My childhood

I’ll start at the beginning.

I was born two weeks prematurely. My mum had a difficult birth. She was on gas and air and had no control of what was happening to her and was left a bit traumatised, especially after they kept taking me away without telling her. My mum is quite emotional and gets upset easily.

Reaction #1: She describes me as a fussy feeder because I refused milk often and I would only feed every four hours, so she was worried about my weight. I had colic. Colic is defined as lengthy, repeated periods of crying. Apparently I had to be held down in the cot or I wouldn’t sleep. These are traits regularly reported in food chemical sensitive babies. Colic has been linked to problems later in life like ADHD and IBS. That isn’t very surprising really, since they’re all genetic food chemical sensitivity problems. Apart from the colic, my mum describes me as a ‘good’ and ‘quiet’ baby. At least, I am described as ‘good’ in comparison to my hyperactive younger sister who screamed the house down every night.

Reaction #2: My very first memory is of sitting on the front doorstep with my mum and eating some chocolates with her out of a tin. I wanted some more, but my mum said they were gone. There then transpired a misunderstanding between Mum and me in which I thought she said there were more in the kitchen cupboard. I leaped up and raced into the kitchen. I couldn’t reach the cupboard as I was too small, and I couldn’t climb on the unit. So I turned around to run back out of the kitchen and I ran straight through the plate glass door that divided the kitchen and living room. This is in the era before safety glass. I cut up my face. I still have a scar just above my eyelid where I was cut by glass, and I was very lucky not to lose an eye. My mum was beside herself. She couldn’t understand why I did it, she thought it was very strange as I was always such a careful, quiet little girl and my recklessness had been very out of character.

Reaction #3: I have a few other flashbulb memories from under the age of three. In all of them I am anxious or distressed because I have seen something or met someone new. My second memory is of playing with brightly coloured play-dough at the nursery across the road. I started bawling my eyes out and had to be fetched home. I wonder whether the brightly coloured additives in the plasticine affected me as they affect other food chemical sensitive children.

Being left at playschool always made me cry. I felt like a misfit from the first day I went to nursery school. I was quite tearful and introverted, and I found it hard to get on with the other children. This is nothing compared to my little sister, who spent most of nursery school screaming to go home to mum! After we moved to Nottingham, on my first day at the new playschool I remember the other children being told off for climbing up the slide. In spite of hearing this very specific instruction I ignored it because I thought it didn’t apply to me. I pretended to be a cat. I didn’t talk to any of the other children. I remember many occasions when I heard instructions but didn’t think they applied to me because I wasn’t a part of the group.

I didn’t settle in school properly either and cried and cried. I found the transition hard. My mum was pregnant with my sister at the time and various relatives had to take over responsibility for me because she was quite ill. I felt very frightened. I was frightened of the other children and the teacher, who wasn’t very nice. One of my first days at school was spent colouring in a picture of a woman. I coloured the entire picture in black. The teacher told me off because I hadn’t been given permission to colour in. I was so upset all of the time that I was eventually sent off to my grandparents in Derbyshire for a while. I don’t know what I had been eating at home but I don’t think my mum was doing the cooking as she was ill in bed for a lot of the time. My grandparents were both ex-teachers and cooked all of their own food from scratch and ate in a very traditional, old fashioned way. I must have eaten home made custard every day of the week. Apparently I was an angel all week, and my parents were really peeved about that!

I was addicted to Ribena blackcurrant cordial. I used to suck my thumb, so I went around everywhere with a bright purple thumb! I was a very, very fussy eater. I hated all vegetables. I hated foods that squeaked in my mouth or hurt my mouth when I chewed them. I hated fizzy drinks because they literally hurt my tongue. I hated strong flavours. Pies, fish, and chips all made me physically gag. I largely lived on mashed potato, lamb chops, and breakfast cereal. I would only eat the yolks of eggs and not the whites. I hated sandwiches. I loved plain sugary breakfast cereals like Rice Krispies with whole milk. I hated skimmed milk. I hated fruit. My mum spent a long time negotiating with me over food. My lunch was usually a very mild cheese sandwich or a marmite sandwich and a jam sandwich. My mum would cut the crusts off the sandwiches, but the bread would always have a hard edge where she had cut the crust close to the edge, so I would eat around the crusts anyway. Finding these remains in my lunchbox caused me to get told off, so I would try to break them up into a massive plate of crumbs or throw them under the table. One of the dinner ladies found me out and told the headmaster, who told my mum. I was distraught, because I just couldn’t bring myself to eat this awful food, it made me feel physically sick. I did most things very slowly and deliberately that it gave me the nickname ‘slow coach’ which really upset me. I ate so slowly that I frequently overstayed the lunch period and that got me into even more trouble. I would spin my meal out because I found food so disgusting. My mum was quite worried because I was underweight.

I had lots of problems with clothes. I couldn’t stand wool because it itched. I couldn’t stand lace, and I insisted on having labels cut out of clothes. I was ‘allergic’ to everything and had constant post nasal drip. I had asthma. One day at school I complained I felt ill and couldn’t breathe, so the teachers called my mum. When she got to the school she found I was having a full blown asthma attack, but in those days they were still so rare the teachers didn’t know what was wrong.

This was all in spite of eating a fairly good diet. We didn’t eat ready meals. Breakfast was cereal and whole milk. Lunch was sandwiches, a mini chocolate bar and some crisps. I drank a lot of whole milk. Tea was usually meat, potatoes and vegetables. I usually left the vegetables. The only thing we did that was really wrong was use margarine instead of butter. I didn’t eat any additives on a daily basis with perhaps the exception of some in the margarine. My diet wasn’t vitamin deficient.

I got a lot of earaches. I did catch chicken pox. I was often ill, sometimes seriously. I had several very nasty ear infections that made my ears hurt so much that I cried. My best friend had a perfect attendance record for every year which won her a prize. I couldn’t even imagine that. I seemed to be off ill at least once every term. There was no sudden ‘downturn’ in my development at the critical age of two! I was ill and different from birth.

I didn’t have a refrigerator mother. I was breast fed. My mum loved both my sister and I and spent a great deal of time stimulating us and teaching us in childhood. As I grew older, I found that my mum had problems understanding and getting on with me, because I was very stand-offish and ‘aloof’. Of course, I know I was not ‘aloof’ or ‘lacking in empathy’, I just didn’t like to be touched as it tickled. It hurt emotionally to be touched, and I didn’t really like interacting with people because I was afraid of social situations.

I was extremely shy and timid. I was afraid of boys and never spoke to them or made friends with them. I had a small group of girl friends and a best friend, who I stuck to like superglue though I never spoke much. I was already using her as a social crutch.

