Pain, Pain, Go Away!

I've never understood the appeal of pancakes: they're dry and tasteless. If you put syrup on them, they're sweet and soggy. Being mostly flour and sugar (if you put syrup on them), they really should be considered a dessert. Crepes are a different animal: they're light and fluffy and moist if you put some butter on them. They're not too eggy-tasting. If you make them with coconut flour and don't drench them in syrup, they shouldn't jack up your blood sugar. In other words, they're real food, not dessert. The recipe is from Cooking with Coconut Flour by Bruce Fife. It took 15 minutes to make these.

Four More Weeks My orthodontist wants to wait four more weeks to take my braces off so that I can get a new crown. Meantime, my insurance is actually considering paying for some of this expensive dental work. Hot dog. Acid reflux, acne, and upset stomach down to flavored coffee I just tried to expand my food horizons and once again, ended up with problems. It took a few months to figure out it was flavored coffee. It's not the caffeine or the acid, since regular coffee and tea doesn't bother me, or anything I put in it (I take it black). It's not any natural flavors, since nuts, vanilla and cocoa don't bother me. It's the chemicals. According to enotes.com , Flavoring oils are combinations of natural and synthetic flavor chemicals which are compounded by professional flavor chemists. Natural oils used in flavored coffees are extracted from a variety of sources, such as vanilla beans, cocoa beans, and various nuts and berries. Cinnamon, clove, and chicory

Do your best to rein in your desire. For if you desire something that isn’t within your own control, disappointment will surely follow; meanwhile, you will be neglecting the very things that are within your control that are worthy of desire. -Epictetus, Stoic philosopher, and Sharon Lebell, author(1) All week, people have kept asking me if I'm looking forward to getting my braces off. I haven't been anticipating it at all: when I build something up in my mind, the reality hardly ever matches my expectations. Today was a perfect example of why anticipation is a bad habit. I thought I was going to get my braces off today, but all my orthodontist took off was the wire on the brackets, which his assistant replaced with different wire on some of my teeth. Tomorrow, after the second part of my implant is put in, a different wire is going back on. In a few weeks, I'm going to have to get my braces off for my dentist to take a mold for a crown. I don't know what my dentist

Have you heard the latest scare tactic against wheat-free eating? A wheat free diet will give you vitamin B deficiencies. Since wheat flour is fortified with B vitamins, substituting wheat-free food will make you sick because wheat-free flour isn't fortified, and bread and cereals are such a major source of B vitamins, says Holly Strawbridge, Executive Editor of Harvard Health Letter . Dietitian Kristi King over at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics agrees . Are they right? Let's look at the evidence. How much vitamin B is in, say, a slice of wheat bread? The yellow row in the table has the answer; the top row is the recommended daily intake of the vitamins. (Click the lower right corner to enlarge) B vitamin table from Lori Miller There's NO vitamin B6 or B12 in the bread, and compared to the recommended daily intake levels, there's only a little bit of the other vitamins.  Fortified cereals have more vitamins, but (as with bread) the B vitamins are ad

They say everyone has a limit, a point where they sink so low that they can't go on denying they have a problem. I hit bottom last week when (you'd better sit down for this) I was too tired to go salsa dancing two Fridays in a row. My problem is that I always go to bed too late, and have to get up at 6:40 to go to work. Previously, going out on Sunday nights, I could catch up on sleep over the weekend, feel fine Monday morning, and tell myself I could get by on six hours' sleep. But having to cancel plans made me face up to reality. The usual suggestions for getting enough sleep don't work for me. Reading? Part of job is proofreading financial statements and valuation report: if reading those doesn't put you to sleep, nothing will. Going to bed the same time every night? That's fine if you want to party with senior citizens; for the rest of us, things are just getting going and everyone's loose and in the flow at 10:00. Carbs to make me sleepy? That'

What do you get when you put a dentist, an oral surgeon and an orthodontist together? I'm hoping I'll get a final resolution to my dental injuries. Regular readers may recall my bike accident from last summer , when I fell on the pavement and broke my eye tooth, knocked two other teeth out of place and fractured my arm. I got braces a few days later to straighten out my displaced teeth and make room for a dental implant. The first part of my dental implant is in place and healed, and a temporary tooth is attached to my braces; in a few weeks I'll get the second part of the implant in, and a few weeks after that, my dentist will take a mold of my teeth to make a crown. What this also means is that I'll soon be getting rid of my braces. They can't take a mold of my teeth with braces on them, so my dentist plans to attach a temporary tooth to the adjoining teeth right after my next surgery. We can't just leave a gap in there. First, I don't want to go arou

"Machiavellian: A person who is charming on the surface, a genius at sucking up to power, but capable of mind-boggling acts of deceit for control or personal gain."(1) "Understanding the narcissism epidemic is important because its long-term consequences are destructive to society. American culture's focus on self-admiration has caused a flight from reality to the land of grandiose fantasy."(2) Exasperating to deal with and dangerous when gullible people believe them, narcissists and Machiavellians really have become more common since the beginning of agriculture. There are several reasons--Machiavellians  producing more offspring and passing on their traits; culture; parenting practices; even viruses. I can only imagine life as a hunter-gatherer, but possibly, living such a life among 50 to 150 people, some who'd known you all your life, meant facing reality every day and knowing who you were and what you could do. Nevertheless, the occasional hunter-g