Picky eaters
How lovely – someone actually emailed me something nice today:
Your article was amazing to me… until I read it, I thought that my 8 yr old son was the only child in the world that was that picky. He will actually dry heave at the sight or smell or feel of many foods in his mouth. Thank you for helping me to understand how he feels. I, like your Mum worry about his eating habits. You are the first person who has ever understood his eating. Thank you!!!
As you might imagine one or two people (for whom vegetables are a veritable religion), had a rather violent negative reaction to the contents of “why kids don’t eat their greens“, which seemed quite an innocent article to me when I wrote it. I’m glad it’s finally struck home for a mother like mine, who is just trying to feed her child well.
Macrobiotic blues
I read “Sugar Blues” by William Dufty about a year ago. It’s a diatribe against the use of sugar, and was a really groundbreaking book when it was first released back in the mid seventies. Dufty recounts how he gave up sugar and all of his chronic health problems like depression, aches and pains, headaches, skin problems, asthma, repeated infections, etc, etc, all went away. He talks a lot about the classic “diseases of civilisation” and blames them on the consumption of pure white refined carbohydrates, particularly sugar.
I had a bit of a chortle at the time because Dufty gives up sugar and his magical dietary conversion is to macrobiotics. He enthuses about eating brown rice and umeboshi plums, and as anyone who has ever low-carbed knows, this is just “sugar in a different form”, because the glucose index of these nutritionally deficient foods is virtually identical, and the nutritional content not much different. But low-carbers also like to blame sugar for everything, including many things it is not responsible for.
Macrobiotics – with perhaps the exception of vegan/fruitarian/Buddhist/Jainist diets – is one of the worst wholefood diets you can embark on, but any wholefood diet is a real step forward from eating the processed, additive-laden crap I see my coworkers eating every day. The kitchen fridge in the office is full of skimmed milk and Weight Watchers yoghurts with ADHD colourings and flavourings, and of course dreaded banana-and-an-apple combos (“two of your five-a-day“, and the highest carbohydrate vitamin deficient fruits you can choose). Those who don’t eat soy-and-propionate-containing white bread sandwiches eat MSG and other additive-containing wonders like Pot Noodles, Cup-a-Soups, and even delightful-looking tinned hot dogs smeared with tomato ketchup. I mean, given the choice between a bit of brown rice, beans and raw fish, or the above foods of the gods, which do you think makes a healthier individual?
But just because “Dr” Gillian McKeith, Madonna, and Gwyneth Paltrow do macrobiotics, should we jump off the bridge as well? McKeith is a wrinkly dragon with a most unpleasant personality, Madonna’s interpretation of macrobiotics is loose to say the least (her pregnancy diet consisted of lots of eggs and olives), and Paltrow, at 5′ 10″ and 112lbs, is dreadfully underweight. Paltrow also smokes, which is a classic response to the macrobiotic diet. Much as those celebrities who buy into the diet claim some sort of spiritualism from it, the macrobiotic diet is not based on mystical ancient Eastern medicine: it was invented by one man, George Ohsawa, in the 1960s, and it has made him a lot of money.
Despite the carbohydrate content of these diets, they tend to lead to underweight. Lean mass wasting is a typical result of vegan and macrobiotic diets. Study after study has shown such diets result in lower bone density, lower muscle mass, and a comparatively higher body fat for the same weight than meat eaters. I saw my own lean body mass improve considerably since I started low-carbing three years ago. To illustrate the point with a little unscientific fun, compare the body fat and lean body masses of known long-term vegan Drew Barrymore with known long-term Atkinser, Jennifer Aniston. Stats on this page for Demi Moore (recent vegan), and Madonna (recent macrobiotic) are out of date.
Yes, vegans and macrobiotics are more likely to weigh less than meat eaters, because it is hard to eat enough calories on a plant-based diet due to the sheer bulk of the food that has to be ingested. But does that lead to meal-time satisfaction or correct nutrition? Plant-based diets are very energy inefficient and result in animals that must constantly graze in order to live. Unfortunately lower BMI is often misinterpreted by the media as making automatic good-health. But macrobiotic and vegan diets are deficient in several vitamins and minerals, including A, D, E, B6, B12, omega 3 fatty acids, iron, zinc, and calcium. The most extreme form of macrobiotics – zen macrobiotics – resulted in numerous deaths from scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) back in the 1960s. Long-term vitamin A deficiency results in poor bone growth, skin and mucus membrane dryness and keratinisation (hence McKeith’s exceedingly premature wrinkles and the reason that any time you see her in a magazine or advertisement she has been airbrushed beyond recognition). Vitamin D and calcium deficiencies lead to rickets in children, increased cancer risk in adults, and reduced bone mass.