When I was seven, I was reading out loud to the teacher, and she suggested that I needed to go down a level. I was very bad at reading out loud because I was quite shaky and nervous. I stumbled and stammered, and I didn’t know how to pronounce some words even though I understood the meaning. Sometimes, because I was bad at catching nonverbal cues, I would just stop because I didn’t know whether I was supposed to continue. Although I was sent down a reading level at school, at home I was reading the full, unedited version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

A year later they noticed I was behind in maths. They discovered that the reason I was behind in maths was that no one had ever taught me to add up properly in my head, and I was still counting on my fingers. I wasn’t good at maths, all the way through school. Sometimes I lagged behind for weeks because a basic rule hadn’t been explained to me. I dreaded maths. I would finish one long, boring worksheet of long division and go for a next worksheet hoping for something different, and I would be confronted with the same thing again.

After our teacher told us about germs I became an obsessive hand washer. I always washed my hands thoroughly with soap after using the toilet. I hated the sensation of having anything sticky or greasy on my hands, so I would wash them. I would splash the taps to clean them too. If ever I was in a situation where I couldn’t wash my hands, I would become very anxious. I still wash my hands far too much. I can’t stand the feeling of grease or dirt on them, or the faintest smell, even that left by coins.

At home, I had a variety of interesting stims. I had little rituals and ways of doing things. I always ate in the same ritualised way. I don’t know what my parents thought of my behaviour, but they didn’t seem to recognise it as unusual. I loved to climb on the climbing frame in the back garden. It was round with four ladders. I would climb onto the bottom rung and jump off. Then I would climb on to the next to bottom rung and jump off. Then the third rung and jump off. This would go on until I got all the way to the top and jumped off. Then I would move on to the next ladder and do the same. The climbing frame had horizontal bars. I would loop over them. I had to loop over them all, one after the other, always five or ten times. If I was in the middle of the climbing frame on the swing, if I touched the ground with one hand, I had to touch the ground ten times with that hand, then ten times with the other hand. If my mum or dad called me inside half way through this compulsion, I had to finish it, no matter how much trouble I got into. My sister shared this trait with me, though hers was not nearly so extreme – she just seemed to have to keep her ground touching even – one on each hand. She also had a habit of repeating things that were said to her under her breath. By this time she was thoroughly hyperactive and most days wired up on coca-cola.

I became a target for bullies quite early on. I didn’t understand why they always zeroed in on me. It was always the same. I had no problems with the girls in my year, but the lowest performing, most aggressive little boys always saw me as a target for abuse. I was called a witch. I had a very bad year with a strict teacher who shouted a lot. He terrified me. I had to sit at a table with some intimidating classmates. Every day I dreaded going to school. Everyone seemed to be in on a secret I didn’t know. I finally asked my mum how babies were made – something it took me days to pluck up the courage to do – I went bright crimson just asking the question. I was so embarrassed. But at least I realised what all of my classmates had been talking about.

Sometimes I felt like my friends weren’t really my friends and I was the butt of jokes behind my back. They once tried to arrange for me to be the new best friend of an unpleasant little girl with bad breath to try and get rid of me. The problem was, though we had been best friends since we were very small, my friend was very popular, and I wasn’t popular at all.

I understand now that I was bullied because I didn’t know how to dissipate aggression. When other kids are bullied they will make like they don’t care and make a joke, sometimes at their own expense, as if to say “yeah, I’m an idiot and you’re the boss,” or they’ll find some way of changing the subject. When I was bullied I responded with defiance or confusion and showed that I was hurt. I was labelled ‘a snob’. Bullying is all about the social pecking order, and I didn’t know I was supposed to submit and be small, and be friendly to these morons who were being horrible to me.

Red, red wine

I’ve never been a big fan of the taste of beer or wine, so I’ve never drunk it in any quantity, just a glass now and then in sociable situations. But a couple of years ago when we were living in Nice I got into the habit of drinking quite a lot of red wine. By “quite a lot” I mean one or two glasses once or twice a week – seriously.

“Food Poisoning”

My other half J. and I both got sick with food poisoning several times while we were living in France. We eventually managed to trace the source back to (probably) an E. coli infection from (definitely) salad from the local greengrocer. Of all the things traditionally perceived as risky that we ate in France – from raw cured duck meat, to “blue” steak, to shellfish, to raw milk, raw fromage-blanc and raw yoghurt, and even, once a very, very undercooked chicken kebab (alas, I realised too late that what I was eating was raw in the middle), none of them ever made us ill. It was a little annoying to trace the source back to lettuce, considering I was always very careful to wash the salad greens well since they were freshly picked and still covered in muck when we bought them.

Then I mysteriously started to get “food poisoning” on several occasions even though J. didn’t get sick and we couldn’t figure out what I had eaten differently. By this time we had already traced the source of the other food poisonings to lettuce and had stopped eating it. These new poisoning incidents happened at a ridiculous frequency – every one or two weeks – so often that I thought I was either going to die of exhaustion or have to move back to the UK, because it wasn’t worth living in the sun anymore for this. This “food poisoning” was slightly different because it was accompanied by a dizzy, spinning head and started quite late at night – at about two or two thirty in the morning and went through till around four or four thirty. It took three or four incidents before I realised I was reacting to red wine. Most of the time I seemed to be able to tolerate one small glass of red wine, but any more than that (one and a half, for example), and I’d be talking to Ralph on the big white telephone.

Where did it come from? I’d never drunk much red wine, but I’d never reacted to red wine like this before. It was as though I’d suddenly become sensitised to it. I had no real explanation other than that red wine contains tannins, which can upset the digestion and might be the cause of “red wine headaches,” and that some red wines contain histamine. Histamine can cause stomach upset, but a more usual reaction is getting a rash. I’ve seen other people react this way; in fact I was at a wedding when one poor girl, drinking the same red wine as me, got a bright red rash from head to toe. Yet I was fine, I didn’t react to the wine that time, though I felt pretty rough the next day, and I’d reacted to varieties in the past that were supposed to be low in histamine, in fact if I drank enough of it, I reacted to all red wine. I was very puzzled.

So I started avoiding red wine and have avoided it for a couple of years now. Then I kept forgetting I had a problem with it and doing stupid things like getting drunk with friends. In one particularly “memorable” incident we had some friends stay over, we all got drunk on red wine, and I spent the night puking and pooping in a bathroom with no door (house renovations), while my friends slept a couple of metres away! They claim not to have heard anything, but I think that might be because they are kind.

After a few severe punishments from my body and a lot of missed sleep and embarrassment, I decided to drink white instead, which I hate as being a supertaster, I find it tastes like sick to me. But after one small glass of white wine, I spent the rest of the night feeling queasy.

Fire and Brimstone

It was only very recently that I heard about the new EU list of food allergens and intolerances that need to be labelled.

