Cheeky yams and oxalates
Here in the UK, I’ve been watching “Ray Mear’s Wild Food” on BBC2 on Sunday nights. This is a series in which Mears goes out, meets a few natives, and spends his time trying to figure out what food Paleo (or Neo) man ate. Most of the series has been about foraging – perhaps an unintentional emphasis, but there’s really not much to hunting: man see, man kill, man eat… He’s tried spear fishing (he wasn’t very good at it), cooking eggs on a fire, eating goat with some Kalahari Bushmen, crocodile with some aborigines, and tonight he roasted a boar. Something I realised about roasting a whole boar is that when you start slicing, you’ll mostly be eating crackling and fat – not muscle meat. One other point is that when he has been with native groups, they have NOT hung their meat. The baby crocodile was killed when it was found, then taken home when gathering had finished and eaten with some yams. The goat was slaughtered immediately prior to being eaten.
One interesting thing I noted was that at no point did he try to cook or eat leafy greens! The emphasis was definitely on starch for energy. He’s tried gathering and processing berries twice – one resulted in a “highly nutritious” fruit pulp that tasted so disgusting it couldn’t be drunk, and the other time he made fruit leathers and proceeded to eat some that were three years old and “still good” (wonder if they gave him a headache). His copresenter gathered some herbs at one point, complaining that they were needed in order to give the “bland native diet” some flavour!
A couple of weeks ago Mears was with some Australian aborigines. On that day, their diet consisted of starchy water lily heads, a small crocodile(?), and a lot of yams. A sort of aboriginal Sunday lunch. He also did the whole widgety grub thing. There were two types of yams – regular yams, and “cheeky yams”. I don’t know how truly “native” in diet these aborigines really were. Most of them were elderly and looked in very poor shape – wasted limbs and large bellies. Apparently alcoholism is a real problem amongst the aboriginal communities, but this is besides the point.
Mears described how the cheeky yams were poisonous and needed processing before they were eaten. The aborigines put the yams into a fire, buried them, and baked them for about an hour. Then they used modified snail shells to grate the yams into woven baskets, which were then suspended on sticks in a running stream and left for 24 hours. At this point the poison had leached out and the yams were edible. I want to emphasise that this was not a soak or a ferment – it was necessary for running water to be used. At the time Mears didn’t care to mention what the poison was, but today he tried an experiment with a different wild root by processing it in the same way then having it tested to see whether it was safe to eat. The poison in common turned out to be oxalate. It seems native people knew about oxalate and knew how to process it out of their foods.
Glutamated by gelatine and UHT milk
I’ve been going through a pretty awful reaction for the last week or so and I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what I’ve been doing wrong.
It’s been a glutamate reaction. It started about a week ago when I tried testing commercial gelatine by making some soups instead of having wheat germ. When I have home made stock, I react almost straight away with an aminey reaction. Commercial gelatine is supposed to be allowed, but it does contain some glutamates. It took about three days for me to figure out I had a problem, by which time I was very sleepy (glutamates, it seems, make me sleepy). I was also obsessed. I woke up on the third morning and I couldn’t think about anything except eating more gelatinous soup. I wanted it for breakfast. I was groggy, I couldn’t seem to get up, so I must have spent 45 minutes in bed, thinking about how I must have some more soup! So I called a halt to that experiment.
I decided to swap back to having wheat germ porridge instead again. Since I haven’t been feeling great and have had some skin problems since I came down with a cold over Christmas, I decided to give my liver a total rest and to cut out ALL vegetables except potatoes for a while, and stop my milk thistle. This really is the worst time of the year for failsafers for reactions. Vitamin D supplies are at their lowest, and there’s still a while ahead until we get some UVB sunshine. So I substituted with even more wheat germ – two bowls a day instead of one. I don’t normally eat potatoes either, so I started having them every day.
My body felt like it was relaxing. I haven’t felt so relaxed and calm in months. I felt really bright and awake too, though I still felt a bit wobbly like I couldn’t quite get over the glutamate reaction. Then I went downhill again at the end of this week and started having the same reaction again. I started to really crave wheat germ porridge. I didn’t know whether it was a carb craving or something more sinister. I just couldn’t figure it out. I’ve had heart palpatations, insomnia till about 2AM, some hangover and brain fog problems, and I’ve been totally knocked out – so tired I just want to fall asleep in the afternoon. Something I have noticed particularly with glutamates is that I start to get some pain in my old DVT leg. Which is interesting because when I got my DVT, I happened to be eating Pot Noodles for lunch every day, which are full of MSG. Glutamate is an essential part of the clotting process.
I’ve tried taking B6 and vitamin C to ease the reaction a little bit, because these two vitamins help you turn glutamate into GABA. It seems to have a little bit of an effect, but not much at all.
Then I noticed last night when I decided to have a small cup of milk before bed that I started getting a scary skipping/racing heart beat. I woke up groggy this morning. My other half made some Yorkshire puddings for lunch, made with milk. This afternoon I was so tired I fell asleep for most of the afternoon. Something horrible started to happen to me when I woke up. I realised I had skipping/pounding heart beat. It’s so frightening when it happens. I feel like I’m going to die. I get an impending sense of doom just like a heart attack. I feel weak as a kitten. I was still so sleepy I kept drifting off to sleep and waking up again and having this horrible pounding heart beat, and not being able to get out of the sleep state. This is what they used to call “night terrors” in the olden days.