Long-term B12 deficiency (starting at as little as two years’ absence from the diet) leads to neuropathy, the de-myelinisation of nerves, including those within the brain, which leads to the misfiring of neurons. The end result of B12 deficiency is megoblastic anaemia and schizophrenia. Dentist turned nutritional anthropologist, Dr. Weston A. Price never found a single tribe of ‘primitives’ who were successfully vegetarian. Every single vegan I have knowingly met displayed odd or irrational behaviour and reasoning that I suspect may be related to B12 deficiency. Many, but not all, of the vegetarians I know display eccentric behaviour – one who has been vegetarian since being a child is quite odd. As a virtually vegan teenager I myself experienced nocturnal visual and auditory hallucinations sometimes called “Restless Brain Syndrome”, an ‘unexplained’ condition. My hallucinations only ended after I started to include more dairy products in my diet. The one schizophrenic I know in real life also happens to be a vegetarian, who shared her mental ward with a fruitarian and a chronic alcoholic (a condition that also results in B12 deficiency). Coincidence? This lady has several other very obvious signs of B12 deficiency, including goiter (thyroid, B12 deficiency and intrinsic factor deficiency all interact), yet to this day she continues to be treated by unwitting psychologists with emotional therapy and incompetantly high doses of psychoactive drugs which fail to control her condition. My attempts to contact her through friends have failed.
So what about smoking? I hate to publicise that often unscientific website Quackwatch, but here goes:
Macrobiotics was founded by Yukikazu Sakurazawa (1893-1966)-better known as George Ohsawa. His first book in English, Zen Macrobiotics, was published in mimeographed form in 1960. Macrobiotic insider Ronald Kotzsch, Ph.D., who wrote Macrobiotics: Yesterday and Today, portrays Ohsawa as a quixotic Japanese nationalist who, while preaching the “Unique Principle” of yin and yang, smoked heavily and occasionally enjoyed cheesecake, doughnuts, Coca-Cola, coffee, Guinness Stout, and Scotch whiskey. In Kotzsch’s words, “Ohsawa was a man who for forty years taught about health with a cigarette in his hand.” A Kushi Seminar for Professionals
In fact, many of the founding fathers of the macrobiotic diet are heavy smokers, and despite the macrobiotic diet being promoted as an “anti-cancer diet”, two of the Kushi family women have themselves died of cancer. Says Stephen Byrnes, “Anne Louise Gittleman, in her book Your Body Knows Best, commented on these strange practices in macrobiotics (Gittleman used to be an adherent and got very sick in the process) and attributed them to practitioners needing stimulants because of what was lacking in the diet: adequate fat and protein.”
What is not understood by many of the non-smoking majority is that many smokers use cigarettes to suppress their appetite when they are hungry. This leads to weight gain and an inability to control appetite when they try to give up. Cigarettes stimulate serotonin release, which is temporarily calming. Eating carbohydrates also stimulates serotonin release. But your body can only produce so much serotonin (which it does from protein, something deficient in macrobiotic and vegan diets: a genuine Japanese rice-based diet by contrast is extremely high in protein from eggs, pork and seafood), and repeated stimulation and release in this way leads to long-term serotonin depletion and a cyclical dependency in which the subject feels considerably worse when they try to give up their diet or their cigarettes.
The problem with frequent, repeated serotonin release is that the effects of serotonin last for one or two hours at the most. Eat a meal that is heavy in carbohydrates like a bowl of brown rice, and you will have subtle cravings for a little something more in a couple of hours time. Cigarettes fill this gap between meals comfortably for the macrobiotic. However, the resultant fluctuations in serotonin levels can and do lead to depression and other serotonin-disturbance related disorders like erratic behaviour, paranoia, obsession and repetition. Something particularly common with this style of low-protein high-carbohydrate diet is the serotonin-related condition, obsessive-compulsive disorder (which may explain one or two aspects of “Dr” Gillian McKeith’s personality).