• Cereals containing gluten and products thereof
• Crustaceans and products thereof
• Eggs and products thereof
• Fish and products thereof
• Peanuts and products thereof
• Soybeans and products thereof
• Milk and dairy products (including lactose)
• Nuts and nut products
• Celery and products thereof
• Mustard and products thereof
• Sesame seeds and products thereof
• Sulphur dioxide and sulphites at concentrations of more than 10 mg/kg or 10 mg/litre

Then I started noticing that most wine labels in the supermarket now have some small bold type on them: contains sulphites. I had no idea that sulphites could cause reactions in people. Because wine isn’t labelled with an ingredients list, I had stupidly assumed it was a pure product. How wrong could I be? Wine is excluded from labelling under some protectionist EU law – probably because if people knew the kind of rubbish that goes into it, they wouldn’t drink it!

So what can sulphites do to people?

• They trigger migraines and sinusitis
• They trigger asthma attacks
• They cause urticaria, rashes and eczema
• They cause bloating, sickness and diarrhoea
• They cause the tongue and throat to swell so much they block the airways
• They cause autoimmune problems
• They cause anaphylactic shock
• And more

Well, some of those reactions make sickness and diarrhoea sound almost like a blessing. But some of the other symptoms made me both nervous and intrigued. For most of my life I’ve had problems with asthma, eczema, and migraines. Could I be sulphite sensitive? I was pretty sure that my eczema was caused by food, and I was determined to cure it. I used my initiative (google) to find out more.

Firstly, there’s a difference between food allergies and food intolerances. Allergies are caused by proteins or substances that bind to proteins and cause an actual antibody reaction from the immune system. Intolerances can be caused by virtually anything, but in practice are caused by just a few things. The mechanisms behind food intolerances haven’t been figured out yet, but they seem to be to do with an inability of the body to process and get rid of certain substances properly. Sulphites are a food intolerance.

I found this guy, Rick Williams, who gets migraines when he ingests sulphites. I really admire this guy, because he’s researched until he’s sure he’s found his problem, and he’s doing proper scientific experiments on himself to determine his level of sensitivity. Someone should take this guy and present him to a bunch of epidemiologists to show them how to do GOOD science. He’s discovered that certain vitamins and minerals help to raise his tolerance level of sulphites.

I tried another experiment. I found an organic red wine in the supermarket that had low enough levels of sulphites that it did not need to be labelled. Organic wine is not automatically sulphite free, but is only permitted to contain about a third as much as ordinary wine. With some trepidation, I drank a whole, large glass. And I had a peaceful night’s sleep. No reaction!

I immediately started taking the vitamins and minerals recommended by Rick Williams to reduce my sensitivity. These included molybdenum, B12, B6, and Folic acid. The problem is, you see, sulphites are everywhere. Even when you check the label, you never know what you are really getting. Sulphites get sprayed onto shellfish like prawns and scallops while they’re still at sea, in very variable quantities, and they’re never listed on the label. Sulphites get sprayed on to potatoes and apples to keep them from browning. Sulphites get sprayed on to lettuce in salad bars to keep the lettuce green. They’re also in dried fruit and nut mixes. Butchers use sulphites (illegally in many countries) to keep mince looking pink. With so many unlabelled uses, you never know what you are getting.

One Sloppy Experiment

I wondered, since I was reacting to sulphites so severely, if they might be the cause of my facial eczema. Since I don’t really eat many foods that contain additives, I wondered if I should also be avoiding sulphurous foods – like red meat and cruciferous vegetables. Sulphur is an important component of our diet, in fact too little causes symptoms that are indistinguishable from anaemia, but like everything, too much can be harmful. You require the trace mineral, molybdenum, to get rid of excess sulphur, and I had been quite worried about not getting enough trace minerals.

Sulphur and sulphites are different substances, but I thought in a half-assed, poorly-researched kind of way it might be worth a try. I casually changed my diet and stopped eating red meat and avoided green vegetables like broccoli. I had already cut out dairy because it seemed to have a very slight negative effect. I was still low-carbing, but I was kind of doing an anti-Atkins and eating a lot of white food. It was a pretty sloppy experiment, truthfully. I didn’t think the theory held much water and there are no tables anywhere on the net for the sulphur content of foods, but I thought, what the hell, I’m at the stage where I will give anything a go.

My eczema cleared up! I was really surprised, but it happened literally within five days of me changing my diet and starting the vitamins. It wasn’t a placebo effect either, because I was still clear a month later, having come through the stresses of Christmas unscathed. But something didn’t fit. I was really puzzled. I was still eating eggs. Eggs are sulphurous aren’t they? I’d been eating eggs all month. And how come my migraines, asthma, and eczema had gotten so much better when I started to do Atkins, even though I was eating tons of meat and salad? How come it had gotten better again for several months immediately when I started doing the very high-fat porker diet and practically living on dairy? I couldn’t figure it out. Was it just down to the vitamins, and my particular tolerance level of sulphur and sulphites?

I got a really bad cold after Christmas, the first one in over a year. I took lots of vitamin C. I remained eczema-free. On the last day of my cold we went to visit relatives and ate out at an Indian restaurant. When I woke up the next morning my face was a mess! I fiddled with my vitamins for weeks, I chopped and changed my diet. Nothing worked. I was sure I was doing exactly what I had done before Christmas, after all I was still avoiding red meat.

I guess I forgot about the green vegetables.

I forgot about the green vegetables! My problem wasn’t sulphurous foods at all. But I’d unwittingly stumbled on the answer to my eczema by doing an experiment. That’s the thing about doing experiments. You can form a theory and test it, and the theory seems to work, but if you don’t control your variables, or even if you do, your theory might well still be wrong. But I used my initiative, I took my health into my own hands and stopped relying on doctors who gave me prescriptions for hydrocortisone creams that didn’t work.

As I write this, I don’t have eczema anymore. It’s gone. G-O-N-E. I thought I had a beef allergy, but I don’t. I thought I had a dairy allergy, but I don’t. I even thought it might be because I’m low-carbing. Of course it’s not. I also thought I could eat carrots, but I’m not so sure I can. I thought vegetables were GOOD for you. Are they heck. Everything I thought I knew about my eczema, I’ve crossed out, thrown away, and started again. In fact, as a rather jolly side effect I appear to have cured my hypoglycaemia. Life is wonderful.

Do you really want to know the answer?

The problem was plant poisons and rotten stuff.

Notes from October 2007

This was a post I originally made on my other non-food blog when I had only just started this blog. It explains how I got to the point where I figured out I needed to go on the failsafe diet.

Eczema and food

Sent: February 7 2006
Subject: contact me form
From: H
Place: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Comments: Ms. D—: Been suffering from terrible, raw eczema on the back of my right hand every winter for 10 years. Wondering if it might be the exposure to sunlight in the summer months that prevents me from suffering year-round: I spend a lot of time outdoors May – October, but not nearly so much from November – April. This winter my eczema has been terrible. Am not spending less time outdoors than previous winters, and am actually experiencing less stress, so figure it must be the diet. Notice horrible reactions up to 36 hours after consumption of cow cream, butter, and high-fat cow milk; also suspect reactions to beef and excess protein. Just wondering if you’ve solved your eczema condition thru diet, and if you’d be so kind as to let me know what seems to help. Gratefully, H [name removed for privacy]

Hi H,

I think the first thing you should do is visit this website http://www.fedupwithfoodadditives.info and read everything!

