If you believe all foods containing wheat mess with your moods why eat it any of that?

November 12, 2019 Leave a comment

“…wheat mess with your moods why eat it any of that?” – That was the question I was asked  this morning.

I’m so busy these days answering questions by email that I have hardly been blogging at all. At the risk of sharing too much I am simply going to paste my email response here for all to read:

Since 12th Oct just one toasted teacake with thick butter that I had instead of my more usual coffee at local café. That is the only bread I have had in past 31 days. I made a point for noting any adverse-affects and did not. I probably tolerate one small one-off dose of gluten or even glyphosate fairly well…. While, I have so many other digestive issues that something would, perhaps, need to be a lot worse than that one teacake to be noticeable.

As for the article you point to  greatest danger in your diet – great pictures for tempting people (not me) back to bread however, I was sure it would be about #glyphosate yet not even one mention of it.

On the subject of ‘ancient wheats’… what have you done with the about 200g of organic spelt I let you have? If you still have it and boil it for half hour or so you may find it both acceptable and digestible. I enjoyed eating it but will not buy it again.

In that article it says, “That’s because 75% of the carbohydrates in wheat are in the form amylopectin A.” – My previous looks into this revealed, to me, that this is no big deal. Amylopectins are a common form of starch found in all cereals, potatoes and all over the place not causing much damage to us at all.

When it comes to sugar in blood from carbohydrate sources I believe > Dr Robert Lustig < and others who warn against fructose are on the right track. Do you remember our discussions about refined fructose (molecule-for-molecule) doing about 10x the damage to red blood cells (raising HbA1c = worsening diabetes) than glucose. Is it true? I think so, while fructose from fresh fruit may be close to harmless. It is refined fructose (including the fructose released from refined sucrose that could be causing more harm than anything else in the typical western or SAD diet.) Then supermarket bread, in the UK, tends to have refined sucrose added, so another reason to avoid it.

Currently I find the article’s reminder about arsenic adds to my dietary concerns…

“Chronic arsenic exposure can lead to headaches, fatigue, brain fog and digestive issues… not to mention, heart disease, cancer and diabetes.”

“Just Say No” to rice flour ..”, “on the gluten-free aisle”, “Rice plants use silica to strengthen their stalks. But arsenic ‘looks’ like silica to the plant, so it is readily pulled from the soil.”

“…testing over 200 samples from 65 different products that contain rice. They found arsenic in EVERY product tested.!”

…because I have boiled rice several times per week and have become addicted to rice cakes, plus fish a few times a week. All fish contains (typically low levels of) arsenic. In the lab we used to test samples of fish destined for dog and cat food for arsenic content. Not a regular thing but I remember we used to find it. Some fish considered too toxic for our dogs and cats yet does anyone test the fish we are eating?

Best wishes

Roger

That was my response to which my friend has asked, “Is it worth the risk?  Maybe No bread or rice.  Why not just eats oats?” – Now that is a good question as I love oats. One argument against oats in the UK is that even organic and even “gluten-free” oats tend to contain some gluten as the same vehicles are used for transporting wheat.

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34 Days without Wheat and Milk #bipolar #gluten #electro-sensitivity

October 26, 2017 Leave a comment

Last month I shared’ “I am in agreement with others who study recovery from mood troubles that a first step is to have a long trial of no wheat and no cow’s milk/cow dairy” and, “Being half-hearted in eliminating wheat (usually barley and rye products too) and dairy rarely works.”

I was already avoiding all dairy produce. Within a few days of clearing my house of all wheat containing foods and choosing not to eat any of these anywhere, my gut discomfort mostly disappeared. I was no longer being woken by gut pains.

Was this the cure for my sleep and mood troubles? Not all, as soon as the gut pain went the mild tinnitus I had been experiencing became far worse. Waking in the early hours the whistling sounds in my ears was as bad as almost any gut pain. Along with the whistling a feeling I used to only get if standing near a microwave oven or laboratory magnetic resonance equipment was now troubling me in my own home. Different people have different responses to microwaves and powerful magnets. For me, this feeling has always been like my head being crushed sideways in a vice.

Moving my bed downstairs eased both the whistling and the crushing pain. A few nights later putting the mattress on the floor helped more. Then removing the mattress and sleeping on a thick blanket on the concrete kitchen floor helped even more. By now, every time I went upstairs the whistling and crushing pain returned.