What of the claims that macrobiotics cures chronic health conditions like eczema, gastrointestinal disorders, and makes people feel wonderfully calm? Well, this largely depends how the diet that is done. In fact I personally know of an extremely cross and irritable macrobiotic – hardly a surprise there. ‘Correctly’ done, the macrobiotic diet is very low in fruit and vegetables and consists largely of rice, other grains, and beans. This is a diet that is additive-free and extremely low in salicylates and amines, and as grains are pressure-cooked, much of the lectin content is also destroyed.
Additives, salicylates and amines can and frequently do cause skin and gastrointestinal problems, irritability and other emotional problems in people. These are quite coincidentally absent from the macrobiotic diet. “Dr” Gillian McKeith’s and many others’ fabled ‘health recoveries’ when they go macrobiotic are in all probability due to the fact that a macrobiotic diet is 80% failsafe: not because they are actually eating ‘properly’, or even ‘correctly balancing their yin and yang’ or other woolly naturopath nonsense. I would be deeply unsurprised if the conditions which William Dufty blames on sugar were actually caused by additives.
The yeast connection
The possible role of yeast in causing chronic, ill-defined illness was popularized by Dr. Crook in the “Yeast Connection” in 1984. Other books and magazine articles have repeated the same idea without modification for 2 decades. This theory tries to explain the whole spectrum of delayed pattern food allergy as “yeast allergy”. The invisible overgrowth of candida is supposed to cause chronic and systemic symptoms.
Doctor Crook indeed! I’ve posted once or twice (or more) times about that snake-oil cure, the Candida diet. I happened across an intelligent article demolishing the Candida myth.
The “yeast connection” theory ignores the many types of adverse reactions to food. Many people with delayed patterns of food allergy believe that they have candida and have a hard time adjusting their thinking to accept a more comprehensive solution to their illness. The symptoms attributed to candida are typical of the wide spectrum of adverse reactions to food, and should not be interpreted as having a single cause.
Microorganisms often opportunistically inhabit favourable environments in and on the body when the body is weakened to the point where they are given the chance. This is why thrush can be a symptom of food chemical intolerance, but is definitely not a cause, nor is it a cause of the symptoms often referred to as “candidiasis”.
It’s pretty annoying that the Body Ecology diet by Donna Gates has won such approval from the Weston A. Price Foundation, who totally haven’t caught on to the concept of food chemical intolerance, even though food chemical intolerance is largely a disease of modernity and in most folks limited to additive intolerance. Instead WAPF touts nonsense like ‘dysbiosis’ and ‘vitamin deficiencies’ as the cause of so many annoying minor symptoms.
Rhinoceros and spinach?
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that people on the Paeleo diet are deluding themselves into thinking the average caveman ate his rhinocerous with a side of calorically empty green vegetables. I mean, when was the last time you saw a wild lettuce? And if you were hungry, would you really go looking for one?
To quote The Simpsons:
LISA
Hey, if a boar can survive here, there must be a source of food! Look, he’s licking slime off that rock! That’s what he’s been eating — slime! And there’s enough slime for all of us! We’re saved!The kids look unsure. That night, they roast the boar over the fire.NELSON
Mmm, all that slime made the boar extra tender! Episode 5F11, Das Bus
I contend that lettuce always has been and always will be just a garnish. It’s pointless. It pokes you in the mouth when you eat it, it doesn’t have a particularly nice taste, and it doesn’t have any calories in it. It contains a small amount of antioxidants, but as we know, antioxidants are bad for you!
There’s plenty of evidence for hunting, not so much for gathering. Depictions of and tools for “gathering” seem to be limited to 1. honey, 2. berries and fruit, 3. grains, seeds and nuts, 4. roots, 5. insects, worms, and shellfish. Fruit didn’t exist in the same form as it does today. It was much smaller and because it wasn’t grown in monoculture, much lower in salicylates. In colder climates, honey, fruit, grains, seeds, and nuts are very seasonal, come in brief gluts, and are pretty hard to collect. Roots, insects, and shellfish are less seasonal.
There’s also evidence that Paeleo man and woman collected and processed the grains that grew in the ashes of their savannah bonfires. In warmer climates, the diet is not necessarily more diverse. Neolithic, partially domesticated hunter-gatherers tend to rely heavily on one or two staple energy-rich plant foods – whether that be grains, corn, various tubers, cassava, or coconut. For example, the !Kung derive 50% of their calories from one nut – the mongongo nut.
