don't need to be cooked, and they're tasty. Problem: I don't feel good when I eat too many of them. Recently, I started snacking on macadamia nuts, which are high-fat, so I thought they wouldn't be a problem. But my stomach was upset, I got a bit of acid reflux and nosebleeds, and generally didn't feel up to par. Nuts have phytates, which bind to zinc and other minerals. This might have caused my nosebleeds. And I don't know what it is about macadamia nuts, but they don't seem to digest well for me; they felt like they were sitting in my stomach causing bloating. I've felt pretty much the same way eating more than a little bit of nuts or goodies made with nut flour. It could be that nuts are seeds and don't "want" to be eaten. Like grass seeds, they defend themselves by sickening those who ingest them. 

You know the feeling: there's a system out there that's wildly popular, almost everybody uses it (except for some maverick non-fiction-loving nerds), and its proponents are at the top of the heap in their field. And yet the system isn't working for you. There's bloating. The help from on high isn't helpful. It takes so long to accomplish anything. It isn't you, it's the operating system. Low-fat diets are like Microsoft products: they're everywhere, and they work well enough for some people, but for others, they're an epic fail. Over the past few days, to work around an issue that Microsoft has known about for years and years, I've had to manually resize dozens of images every time I opened a document. And I've spent the entire evening tonight figuring out why my computer was at a standstill. (It turned out the automatic updates feature in good ol' Microsoft has been running up my CPU usage to 100%, bloating it like five servings o...

I've finally found a name for what I have: gastritis. From Wikipedia : Gastritis is an inflammation of the lining of the stomach, and has many possible causes. [1] The main acute causes are excessive alcohol consumption or prolonged use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (also known as NSAIDs) such as aspirin or ibuprofen . Sometimes gastritis develops after major surgery, traumatic injury, burns, or severe infections. Gastritis may also occur in those who have had weight loss surgery resulting in the banding or reconstruction of the digestive tract. Chronic causes are infection with bacteria, primarily Helicobacter pylori , chronic bile reflux , and stress; certain autoimmune disorders can cause gastritis as well. The most common symptom is abdominal upset or pain. Other symptoms are indigestion, abdominal bloating, nausea, and vomiting and pernicious anemia . Some may have a feeling of fullness or burning in the upper abdomen. [2] [3] A gastroscopy , blo...

Certain things should be left in the aquarium. Readers may recall my ordeal last Saturday with a migraine headache and a trip by ambulance back to my parents' house. Thanks to one of the paramedics jogging my memory, I researched the almond milk I'd started drinking around the time I quit dairy. One of the ingredients was carrageenan, a substance used to induce inflammation, sensitivity to pain and other problems in laboratory animals. Supposedly, the "undegraded" form is safe for human consumption, but undegraded carrageenan has been found to be contaminated with degraded carrageenan, and there are ways that the digestive system could degrade carrageenan itself. For the past few months, I've felt a little bloated, and was starting to have some mild pain in my lower stomach. I thought it might have been the effects of the antibiotics, oral steroids or decongestant (which gave me an allergic reaction) from back in February. I didn't connect it to the sev...

The Wall Street Journal has, for once, run a useful health article: "When Everyday Foods are Hard to Digest" by Melinda Beck, November 8, 2011. The article says what some of us have known for awhile: certain carbohydrates can cause digestive problems for some people. Now, a small but growing contingent of specialists is focusing on food intolerances as a possible culprit—and a new dietary approach, called the low-Fodmaps diet, is gaining attention around the world. The theory is that many people with IBS have trouble absorbing certain carbohydrates in their small intestines. Large molecules of those foods travel to the colon, where they are attacked by bacteria and ferment, creating the telltale IBS symptoms of gas, bloating, constipation or diarrhea. A long list of foods—including dairy products, some fruits and vegetables, wheat, rye, corn syrup and artificial sweeteners—can potentially create such problems in susceptible people. Collectively, they're known as F...

"You let me in your house with a hammer." -"Candy Shop" by Andrew Bird Low-carb proponent Gary Taubes appeared on the Dr. Oz Show March 7. In one entertaining segment, Dr. Oz spent a day eating a low-carb diet and complained of the greasiness of the sausage, feeling tired, constipation and bad breath. That's a drag, but when I stopped drinking Coke in 2007, I felt even worse: stomach ache, headache, tiredness, and mental fog. Should I have gone back to drinking Coke? If you quit a bad alcohol habit and start seeing snakes, do you need a drink? If my legs hurt from working out Monday night for the first time in two months (which they do), maybe I should resume my exercise hiatus indefinitely. I respect Dr. Oz for having Gary Taubes on his show and letting him share his ideas. I'd respect Oz even more if he looked into low-carb diets more carefully. What he didn't seem to consider regarding his one-day low-carb diet was that he spent a day...

The readers of this blog have spoken: a lot of you are suffering from bloating and acid reflux and want to know what to do about it. At least, that's what my statistics tell me: the top two posts for the past month are Gas Bloating: The Incredible Shrinking Waistband and Exploding Intestines and My GERD is Cured: Low-Carb Hits the Mark . If you're like a lot of people, you might also have made a resolution to lose weight. I sympathize with all these problems: I used to suffer frequently with gas pain and acid reflux and a year ago I set out to lose 20 pounds. Why do so many people have bloating and acid reflux this time of year? Too many Christmas cookies, too much stuffing and mashed potatoes, too many holiday potlucks with dishes made of cheap, high-carb food, and too much dessert. In other words, too many carbs. That's the short answer. What do Carbs Have to Do with It? Dietary fat doesn't give you gas. Protein gives you very little gas, and it's farther along i...