I finally figured out the source of the problem. I bought a different source of milk. I normally buy one specific brand of non-organic Jersey cow milk (“Gold Top”), and I seem to tolerate that fairly well. The milk I’ve drunk in the last few days has been an organic whole milk from M&S. You would think that organic milk would be safer. I don’t know whether they are allowed to add dried milk powder to organic milk without declaring it, but I thought not. But on the label the milk says “pasteurised for longer“.
Milk has some natural glutamates in it. Potatoes have some too. Apparently pasteurising milk for longer hydrolyses the proteins and creates more glutamates. There are several sites dedicated to people who are sensitive to MSG. All of the people there seem to be in agreement that they cannot drink UHT or long-pasteurised milk.
Is it possible that some milk intolerance reactions are just MSG reactions to over-processed, denatured milk?
To make a slipcoat cheese
Take five quarts of new Milk from the Cow, and one quart of Water, and one spoonful of Runnet, and stirre it together, and let it stand till it doth come, then lay your Cheese cloth into the Vate, and let the Whey soak out of it self; when you have taken it all up, lay a cloth on the top of it, and one pound weight for one hour, then lay two pound for one hour more, then turn him when he hath stood two houres, lay three pound on him for an hour more, then take him out of the Vate, and let him lie two or three houres, and then salt him on both sides, when he is salt enough, take a clean cloth and wipe him dry, then let him lie on a day or a night, then put Nettles under and upon him, and change them once a day, if you find any Mouse turd wipe it off, the Cheese will come to his eating in eight or nine dayes. To make a slipcoat Cheese
This is an example of a fresh cheese from a website of 17th century recipes. Other cheese recipes on the site are very different to what we consider cheese today. They seem to consist of using rennet to separate the curds and whey and then using the curds immediately in recipes, or mixing egg whites and cream and calling the result “cheese”.
The fruit and vegetable recipes are very unusual. Most of the vegetables in them are unfamiliar for example, burdocks, mallows, rosebuds, gillyflowers, hops, purslaine, artichokes, quinces. Samuel Pepys’ diary is also of interest. No one seems to have a definitive answer on how many fruit and vegetables people ate.
Vaccine zaps allergy in record time
To help understand this article, there is an animated overview of how the immune system works here.
ALLERGY sufferers could bid farewell to their sneezes with a new generation of vaccines that take effect within weeks.
Existing vaccines for allergies involve three to five years of regular injections with increasing amounts of allergen – the substance that triggers an allergy. All the while the immune response slowly changes from a predominance of T-helper 2 (TH2) cells, immune cells responsible for triggering allergic reactions, to T-helper 1 (TH1) cells, which stimulate the production of protective antibodies.
Because nothing is directing allergens to the right place in immune cells, it takes a lot of allergen to generate a response.
Now researchers at the Swiss Institute of Allergy and Asthma Research (SIAF) in Davos Platz have developed “modular antigen translocating molecules” (MAT), which make vaccines more efficient by delivering the antigens – foreign substances that trigger an immune response – right to where they’re needed within an immune cell.
The MAT vaccines trigger the same protective response as conventional vaccines but in a fraction of the time and with much less allergen, according to a study in human cells. “They lower the dose needed to induce a T-cell response by a factor of about 100,” says Reto Crameri of SAIF, lead author of the study.
The molecules have three parts: a translocation unit, a targeting unit and an allergen. The translocation unit gets the allergen into antigen-presenting cells that are responsible for engineering the switch to TH1 cells. The targeting unit then chauffeurs the antigens to the part of the cell that packages them up for presentation to TH1 cells, ensuring more TH1 cells meet the antigen and respond to it.
Crameri’s team has so far developed vaccines for dust mites, pollen, cat hair and bee venom and tested them on cells from susceptible humans. In each case the vaccines produced a stronger immune response than injecting the allergen by itself (Allergy, DOI: 10.1111/j.1398-9995.2006.01292.x). Crameri says his group is getting similar results with mice injected with these vaccines, and clinical trials on a MAT vaccine for cat allergy will begin later this year. The trial will involve three shots over a four-week period.
The approach is one of several new strategies for tackling allergies. Another vaccine, developed by Allergy Therapeutics of West Sussex, UK, entered phase III clinical trials last week. It stimulates a stronger response by tricking the immune system into thinking it is being attacked by a bacterium. “In the past few years we have really begun to understand the cell signalling mechanisms involved in the allergic response,” says Katherine Gundling of the Allergy Immunology Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco. “Now we’re asking, ‘Can we find a way to take advantage of those mechanisms?’” New Scientist
Basically what scientists are doing is converting an IgE allergic response into an IgG non-allergic response. Diagnosing people with ‘food intolerance’ based on IgG testing is a favourite practice of quacktitioners. It is not accepted by medical science for reasons like the above – IgG responses cure allergic reactions, they don’t cause them.
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