This site is also very useful: http://www.allergy-clinic.co.uk

Depending on who you listen to eczema is either “idiopathic” (“we don’t know what causes it”), or it is caused by food allergies and intolerances. Allergies are caused by proteins or by chemicals that bind to proteins ( e.g. sulfites), intolerances are broader and can be caused by numerous additives or natural chemicals like salicyclates in plants. Some fats can provoke existing inflammatory problems (omega 6 vegetable oils, arachidonic acid in beef, lamb and dairy).

A lot of people who have eczema don’t have enough GLA (evening primrose oil), or omega 3s from fish oils, or zinc. They didn’t work for me (zinc makes me really flake), but as eczema can have numerous causes, it’s worth a try. I too find that sunlight really helps my eczema and I’m looking forward to the spring!

My sister suffers from eczema on her hands during the winter. She is actually eczema-free this year and has been helped by the following combination of things:

• Maintaining good circulation and warmth in her hands
• A low carbohydrate diet of natural wholefoods (no additives or junk food allowed!) based on Weston A. Price foundation principles.*
• Vitamin A cream
• These vitamins:
  • A standard multivitamin
  • Vitamin C (1 gram)
  • Vitamin A (5-10,000 i.u.)
  • Vitamin D (2-400 i.u.)
  • Vitamin E (2-400 i.u)
  • B12 (1000 mcg)
  • Folic Acid (400 mcg)
  • B6 (10 mg)

I am taking the above vitamins plus these,** which I’m having quite a bit of success with:

I am also having to avoid wheat, potatoes, dairy, red meat (particularly beef), fish and shellfish, the onion family, garlic, tomatoes, and anything that might contain sulfites! So I’m currently living on chicken, green veg, carrots, parsnips, nuts, fruit and eggs (which strangely I don’t react to)!*** I’d say that I’m 90% of the way there in identifying the foods I am reacting to. The fats I use are limited to coconut oil, olive oil and goose/duck/chicken fat. I also drink a lot of redbush tea**** and chamomile tea because they have an anti-inflammatory effect. Apparently sodium bicarbonate and calcium carbonate are both very good for soothing reactions, haven’t had chance to try them yet. Too much or too little carbohydrate and too much protein do cause me flare ups, but I think this is due to increased stress hormones rather than anything deeper. The thing that helps most is to keep your macronutrients regular rather than yo-yoing, (which is what I used to do because I was scared of gaining weight).

I have a long history of asthma and eczema and I’ve had a chronic eczema-like inflammation in my right ear for the last ten years or so that is connected to shampoo use. My facial eczema appeared after I got a very nasty bout of bronchitis about a year and a half ago, I think it upset my immune system. I had also developed an intolerance to sulfites (in red wine) a couple of months before, and that was associated with food poisoning. I think it is all connected. Hydrocortizone has never worked for more than four days, then I get worse than when I started!

Because it’s an autoimmune problem it’s pretty difficult to control purely through diet as there are so many other factors involved (stress, sleep, sunlight, airbourne allergens, infections, weather, hormones), and I sometimes it feels as though it’s flaring up for no reason at all. It’s pretty important to keep a food diary and remember that a reaction can be immediate, or it can take up to 48 hours to appear or peak. The positive thing about food allergies and intolerances is that they usually go away of their own accord with anything between 3 months and 2 years abstinence.

So far I’ve managed to completely clear up my eczema on three separate occasions for weeks or months each time, but then something has happened that has set my immune system off again (stress, illness, a takeaway meal, lapsing on the diet, etc.). With the vitamins and the careful diet, I’m very close to clearing it up for a fourth time. I know I’ll eventually beat it if I keep at it and keep a positive attitude!

Everyone has different foods that they react to. Start out by eliminating the foods you know cause a problem, keep a diary, try an elimination diet or a rotation diet. Once you start looking for things it’s amazing what you will find. Try the vitamins. Sometimes it’s very simple to fix, other times (like me), you have to be pretty persistent!

Hope this helps and good luck!

Notes from October 2007

It’s really amusing reading this back now. I had only just found the Fed Up site and it was all starting to make sense, but I still wasn’t thinking straight and I wasn’t entirely sure what I was reacting to. I was still trapped in the idea that I had suddenly become sensitive to food chemicals – when looking back today I can remember numerous incidents where I became quite ill or had strange reactions to food. The clue that led me to the idea of food chemicals in the first place was a very bad reaction to red wine – which I wondered might be caused by sulphites.

It would be another six months before H, the correspondent in this email, would think about trying the failsafe diet.

* I don’t know why I included the Weston A. Price Foundation principles in this, since they’d only ever made me worse. That’s how strong my belief was. Fortunately I’m a lot more skeptical now.

** These are enormous doses of vitamins and I would never take this much today. I suspect I tolerated such massive doses of vitamins because salicylates were antagonising them so much. I still felt like hell all the time because my diet was so high in chemicals – but I felt marginally better on the vitamins than off them.

*** As you can see I was still very confused about what I was reacting to. Before Christmas I had spent the whole of December not eating any green vegetables. At this time I was off dairy, beef, and wheat and grains, and my diet largely consisted of chicken, potato, eggs, minimal added fats apart from tallow, horse chestnuts, and, strangely, dates. I got very ill after Christmas – I suspect due to the combination of low vitamin D levels and taking methyl donors – methylcobalamin never fails to give me a cold. A week after New Year, I ate a curry and my eczema and brain fog came back within 12 hours. I promptly forgotten that I had cut out green vegetables and reintroduced them again and cut out potatoes – this resulted in broccoli induced hangovers and eczema flare ups. During the period when I wrote to H., I was on the verge of realising all this.

**** Redbush tea is absolutely sky-high packed with polyphenols – even more than green tea. Reading this makes me laugh, because I remember going through periods of cutting out redbush tea (for example, I never drank it in France), and feeling much better for it.

Why kids don't eat their greens

Choking on Cucumber

My Dad experiences certain tastes differently. So does my partner J. They can both taste something that I can’t in cucumbers and melons. Cucumbers and melons have a similar mild, weird taste to me, which I don’t find particularly unpleasant or indeed pleasant. By contrast my Dad is completely repulsed by cucumber and can just about manage the occasional slice of honeydew melon. He says these foods “taste like petroleum.” My partner J. reports something slightly different. To him, melons and cucumber taste almost, but not quite, like sick. He can’t even bear to eat things that cucumber has touched. I can’t find much information on the net about this particular aversion, but I believe it might be down to a chemical called cucurbitacin, an alkaloid which can cause severe stomach upset if ingested in a large enough quantity. There is certainly an evolutionary advantage in being able to taste this chemical, since tasters and non-tasters alike are equally susceptible to its effects.