Using my laptop I could tell that the whistling and pain was related to the number and strength of WiFi signals in different parts of my house. I spoke with some of my nearest neighbours who agreed to turn their WiFi and a WiFi enabled printer off overnight. This helped and the first night with that printer off was, for me, one of the longest and most refreshing sleeps this year.

This did not solve my troubles. Day-after-day I just seemed to be becoming more electro-sensitive. It was not just WiFi. I needed changes to the wiring and ways I was using electricity in my own home.

I am continuing to investigate local sources of the man-made radiation and how to reduce their effects on my wellbeing. I need to do this so that I can again use the upstairs of my house.

What about my dairy and wheat experiment?

Other than tea with milk on 3 occasions, I have been 100% free of dairy produce, which has helped enormously with my breathing.

I had zero wheat/oats/barley/rye for 34 days, then had a portion of chip-shop chips, which I normally avoid as I consider the types of fat and deep frying process to be detrimental to health. I think these chips were contaminated with gluten as many chip-shop chips are. That evening I had a tiny glass of beer. I slept well, but woke feeling dreadful. The next evening I finished the 500ml bottle of beer. I did not sleep well. I was awake from 12:30am and felt extremely unwell. I won’t go into detail here about my next 12 trips to the toilet over the next 24 hours, other than to say these were very much non-standard.

I had kidded myself that the German beer would be free of gluten. It was not. I now saw the allergy advice on the label was very clear. “Barley: contains gluten”.

Why do we keep on wanting dairy and wheat/barley/rye even when again and again we have proved, to ourselves, these are damaging our health?

I used to say that my desire was largely driven by habits and social pressures as most people around me continue to consume these many times every day.

There is also the calming/relaxing effect from morphine like compounds from partially digested dairy and wheat.

After what happened over the 35 days I am thinking about one more ‘advantage’ of consuming wheat: It was only when I stopped both dairy and wheat consumption that my electro-sensitivity became so bad as to almost totally disable me. As soon as I consumed the contaminated chips and clearly labelled beer the tinnitus and crushing pain lessened, with my new obsession with protection from man-made Electro-Magnetic-Fields (EMF) subsiding.

It is like with physical pain when our attention is always drawn only to the greatest or most acute pain. I am wondering if others have noticed what I have. Already being free of all prescribed medications/drugs and then avoiding the morphine-like-compounds associated with dairy and gluten, my brain increasingly noticed the man-made radiation ‘soup’.

This has left me with another question: How many bipolar diagnosis are linked in some way to exposure to EMF, WiFi and now perhaps ‘smart-meter’ radiation.

Thinking back to my own hospitalization in 1997, mobile (cell) phones were still a rarity in the UK. In the 5 days leading up my hospitalization I was away from home and had borrowed a mobile phone, which I used excessively, holding it pressed up against my ear. Prior to this I’d had very little contact with mobiles. I certainly am not claiming that mobile phones alone can cause severe mood disorders. I am suggesting mobiles and other sources of EMF may be contributors to many, if not all, modern psychiatric troubles.

What do you think?

I am going back to zero dairy and gluten. I am also admitting that the risks of gluten from beer are too high for me at this time.

I’ll close, as I did a month ago, by saying that the first step in recovery from almost anything would seem to be getting out of denial and accepting we may need to do something radically different. On Friday, I have called a group together to discuss the effects of EMF and what we can do to better understand its effects and how we may each need to respond to the increasing number of sources and the strength of these new sources, such as the role out ‘smart meters’.

 

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Beat Bipolar Bloat #fasting #gluten

September 22, 2017 1 Comment

“All disease starts in the gut.” Hippocrates

Eating late tends to give me gut pains at about 2am and this has been a major driver for disorder in my life.

I made a decision to tackle this by not eating anything after 6pm. I had mixed success for a few days until, 24th August when I put this as my number one objective. I decided to allow myself to eat as much of whatever I fancied during each day, to be certain I’d not be hungry at the end of my early evening meal.

You’ll see here that I was successful:Monitoring time of last food of the dayWell, I was successful in achieving just that one goal for 2 weeks. This came at a price as the 2am gut pains came back far worse. I’d only feel okay when I got up and stayed active. Many nights I was up from hours like 2am to 6am, before sleeping about one more hour to get dressed at 7am.

