Pain, Pain, Go Away!

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 j...

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...

 If you have a Suteck or similar yogurt maker, here's how to program it for time and temperature. I've selected 106 degrees because I ferment L. reuteri and B. coagulans together; if you're doing just L. reuteri, set it for 97 degrees.  Thirty-six hours' fermentation is necessary to get high bacterial counts--not just creamy texture.  Enjoy!

Attention Citizens! Investigative journalist Alex Berenson is back on Twitter after a settlement with the company. The "wrongest man" of the pandemic consistently called it right, yet he was suspended for misinformation. The final tweet that got him bounced from Twitter: It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it - at best - as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity. — Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) July 6, 2022 Lifestyle Medicine (or, Your Health before Pharma Profits) Over on YouTube, Dr. Suneel Dhand, internal medicine physician who reads and interprets studies and the news on his channel, started posting there again after his two strikes for "misinformation" timed out. One of his strikes was for reading a news article about a COVID outbreak among vaccinated people last year.  I don't agree ...

Amish Red gooseberries from my garden. First, the tiny gooseberry plants that arrived in the mail were too small to bear fruit. Then the neighbors' lawn guy cut them down while mowing drunk in the dark. But finally, after putting some bricks around them (and not doing much else), I have a crop of tasty gooseberries.  Gooseberries are juicy, a little tart, and they last longer than other berries. They're like seedless grapes but less sweet with only about 7 grams of net carbohydrate per cup, 42 mg of vitamin C and 297 mg of potassium . If you've never heard of them, you're not alone (and you're probably not English). Gooseberry bushes were banned in the United States for a long time because they were a host plant for a disease that killed white pines. They're still banned in some places. But they're allowed where I live (we don't have many pines in Indiana) and they've grown like champs on the north side of my house.