Pain, Pain, Go Away!

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.   * * * * * 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, ...

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, ...

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...

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 ...

That's what I gather from my sniffling, sneezing coworkers. Accuweather.com says dust and dander levels are high now. Huh. I suffered so long and so badly with allergies that it's strange to feel fine while others are going around with sinuses packed tighter than a 200-pound woman in size eight pants. Since I started a wheat-free diet, I've been mostly free of allergies. (My hay fever last year might have been brought on by drinking almond milk laced with carrageenan, a thickener and inflammatory. If your sinuses are inflamed, it won't take much mucus to fill them up.) I also don't use any dairy besides butter; it can cause congestion. To paraphrase an old saying, nothing tastes as good as a clear head feels.

Relative: What are you doing? My mother: I'm throwing out everything with carrageenan in it. It's really bad. Scientists use it to make [research] animals sick. That's what made Lori so sick the other night with a migraine headache. Relative: I'll take the salad dressing. It doesn't bother us. My mother: Doesn't your daughter get migraine headaches? This conversation sounds absurd, but knowing the people involved, I'm sure it happened as my mother described it. In the relative's household, there's obesity, diabetes, migraines, hypoglycemia, fatigue, acne, and no doubt some other ailments I'm not privy to. Is this the new normal? Does illness seem so inevitable that some people aren't willing to think about what's causing it? Or do anything with an answer when it's handed to them? Let me tell you how I've felt since I've been free of carrageenan poisoning for the past week. My stomach doesn't hurt, I can eat low car...

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...

A few years ago when I started a low carb diet and started eating sausage again, I found some sausages gave me a headache, but others didn't. At first, eating them was a crap shoot, but I soon found some I couldn't eat (Applegate Farms Organic & Natural Meats) and some I could (McDonald's Restaurants and Ranch Foods Direct, a local pastured meat company). Some of Applegate Farms' products contain carrageenan (a highly processed, seaweed-based food additive used to induce pain and inflammation in research animals). McDonald's and Ranch Foods Direct sausage doesn't contain it. Why put carrageenan in sausage? According to Applegate Farms' website , Carrageenan, which is derived from red seaweed (Chondrus Crispus), activates extracted protein in the meat to help it bind together when formed. As the meat cooks, the heat forms a gel network, increasing moisture retention and improving the sliceability of the product. Without the addition of carrageenan...

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...

If you've been through it, you know the feeling: you get dressed in the morning and all is well. You have breakfast, and maybe a mid-morning snack, and then your pants don't fit. Surely you didn't put on five pounds in two hours, you think. (I had one tweed skirt in particular that became uncomfortable around 10 a.m.) Some days, you even look like you're pregnant. (That was when my big lavender shirt-dress came in handy.) It's gas bloating--but what causes it? Can you stop it? The short answer is that I got the bloating to go away without medication or supplements--and I had tried several. My understanding of the causes of bloating is that certain foods naturally lead to gas, and it's hard for some people to digest various foods. (There may be other causes, but these are the two I'll talk about here.) Which foods lead to gas? According to Heartburn Cured (1) by Norm Robillard, a microbiologist, it's mostly carbohydrates. Fat and protein don...