Bitter Almonds

Cyanide is another interesting chemical that some of us can or cannot smell and taste. It is bitter in flavour and has an almond-like odour. About forty percent of the population can’t smell cyanide at all because they lack the gene to do so. Certain bacteria, fungi, and algae produce cyanide compounds that serve as a defence against being eaten by animals. Cassava, many fruit pits, apricot kernels, and bitter almonds all contain a cyanide compound known as laetrile or amygdalin that has anti-cancer properties. Whilst in this respect a small amount of cyanide can be beneficial, too much can clearly kill, so being able to smell and taste the distinctive “marzipan” bitter almond flavour of cyanide gives one a very useful evolutionary advantage when choosing one’s next meal. I can smell and taste cyanide compounds, but not as well as J. who protests vociferously if I mix apricot kernels in with the rest of our snack box of nuts. Whilst I can tolerate the mild bitterness (and occasional vile-tasting cyanide-bomb) of the apricot kernels and almonds, J. tastes a cyanide-bomb every time.

Why Don’t I Like Salads?

J. and I are also “supertasters.” A supertaster can taste two chemicals, phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) and 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP). About 25% of people taste these chemicals as a very bitter taste. Another 50% can taste them mildly, and the last 25% can’t taste them at all. Supertasters can taste a bitter substance in the following foods:

• Green tea and to a lesser extent black tea
• Black Coffee
• Grapefruit
• Undercooked or raw cruciferous vegetables such as cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts
• Peppers and chili peppers
• Some salad greens (especially rocket)
• Spinach
• Strong cheeses
• Dark chocolate
• Dry wines and beer
• Tonic water
• Olives
• Soy products

Supertasters can also taste sweetness as being sweeter than a typical taster, and sourness in fruits as being sourer. Any strong flavour or odour like tomatoes, cured meat, yeast, cheese, game, or fish is also deeply intensified. Says one particularly badly afflicted supertaster, “If it came from the ocean, I don’t eat it.”

Picky Eating

It’s a well-known universal truth that children hate eating their greens, and not without foundation. I can taste the bitterness in PTU/PROP containing foods; it’s why as a child and teenager I disliked tea, coffee, beer and wine, salads, all of the green vegetables listed, and I found olives and grapefruit downright revolting. As a vegetarian teenager I found soy products to be beyond disgusting and pleaded with my mother for her not to buy them for me.

But there was more to my dislike of foods than bitter tastes. I also disliked fruit intensely, yet curiously I never had any problems eating a sugar-loaded breakfast cereal. Bread (which contains soy and yeast), was only made edible with the addition of jam (seedless, the seeds were chewy and bitter); I refused the crusts because they tasted burnt, and wholemeal was completely inedible. I always gagged at the sick-smell and taste of both meat pies and cheese and tomato lasagna.

Looking back, it seems my Mum was always desperately trying to get me to eat things that I found revolting, from green vegetables to battered fish, which made me want to throw up. She thought I was some sort of child anorexic: I wasn’t, I just couldn’t stomach the taste, smell and texture of certain foods. The only thing I really liked the taste of during my childhood was fresh whole milk, and I was in a constant battle to be supplied that instead of UHT skimmed, which tasted putrid to me. It was around the time that “Maggie Thatcher the milk snatcher” removed my free milk from the school menu when I reached the age of seven, that my mother began to get very worried about my weight because there was so little that I actually wanted to eat. She went to the extent of putting tabs on me at school. All the teachers and the dinner ladies monitored what I ate, so I was forced to eat my revolting cardboard, yeast and burnt flavoured sandwiches. Why not give me school dinners? Ah, no, I was too picky for that, best not to even try!

Mum has always (rather unjustly) believed that I am in some way anorexic or picky and obsessed with food and sees my teenaged vegetarianism and my current interest in nutrition as an extension of this. I see things rather differently; for most of my life I have been completely disinterested in food and had absolutely no understanding of its impact on my body. Only recently have I come to discover that food is very interesting stuff and I am now the exact opposite of the anorexic I never was: I am busy trying to nourish myself in order to cure my chronic illnesses.

I think that the big clue in my relationship with my Mum over food, is that one day my family all sat down to a dessert of grapefruit, and my Mum was the only one who could actually eat it. We all declared it bitter, but I actually reacted very violently, gagging and spitting mine out and declaring it (rather precociously) to taste like cat’s piss. If only we had known about supertasting, maybe my childhood mealtimes would have been less of a battleground.

I’ve since “acquired” a taste for many of the classic supertaster foods, though I still find that green tea tastes like washing up liquid, soy is still manky flavoured cardboard, and grapefruit tastes like cat piss. Whether I am a full supertaster or one of the 50% majority of people who experience a mild bitterness, I don’t know, but I’m guessing I’m a full supertaster. What I do know is that J. is far more sensitive to bitterness in vegetables than me, though like me, he too has acquired a taste for alcohol, olives, dark chocolate, black coffee and strong cheeses, and he has always liked tomatoes while I don’t. I am still not a big alcohol drinker, and I can only take coffee and tea in small doses. I’m still iffy about game, but quite happy to eat cured meat, and while most people regard fish as a subtle taste, I find it quite strong and alien. I find most fish to be pretty unpleasant in taste (earthy, bitter, fishy) while J. does not, though I am happy enough eating very fresh shellfish and crustaceans. Oysters and seaweed taste vilely of rock-pools, but since oysters are very small and nutritionally worth the effort I will eat them, the rock-pool taste being largely neutralised by a bit of vinegar.

Evolution in Action?

I wonder what the genetic advantage is in tasting PROP and PTC? There must be one for the gene to be so widespread. Most of the supertaster articles you will find on the net or in the media describe what a terrible disadvantage such people have; supertaster children don’t eat their greens and are picky eaters (with misleading hints towards “anorexia” in spite of the fact that greens are typically low-calorie foods), and howls of dismay that supertasters don’t get enough of the anti-cancer chemotherapeutic phytochemicals and “wonderful” bioflavinoids found in such foods.

Or are they really that great? After starting Atkins, I became a dedicated salad-eater, but it was with some relief that I gave up eating regular salads last year when I sat down and took a look at what vitamins salad greens actually contain. I found that they don’t contain very much of anything apart from a tiny bit of folic acid and a bit of vitamin K, and most of them being destroyed by the “modified atmosphere” nitrogen packaging they are shipped in. Fortunately I can get both of these vitamins from elsewhere without having to endure the horrible bitterness of all red and dark green leaves. Brassicas are a very useful source of vitamin C and folic acid, and maybe a few carotinoids and chemotherapeutic agents, but unless you are planning to eat at least half a dozen cups a day (I dare you to try), they are pretty much useless for anything else.