Overall, I was averaging 4 hours sleep a night. I could not figure out what it could be that I might be eating that was causing all this pain.

I’d been out all day on Tuesday. I ate but was still hungry at 6pm. I made porridge with organic oats. Within an hour I was overcome with extraordinary tiredness and laid down at 7:15pm.

I woke at 4am with my abdomen bloated/distended too painfully to be sleeping anymore. It was good to have slept 8 hours, rather than the 4 hours of the previous nights, but what had caused this bloating?

Could it really be the organic oats I’d been using for more than a year?

I have just weighed the dry milled oats I have left. Knowing when I bought these I can tell my consumption had increased to over 500g/week. Four times as much as before 24th August. Most times I had been up in the night, I only eventually felt able to sleep again after mixing and consuming oats with salt and hot water.

I had become addicted to oats!

I believe that a problem with addictions, leaky-gut and failure of the blood-brain-barrier is that we seem to completely forget the most obvious causes.

I must have been suspecting something was odd, when on 13th Sept I had emailed some friends asking, “What is it that can cause oats to be irresistible or even addictive?”

I have known for years that oats and wheat are often:

  • often grown on the same farms
  • moved in the same vehicles and stored in the same barns/silos, which may not be fully cleaned between each load
  • processed in the same factories

The oats I have been using are not labelled ‘gluten-free’. (Even so, ‘gluten-free’ is not necessarily completely free of wheat gluten as the label only means that efforts have been made to reduce the risks from gluten. This was confirmed by an investigation into gluten-free oats that revealed most brands tested contained some gluten.)

How come was I able to eat these oats for so long without spotting these could be a major problem for my gut and sleep pattern?

On Tuesday, my Beat Bipolar presentation had included this slide:Beat Bipolar - 2017-09-19 - Zonulin SlideI have heard doctors question the existence of Zonulin, saying all this is unproven and doctors such a William Davies in his book ‘Wheat Belly’ are making outrageous claims about the harm that can be done by just a little gluten. Whether the science is good or not, I believe we each have to go with our gut feelings (pun intended).

I believe that I have been using these oats as a drug! Every time I had some I felt sleepy about an hour later. Sometimes, if having oats at lunchtime I would have an afternoon sleep.

I’ve made a decision and just given away the remainder of those oats so I will not be tempted.

To be continued…

 

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Glutinous Bipolar – Gluten and Bipolar Symptoms

March 6, 2015 2 Comments

Glutinous Bipolar – Gluten and Bipolar Symptoms

It is 16 years since I was last detained on a psychiatric ward, 15 years since I learned how to self-manage and stay away from psychiatrists. It is now more than 4 years since I last took any psychiatric drug.

Today, it feels like I am ‘back to square one’ with words from a 1960’s song in my head.

“Lock me away and don’t allow the day, here inside, where I hide with my loneliness…”

Everything was going well, so why am I feeling this way?

It was cold and dark with a bitter wind. I was walking back to the train station when I got some bad news on my phone just as a welcoming fish ‘n’ chip shop came into view. I had promised a friend I would not eat chips. I went in and bought a sausage instead.

Somehow I convinced myself that any gluten in the sausage would not matter. This was not good food for me, but it was hot and seemed to be what I needed to deal with the cold and bad news. Was this self-harm? Were things going too well? Could it be my “inner saboteur” getting the better of me?

After more than a month with no gluten at all, with minimal pain, great positivity and plenty of sustained energy, just an hour after eating the gluten… my world was starting to fall apart.

Three days of misery followed with stupid coffee drinking and loads of dairy produce. Three days of binging, increasing gut pains and foggy and confused thinking.

Was it always gluten? It is 19 years since I was prescribed medications to calm my guts, but it was one of these that made my insomnia worse and led to the psychiatric drugs. These sedated me and in many ways made my life easier, but all the time they were allowing more gut damage to occur.

Each new doctor said it was all in my head and nothing to do with my gut, so I had to figure it out for myself. Now it seems I can only survive and thrive if I can learn from my mistakes and so avoid gluten regardless of what life throws at me.

Food and Mood / Natural Nutrition courses

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