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.

True Confessions about Fish

OK, I'm going to come out of the closet. After 18 years as a lacto-ovo vegetarian, I've decided to include fish in my diet. Not just any fish - it's got to be wild-caught, not farmed, and preferably labelled with one of the sustainable fishery seals, so I can be reasonably confident no dolphins, whales or seals were harmed in the process. Also, given the laws of kashrut, the fish have to have fins and visible scales - so no shellfish for us.

I've got some nice Pacific salmon filets in my freezer, and even better, northern pike and pickerel (walleye to you Amurricans) from Lake Winnipeg - as close to local as you can get in a landlocked province like mine. Well, OK, it isn't really landlocked, but I don't know how much of a fishery they have up in Hudson's Bay. Some people dream of  ice fishing up there ... but I digress.

Now, of course, I'm looking for some good recipes. I've marinated the salmon and baked it in aluminium foil - I guess that's the default for any fish, but I'd like to expand a little, especially for Shabbat. All constructive suggestions welcome!