That’s why My Hair is Falling Out!

Edible plants develop poisons over time when they are eaten due to natural selection. Poisonous and bitter-tasting plants are selectively rejected by animals that prefer sweeter shoots, with the consequence that their population increases. I also know that this very same group of bitter crucifers, greens, and soy foods contain goitrogens; chemicals that disrupt and depress thyroid function. PROP is in and of itself a goitrogen used to treat hyperthyroidism. In green vegetables, about a third of these chemicals are neutralised by cooking or fermenting, in soy they are extremely difficult to neutralise. Thyroid inhibitors are particularly damaging for children, those classic “picky eaters,” as they can lead to delayed development, lowered intelligence, and shortness of stature with normal or overweight.

Whilst we almost always cook brassicas and crucifers these days to reduce the PROP, PTC and other goiterogen content, the bitter taste supertasters detect may have helped our raw-vegetation-eating ancestors distinguish poisonous, thyroid-damaging plants from the rest and avoid or regulate their intake in order to gain the benefits of eating them without also gaining the disadvantages. So perhaps the next time you tell your kids to eat their greens and they refuse, you should ask yourself if they know better than you?

Notes from October 2007

It’s actually quite exciting to read this post back today, as it demonstrates how in February 2006 my sights had finally rounded on vegetables as a cause of my problems. I knew I was on the verge of a major breakthrough, as I’d realised I was reacting to some vegetables – like broccoli.

The porker strikes back

It’s been a long time since I wrote a porker update. I was worried about boring people by harping on about diet, but as I’ve now had several (very pleasing) requests from folks I don’t even know, I think there’s enough demand out there for a follow up! If you’re new to the porker experiments and you’d like to read more, you’d better back track and read from the start!

Phase III – The Ketogenic/Optimal Diet

Back in April I was doing well on the Ketogenic/Optimal Diet, I was eating about 2,000 calories per day, less than twenty grams of carbohydrate, and about 50 grams (my RDA) of protein. The rest of my energy was coming from fat, fat, and more fat. Butter, coconut oil, olive oil, lard, tallow, bacon fat, goose and duck fat, dripping, double cream, you name it. It’s amazing how many recipes you can make with a little extra fat.

Two weeks into the diet, and with the aide of some natural sunlight, my eczema had gone. Gone as in G-O-N-E, completely, utterly GONE. It was gone for several months. My weight loss stopped a week in, as I’d predicted. I’m just too lazy to exercise so I let things be for a while. My mood was fairly stable, though I would still get tired and irritable sometimes. I still suffered from low blood sugar mid-afternoon and it made me stupid and unresponsive. At the time I was learning to drive, so this was pretty problematic. Then I blew it. We went out for a few meals during the spring. I was thrown out of ketosis in spite of being careful and I felt horrendous trying to get back into it. (I hadn’t obtained a supplement called L-Carnitine at this point, if I had things might have been very different). So I didn’t get back into ketosis.

Phase IV – The Optimal Diet

Instead I opted to go on Polish Atkins, Dr. Jan Kwasniewski’s Optimal Diet. I stuck to between 30 and 40 grams of carbohydrate per day and 50 grams of protein. I ate about 2,000 calories a day. I didn’t cut anything out of my diet, I ate pretty much the same things, but added in some berries and the occasional slice of sprouted wheat bread or sourdough rye, or a glass of milk or some root vegetables at tea time. I felt really, really calm and chilled out, not at all stressed. My driving got much better and I felt more alert, I regularly felt energetic and I didn’t feel the need to overeat. My problems with tachycardia lessened and lessened and shortly my skipped heart beats were gone completely! I felt very strong. I had absolutely nothing wrong with me at all. No mysterious aches or pains or freakish symptoms. I put on a couple of pounds again, regaining glycogen from the carbohydrate which is to be expected. I occasionally dropped a pound when I had a physical day of walking or shopping, and put some back on if I ate out. I went up and down for a little while and landed firmly at 8 stone 13 pounds (125 pounds).

I finally got around to buying a blood glucose monitor and gave myself a fasting blood sugar test every day for a week. It was 5.6 mmol/l (100.8 mg/dl) most days and never below 5.1 mmol/l (92 mg/dl). 5.0 mmol/l or 90 mg/dl is considered “normal”. Dr Bernstein considers 4.6 mmol/l or 83 mg/dl to be the ideal normal. So my measurement is high but within the normal threshold; over about 6.0 mmol/l or 110 mg/dl is considered diabetic. So I’m not overweight, my stomach is flat, but my blood sugar is ever so slightly too high? How does that work? Can I be of normal weight but still insulin resistant? Halle Berry is a type II diabetic but she’s as thin as a rake. How? And I have a hell of a time losing weight, as you can tell from these posts.

So everything was going great. Then we went on holiday to Mallorca. Everything got blown to shreds: there is nothing to eat on Mallorca! The hotel food was inappropriate, the national dish is Paella. Because of the heat, the only cream available is UHT and it tastes foul. My way of coping was to take a small croissant for breakfast and heap it with a couple of ounces of butter, and have a couple of boiled eggs and some sort of cooked meat for breakfast. I found myself picking at the constant supply of fruit the hotel kept in the dining hall, which was full of fat Germans eating entire bunches of grapes. I didn’t have as much energy after day three of this routine. Soon I was always snacking on fruit and nuts and ham and cheese and the Danone live yoghurt that seems to be big on the continent (yoghurt has never done me any favours with regards to weight because I can never stop eating it). I swam in the pool every day. The chlorine really irritated my face, and all of a sudden despite all the sunlight, my eczema came back and was a raging inferno! I only realised that I could swim safely in the sea two days before we left, what a shame, I loved swimming in the salt water, which seemed to ease my eczema instead.

It turns out one small croissant per day is one small croissant too many. I put on five whole pounds on holiday! Damnit! I did not eat five pounds worth of calories! So I stopped to have a think. I didn’t really want to stress myself out by trying to get into ketosis again, especially as I was still having driving lessons and had my driving test coming up. I wanted to be as clear-headed and healthy as possible. I also wanted to let my body rest and heal, as I’d been putting it under a lot of pressure. I loved eating the Optimal Diet way, as it kept me so incredibly calm and peaceful. On the Optimal Diet I felt like I could cope with anything. After about two weeks on the Optimal Diet I had discovered that I was able to skip lunch occasionally without noticing or feeling hungry. So I stuck to the Optimal Diet and felt great, and I lived with the eczema on my face which was not getting better but not getting worse either. I neither lost nor gained weight, and I passed my driving test and coped with the stress of having our house sand-blasted.