We know agriculture was accompanied by a decrease in height and health (arthritis is a classic Neolithic disease). But did we really “suddenly” start growing and eating grain crops overnight, if we had never eaten them before? I imagine it more likely they had always been a small part of the diet but were suddenly elevated to staples when the weather got warmer at the end of the ice age, and we ran out of big game.
Bread and dairy
After much umming and ahhing I’ve finally decided that I am slighty sensitive to dairy, but not enough to matter. The sensitivity is simply that I find it quite addictive. One serving a day is fine. Two servings requires willpower. Three servings makes me crave four or five servings, and I get a pretty obsessed with finding new excuses to eat more dairy. This only seems to apply to whole dairy – milk, yoghurt, cottage cheese, mascarpone, etc. I’m fine with cream or creme fraiche. Opioids? I don’t know.
The first time I did a bread trial, I performed it with commercial white bread, and I developed tiny spots of eczema all over my body. This was kind of wild, since I’ve never before had eczema all over my body, but then I’ve never really eaten bread since being force-fed it at school. It wasn’t the propionates, because I found a soy and propionate-free brand, and the eczema continued to worsen. It carried on when I switched to oats. It was gone within a few days of me cutting out grains again.
I wondered whether I’d react differently to “proper” bread – home made, additive-free, sourdough bread. I also added extra wheat germ, and because I’m a coward, I added a bit of commercial yeast to help it rise. Sourdough contains small amounts of amines, but apparently I can tolerate the dose. It might have made me marginally more irritable. I’ve been eating it for over a month, and the only real problems have been 1. constipation, and 2. the complete inability to lose weight.
I’ve also tried commercial white bread again a few times. It seems I react to it with the same symptoms but with less of a problem than to sourdough bread.
I don’t know why I got eczema the first time, but I’m going to experiment again in the future and try to find out. Maybe it was just because I wasn’t “clear” of the dreaded plant poisons.
I’ve been eating a very liberal diet as far as carbohydrate goes (around 70 grams a day) ever since March, and that has caused a liberal amount of weight gain – going from 8st 9lbs all the way up to 9st 2lbs. I don’t really worry about my weight that much, but I’ve hit my psychological upper limit again. Now last year when I gained weight, I gained more than this – but it all went on my ass because I was eating a very low carb, high fat diet. This time with the higher carb-count, about half has gone on my belly and half on my ass, so I’m not feeling too great about my figure at the moment.
I’m going on holiday in about a month’s time, and about a month ago I decided I needed to conciously restrict what I was eating if I wanted to look good in a bikini. But I kept the carbs at between 40-70 grams per day. The problem is – carbs just lead to more carbs. Even at this still quite low amount of carbohydrate, I’ve found it totally impossible to control my hunger. If I have some carbs at lunch, I’m craving more of them 3 o’clock, even more at tea, and I also need some sort of dessert in the evening to feel satisfied.
I hate these cravings. The first time I went on Atkins, I craved breakfast cereal for three whole days. Well I’ve stopped the bread and I’ve started fat-fasting again. Oh, it hurts. There are some failsafe Scottish shortbread biscuits in my desk drawer just calling to me.
I have also desperately (and unsuccessfully) been pestering my other half about us joining a gym again. I am a bit of a freak – I am too scared to go to the gym by myself because I find sweaty men fairly intimidating.
Violent reaction to sulphites
I’ve had a few off-days since I started failsafe, after eating things containing amines or salicylates.
With the exception of chocolate, amine reactions are usually pretty fast and often clear within a few hours, and are specific enough to identify (palpatations/racing heart/sleeplessness = tyramine, rashes = histamine/serotonin, hunger = serotonin, happy-high=serotonin, depression/anger = tyramine/MSG). Saying that, I’m currently experiencing a hangover histamine/salicylate reaction – some pretty nasty itchiness and urticaria – to a slice of pineapple I ate yesterday evening! Chocolate, on the other hand, produces extended bouts of depression and anger, and more chocolate cravings.
Salicylate reactions seem to produce ANY of the above symptoms, plus a whole load more (like arthritic joint-clicking, a back that cracks and hurts, bloating, PMS, ear aches) and often hang over into the next day or more. When I started the diet it took me weeks to clear salicylates out of my body and to get to the point where I can observe specific reactions to foods. Most usually salicylates cause irritability.
