SCD and Paleo and FODMAPs, oh my!

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing ... and sometimes more knowledge is not better! I am now getting quite confused. It seems that everything is bad for me, and some of the recommendations are contradictory. What's a girl to do?

I've been doing the Specific Carbohydrate Diet for a few years now, and I have done very well on it, removing grains, sugar and liquid milk from my diet. It has helped me keep my Inflammatory Bowel Disease under control with no medication, presumably by reducing the inflammation in my gut.

Then I discovered paleo. To be honest, the paleo/primal principles have had more effect on my exercise (walking and lifting heavy rather than chronic cardio and machines) than on my nutrition, as I was already eating free-run eggs (and pastured when available) and organic dairy (made into SCD yoghurt which is fermented for 24 hours to remove all the lactose) in my lacto-ovo vegetarian diet. Removing legumes (aside from occasional lentils) seems to have been beneficial. Moreover, I added fish to my diet back in March, ending 18 years of vegetarianism. Bringing mammals and birds into my kosher dairy kitchen would be a whole other tale, worthy of another blog post. Hasn't happened yet.

I've also, as my faithful readers know, become enamoured of lacto-fermentation, fermenting kale, cabbage (with juniper berries, yum), pearl onions and carrots. Everything I read told me that these would be good for healing my leaky gut. Just as an update, I no longer use mason jars to ferment, but bail-top jars similar to these (affiliate link).While not totally anaerobic according to some people, I am not yet convinced of the necessity for airlocks, especially as Sandor Katz, the guru of fermentation, agrees with me.

So, along comes the whole FODMAPs thing and completely destroys everything I've been doing. This awkward acronym stands for Fermentable, Oligo-, Di-, Mono-saccharides and Polyols. I'm not going to go into all the details of these (visit the Wikipedia links provided if you really want to know), but in short, all my favourite fermentable foods should be off-limits to people with leaky guts. This despite the lovely lacto-bacilli they harbour which are supposed to be beneficial to the same people. I have no problem with avoiding lactose, grains and pulses, but to cut out all the stone fruits, cruciferous vegetables, onions, nightshades and fungi leaves me with pretty much nothing to eat in the plant department.

Oh, and then JJ Virgin comes along and tells me that eggs are inflammatory, too.

Please, shoot me now.

Paleo

Time to come out of the closet - I'm a great admirer of the Paleo way of life. I think I adhere to it reasonably well, except for the small detail that I don't eat meat. I don't know if that disqualifies me from the Paleo community. I guess I'll find out, as I've applied to sign up to the PaleoBloggers email list. A new adventure ...

So, what is Paleo? I like ModernPaleo's version of the principles:

The core of paleo is the diet: it eschews grains, sugars, and modern vegetable oils in favor of high-quality meat, fish, eggs, and vegetables.

In fact, you might say it's not that different from the SCD. Of course, you can go further in your quest for a Primal lifestyle and learn about the dangers of Chronic Cardio and all the bad things it does to you ... in other words, how to turn upside down pretty much everything we thought we knew. I love it.

How about you, are you ready to make some changes in your life? It's January, after all. Want to do this with me?

A New Toy for GI sufferers

I've found a new toy - an online GI tracker. It's a little inflexible in terms of input, but it seems to work nicely to correlate foods and symptoms. You can have it send you reports in the form of PDFs that you can take to your doctor. It's kind of cool, in a medicalised kind of way.

One thing that shocked me is that you HAVE to input some kind of medication. The idea of having a condition like this and not taking medication appears to be outside the box. I put in one of the more innocuous things I've been prescribed (and that I do occasionally take), but it was pretty amazing that there was no "none" among the options!

I've also bought myself the latest version of Mark Sisson's book The Primal Blueprint. Not that I lead such a Primal life - for one thing, having had a kosher vegetarian kitchen since 1994, I'm not about to introduce meat into the house. Even if I were ready for such a major upheaval of my kitchen, I don't think grassfed kosher meat is available anywhere around here for a price I'm willing to pay (apparently it's available in Baltimore, but that doesn't help me). Right now my kids, vegetarian from birth, are revolted even at the idea of eating fish, so it's all baby steps. I did such a great job of raising them according to the ideas of the 90s, healthy whole grains and all ... sigh.

Still, being that I'm on the SCD, it's a lot closer to Primal than the Standard North American Diet. I do make the SCD yoghurt and eat cheese, and I also use honey on occasion. Legumes are also a major part of my diet, since I seem to tolerate them pretty well.

By the way, the kale chips came out great. I was going to take a picture of them, but I ate too many before I thought of it. Oh well. I'll make more later in the week. I do need to be a little careful, can't gobble too many of them or the fibre gets me. But they were crunchy, fatty, garlicky and salty, just what I like! I'll post the recipe when I make them again, along with a lovely picture.

What about you, what substitutions can you make to enjoy your favourite things without ruining your health?