I had finally returned to the weight I had been for most of my teenage and adult life – nine and a half stone (132 pounds). But I really didn’t mind being plump! The weight had gone on to my hips and my breasts, and my stomach was still flat so my figure was just intensified into a more exaggerated hourglass, and I felt quite sexy and mature. But sexy and mature isn’t enough for a girl who still wants to look ten years younger than she is, and doesn’t want to fork out on better fitting clothes and yet another set of new bras. So when it came down to it, how the hell was I going to lose all of this weight I’d put on during my holidays?

Notes from October 2007

Isn’t it amazing that I was eating this diet for so long, then as soon as I go on holiday and touch fruit, cold meats, croissants, and let my macronutrients slip that I suddenly gain five pounds and my eczema comes back with a vengeance?

The porker diet update

A Brief History of alienrobotgirl’s Diets

The Standard Western Junk Diet

I ate any old crap: pizza and pasta were regulars, curries every two weeks or so, I ate a couple of bowls of sugary breakfast cereal a day, drank frequent large lattes, and sugared my tea and coffee. I never ate bread because I couldn’t digest it at all (yes, I do tolerate pizza, pasta and cereal better than bread!). I was vegetarian, pasty and anaemic-looking, allergic to everything (including my clothes), had eczema, asthma, was chubby, bloated, cross and stressed all the time. I tried calorie reduction diets and Slimfast and felt so hungry I couldn’t bear them, and I never lost a pound. I tried exercise at the gym and always felt so hungry and shaky that I could faint afterwards and always ended up pigging out. I lost about four pounds through exercise only to regain it plus a couple more pounds when I gave up from exhaustion. Then I went on warfarin for a blood clot in my leg and it completely destroyed my already terrible health. I was utterly worn-out, stressed, dreadfully hypoglycemic, and just about at the end of my tether.

The Atkins Diet

I went on Atkins, lost two and a half stone (dropping from ten and a half stone down to seven stone twelve pounds) and felt great for about a year! I ate about 1,800 calories per day. I usually ate between 100-120 grams of protein, 20-40 grams of carbohydrate and 120-150 grams of fat. Things were wonderful and I was very slim. Then I started to regain some weight. I started to feel exhausted all of the time, particularly after meals when I would get sweet cravings. I was unable to cope with stress and had redeveloped the eczema I had struggled with before going on a low-carb diet. I was eating nothing but natural wholefoods, but something was still wrong with my diet! So I thought I would experiment.

Phase I – The Porker Diet Experiment

In Phase I, I ate between 2,700 and 3,000 calories for five days. I kept my protein at about 70 grams, my carbohydrate at about 40 grams, and my fat at about 220 or more grams. I lost three pounds! I felt pretty good, not as fuzzy or as tired between meals and my eczema visibly improved in a very short space of time.

Phase II – The Less Porky Diet Experiment

In Phase II, as I planned, I reduced my calories to about 2,500 and kept my protein and carbohydrate grams the same for three days (protein 70 grams, carbs 40 grams, fat about 150 grams). I felt atrocious. I was tired, irritable and confused. I put back on the three pounds that I lost!

Phase III – The Ketogenic/Optimal Diet Experiment

I went for all-out ketosis, reducing my protein to between 50-60 grams, carbohydrate to less than 20 grams and raising my fat to 180-200 grams with an overall calorie count of about 2000 per day (I physically could not eat a higher proportion of fat than this!). I felt atrocious for the first three days (headaches, weakness and other low blood sugar and ketosis symptoms), then I woke up with a massive energy rush and a clear head. I dropped from a worrying 9 stone down to 8 stone 9 pounds (five pound loss!) in about five days!

Fuel and Efficiency – The Second Law of Thermodynamics

Obviously the weight I lost and regained in Phase I and II is only water weight. The body stores between 1,600 and 2,000 calories of glycogen – a starchy carbohydrate – in water at a ratio of 1:3, and the first 3-4 pounds of weight loss on any diet is glycogen, which must be depleted before real fat loss takes place. Furthermore the body stores minerals such as salt in water, in fact people with poorly functioning thyroids are particularly prone to excessive amounts of salt storage, and this balance can sometimes change when someone starts dieting depending on the state of the thyroid. So, I either I lost my glycogen when I increased my fat consumption (in spite of not changing my carbohydrate consumption) and regained my glycogen on the slightly lower-fat, lower-calorie diet (without increasing my carbohydrate consumption), or my metabolism sped up on the high-calorie diet and slowed down on the slightly lower calorie diet, and I regained both glycogen and water and salt due to my body burning less calories. I lost the most weight on the ketogenic diet, by lowering carbohydrates and calories, though on 2,000 calories per day I was still consuming more calories than modern medicine says I should burn in a day. I didn’t exercise. Even on a glycogen-depleting, thyroid-stimulating diet like this, 5 pounds is pushing it for mere water weight, and according to my body fat monitor, I seem to have lost some fat too.

To understand this apparent paradox, you need to get your head around the laws of thermodynamics: most people don’t understand them because physics is complicated stuff and we don’t really get taught it in school. People assume there is only one law of thermodynamics; “energy can be transformed but not destroyed”, i.e. a calorie is a calorie is a calorie; energy in equals energy out. A physicist will tell you there are three laws of thermodynamics (at least, possibly more, you know what physicists are like for inventing more stuff). There are numerous essays on the internet alluding to the importance of the second law of thermodynamics in biology and weight loss; “in any transformation of energy from one form to another, ‘useful’ energy is lost.”

The example I’ll give is that of a car. A lot of non-useful heat is generated in overcoming friction, as well as the forward motion of the wheels. Calories in calories out, sure enough, but a portion of calories is going to waste as heat rather than forward motion (arguably heat is not actually wasted and is valuable when produced in the human body but we’ll get on to that when we talk about the thyroid). Another example I’ll give is fuel. A diesel engine will run a lot more efficiently on diesel than it will on petrol, and vice versa, though they’re of a similar calorific value! Note: if anyone intends to take me to task on this I’ll tell you now, diesel is 16,000 kcals per LB and petrol is 14,700-15,400 kcals per LB, the important factor is the octane rating – diesel has a high octane rating and self ignites, where petrol is designed not to. Each type of fuel causes havoc in the wrong kind of engine, like supplying the human body with the wrong kind of fuel.

Thyroid Function

In the car analogy, the thyroid is like a gear stick. Imagine you’re riding a bicycle: it’s very difficult to get up a hill in a high gear, but much easier in a lower gear. Do you think you expend the same amount of energy getting up the hill in a low gear compared to a high gear? No, in a high gear you’ll be hot, sweating and probably start going backwards! Running burns more calories than walking the same distance. The thyroid controls how fast the body “runs” internally, so it is possible to expend more energy doing the same task (keeping you alive), depending on what gear your metabolism is in.