Smells (volatile organic compounds or VOCs) also cause irritability and urticaria, in fact, there are certain shops with chemical smells that I know if I go inside, I can guarantee I’ll come out feeling annoyed about everything. Driving and inhaling exhaust fumes also makes me irritable. You inhale more exhaust fumes driving in a car than you do as a pedestrian. The VOC reactions are usually fairly short-lived (which is probably dose-related) and I’ll have cleared them inside a couple of hours.
Sue Dengate says there’s pretty much no point in testing additives if you’re sensitive to amines and salicylates, because in all probability you’ll react to them. How much I’d react to additives now I’m “clean”, I didn’t know until I tried them.
Last weekend we went out for a meal as it was a friend’s birthday. I decided I wasn’t going to be a food-fascist about eating any additives (I don’t punish myself for eating bad stuff – my body does that for me). I had half a glass of champagne, a couple of olives, some prawns and some smoked fish, and everything else was failsafe. Now, I’ve tried smoked fish before and not reacted particularly severely. The thing that was different about these foods was that most of them contained the dreaded sulphite preservatives. Champagne, probably the olives, the prawns, and possibly the smoked fish.
In “Fed Up With Asthma”, Sue Dengate describes how sulphite reactions often tend to be delayed until the next day, and how they affect the majority of asthmatics quite violently.
Two or three hours after eating we headed back to the hotel. On the way back I started to have problems breathing. I stopped being able to breathe through my nose and had to breathe through my mouth, and my chest got very tight. I had asthma as a child. I haven’t had it for years, with the exception of a period three or four years ago when I regularly went swimming and inhaled lots of nasty chloramines – something I actually discovered at the time and stopped swimming – and stopped having a problem – as a result. I didn’t have a proper asthma attack, though I coughed a bit and had difficulty sleeping.
Breathing through your mouth instead of your nose makes asthma worse because air inhaled through the nose is mixed with nitric oxide (a vasodilator) before it enters the lungs, and a nitric oxide deficiency leads to further hypertension and constriction of the airways (this is how the underdeveloped facial structures and mouth-breathing that WAPF are always lecturing about is linked to the surge in asthma in recent times). I believe the only reason I eventually got to sleep was because I clamped my mouth shut and forced myself to breathe through my nose until I calmed down.
The next day I can only describe my face as beetroot-coloured. Red, red, red. Before I went on failsafe I was quite worried I was developing rosacea (to go with my dermatitis), because there were so many times when my face just seemed to be really flushed, hot, and sensitive, and I was permanently a little bit pink. My face hasn’t looked like this since I started the diet. The other amazing thing was that my face had been totally clear of any sign of dermatitis/eczema/rash the night before, and when I woke up I had a defined pink patch and a couple of big acne-like papules. The doctor has prescribed me something effective for the dermatitis, but I’ve noticed whenever I eat something off-diet, it’s like two steps back again. I can delude myself that I’m “cured” until I eat something off-diet. My skin responds more to diet than to antibiotics. Anyway, I was quite excited by the red face because I have a friend who has rosacea who I wanted to show my face to, but we didn’t get to meet up with him.
My partner, who “does not” have food sensitivities – gets cracking knee joints when he eats spicy foods high in salicylates, and I’ve noticed before that he gets irritable the day after having sulphites in beer or other foods. Well, we were both irritable that morning. I had urticaria too, and I felt like I had a hangover.
I have a theory about hangovers. You see, I get “curry hangovers”. Most people drink when they have a curry, but being a supertaster, I don’t like the taste of alcohol, so I don’t drink. But I get a hangover. Wine gives me terrible hangovers, even though I never drink enough to get drunk. I’m basically reacting to the food chemicals and the sulphites. I know some people who claim that organic wine and beer does not give them a hangover in the same way that the non-organic variety does, and blame hangovers on unspecified “chemicals”. I wonder how many people who get hangovers blame the alcohol when they should actually be blaming the MSG, the spices, or the sulphite additives?
Anyway, I felt horrendous. I magically gained two pounds (I swear on these occasions I must just suck fat cells out of the air because when I gain it it doesn’t come off again). My brain wouldn’t work, I was really foggy, irritable, and confused. I kept getting headaches. The last time I felt this bad was about six months ago when I went out to a local pub and ate a half pint pot of prawns. In other words, the last time I had a big dose of sulphites.
It took me a week to get over it. A WEEK! Screw the “I’m not going to be a food-fascist” approach to additives. It’s not worth it. Give me amines and salicylates any day.
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