Pain, Pain, Go Away!

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. 

With the COVID vaccines looking like they cause heart attacks and reduced sperm counts in young men, 2022 is playing out like the beginning of Idiocracy . (Warning: NSFW.) Of course, Clevon doesn't represent all the vaccine refusers, but Trevor and Carol aren't necessarily smart about anything but test-taking and PowerPoint presentations. These tweets from a few days ago are from someone of the same type, a professor of epidemiology . As such, he must know that masks haven't been shown to stop spread, airplanes are not significant COVID vectors, and a respirator (assuming it's fitted) should be more than adequate protection. And yet Professor Karen tweeted these:  I'm a university graduate myself. But it was the Trevors and Carols and Professor Karens who brought about masking and lockdowns and mostly the Clevons who got us back to normal. Not that I'd recommend Clevon's lifestyle--I'm related to a few Clevons myself. But Trevor, Carol and the professo

This weekend, I picked up three bottles of low-carb barbecue sauce with no frankenfood ingredients at Whole Foods to try out. I put them on chicken wings and tasted them by themselves. Results: Good Food for Good BBQ Sauce Classic , 4g carbohydrate per 2 tablespoons. No sugar added, but the dates make it the sweetest of the bunch and with a warm hint of mustard. It's organic, has a very short list of ingredients and no thickeners or emulsifiers. It's a little runny, but I recommend it for people who like a sweet sauce. Who knew Canadians made such good barbecue sauce? Primal Kitchen Classic BBQ Sauce , 3g carbohydrate per 2 tablespoons. This was the lowest in carbohydrates and the tangiest and smokiest, with vinegar and mustard in the mix. The tapioca starch made it the thickest sauce. It's also organic--what else would you expect from Mark Sisson? Recommended for strict carb control and occasions when you need a thick sauce. LocalFolks Foods Hab-A-Q (Habanero Bar-B-Q) , 5g

USA Today reports that study subjects lost dramatic amounts of weight with diabetes drug tirzepatide. Participants in the randomized, controlled trial lost an average of 15% of their weight at week 72 according to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine .  Photo by  Sara Bakhshi  on  Unsplash How does it work? USA Today's interview with a participant offers a clue: The drug prevented her from overeating, [participant Mary] Bruehl said.  If she overindulged, the food would come back up. "I've learned to stop before I get that feeling," she said...The one negative side effect was nausea, which Bruehl felt the day after each of her weekly shots of tirzepatide. She's not alone. From the study , The most common adverse events with tirzepatide were gastrointestinal, and most were mild to moderate in severity, occurring primarily during dose escalation. Adverse events caused treatment discontinuation in 4.3%, 7.1%, 6.2%, and 2.6% of participants receiving 5-