A doctor will tell you that hypothyroidism leads to weight gain and hyperthyroidism leads to weight loss. Someone with a sluggish thyroid can eat the same amount of calories as someone with an over-active thyroid, and they will gain weight whilst their friend loses weight. This is due to thermogenesis. Do you have friends who either sweat all the time or complain of being cold all the time? If you are cold all of the time your thyroid is under-active and you’re storing energy instead of burning it to heat up your body. If your body is too cold, it shuts down numerous enzymic reactions that it would usually use for maintenance and repair tasks. You’re stuck in a low gear.

The opposite is true if you’re hot under the collar. People with hyperthyroidism are often battling weight loss. Many things affect thyroid health, such as mineral deficiencies (which can be caused by a high-fibre diet), fat soluble vitamin deficiencies (usually caused by a low-fat diet), thyroid inhibitors (goitrogens) such as isoflavones and phytoestrogens found in plants like soy and many beans and nuts, and the macronutrient composition of the diet. Calories too are important for your thyroid. More calories stimulate your thyroid to burn more and hotter and turn on all of those enzymic reactions. Less calories pushes your body into starvation mode, cools you down and switches off all those chemical processes that keep you healthy, as your body struggles to cling to its fat reserves in order to keep you alive for longer.

Fat composition is important. Animal fats are around 45% monounsaturated, 47% saturated, and 8% polyunsaturated. Vegetable oils are largely polyunsaturated apart from olive oil, which is largely monounsaturated, and tropical fats such as cocoa butter and coconut oil which are largely saturated. Saturated fat is essential to thyroid health. The fat around the heart is highly saturated as it is the preferred food of the heart, this is a special reserve the heart draws on in emergencies. The lungs cannot function without saturated fat, which forms the protective surfactant that also helps to prevent asthma and emphysema. Saturated fat is so essential to the body in general that if the diet contains inadequate amounts of saturated fat, the body starts producing it from glucose. Thus, any very low-fat diet is actually a high-saturated fat diet – but without the benefits of fat-soluble vitamin consumption. Don’t believe me? These are the words of Mary Enig PhD, one of the world’s leading experts on fat.

Insulin and Pancreatic Function

In terms of weight loss, insulin is like the body’s brakes. Insulin pushes energy into the body’s cells, but it also signals to the body to turn excess carbohydrate into fat and store it instead of burning it. The physical shape of your body may cause you to produce more insulin. People who have fat stored around their bellies are frequently insulin-resistant, that is, the fat cells in this area reduce the number of insulin receptors on their surfaces, which means that the body has to output extra insulin in order to push energy into them. Imagine your pancreas having to shout louder so these cells can “hear” your pancreas speaking. So if you have weight around your middle, you’re at a serious disadvantage when it comes to weight-loss. Depending on how much insulin you have circulating in your body, you’ll gain or lose weight regardless of the composition of the diet. Thus some people are more likely to gain weight than others. We know this because poorly controlled diabetics with very high blood sugars tend to lose weight regardless of how much they eat, whilst diabetics who inject industrial amounts of insulin to cover their high-carb ADA diet get fat very quickly even on controlled-calorie diets. People who have higher insulin levels have a tendency to put on weight instead of heating up and burning their food. Carbohydrate i.e. sugar, is what stimulates insulin production. Protein stimulates insulin production too, but in smaller quantities. More insulin is like stepping on the brakes; it slows your energy burning down and causes you to store fat. The less insulin you have circulating in your bloodstream, the more likely you are to be able to burn off the energy you consume, plus a bit more. The only ways to reduce your insulin levels is to reduce your carbohydrate intake and control your protein intake, or exercise.

By eating this high-quality high-fat diet I’ve been stimulating my thyroid and lowering my insulin levels. I think the reason I got away with eating so much on The Porker Diet is simply to do with proportions. Fat lowers the glucose index and glucose load of any food (this is the speed the glucose passes into your bloodstream), and fat also increases ketone production, which in turn stimulates fat burning. I ate so much animal fat that I managed to keep my insulin levels down in spite of the extra carbs, keep my ketones up, and keep my thyroid stimulated, and I was able to burn the excessive amount of calories I gave to my body, probably on numerous much needed repair tasks.

Phase III – The High-Calorie Ketosis Experiment

Having recovered then lost my health again in phases I and II, I decided to try something new: going for all out ketosis. Ketosis is a kind of soft metabolic switch, when the body burns fat primarily for fuel instead of glucose. Imagine if your car could run on both petrol and electric at the flip of a switch, and the two could be mixed to different proportions to produce different effects. Ketones are the substances produced when the body breaks down fat (dietary or body stores) for fuel in the liver. It’s a dimmer switch, we all produce ketones all of the time, though those of us on a high carbohydrate Western diet don’t produce very many. Our ancestors who lived during the ice ages and ate mammoth fat probably produced a lot of ketones. We usually have a higher ketone level in the morning, after an overnight fast.

The more fat we eat in relation to carbohydrate and protein, the more ketones we produce for energy, though even low-fat calorie restricted diets produce small amounts of ketones – it would be a biological impossibility to lose weight without producing them, as they are simply the by-products of all fat burning. Ketones only appear in significant amounts when insulin is lowered to a critical point. The body seems to prefer to operate either in the presence of insulin, or the presence of ketones, which bypass insulin. It does not operate more efficiently in the presence of both, as insulin suppresses ketone production. The body actually runs more efficiently on ketones than it does on insulin, as demonstrated by numerous studies available in PubMed, including the body’s heart function and brain function. If you hear that ketones are “dangerous” in the media or from your doctor or nutritionist, their information is out of date and based on a misunderstanding of what diabetes is and what it does to the body.

A ketogenic diet restricts protein to the RDA amount, restricts carbohydrates to less than twenty grams, and makes the rest of the diet up with fat. This comes to 80-83% of calories from fat, about 10-13% from protein, and barely 3-5% from carbohydrate. This diet is similar to the diet recommended by the longest living type I diabetic, Dr. Richard K. Bernstein MD. It’s also very similar to The Optimal Diet recommended by Dr. Jan Kwasniewski, when adapted for weight loss.

I’ve been eating about 2000 kcals a day and I have reduced from a frustrating scrape with the nine stone mark down to eight stone nine in less than a week. I am aware that this is mostly water weight as my experiments are too brief for anything else, and that I will probably need to add some aerobic and anaerobic exercise to this to continue to lose weight because of the quantity of calories I am eating.
I don’t want to cut back on calories at the moment as I feel I need to support my thyroid to continue to experience good health.

Ketosis is a subject of controversy. It hasn’t been studied very much, and the web is full of misinformation and contradiction. A copy of the best paper I’ve found so far is Ketones: metabolism’s ugly duckling, though even this contains some confusion about how much protein gets converted to glucose towards the end.

I’m surprised by the numbers of doctors who write rabid rants about ketosis based on the few meagre facts they learned at medical school about diabetes and the dangers of ketoacidosis. Ketoacidosis is a condition suffered only by diabetics who have very low or non-existent insulin levels. It is accompanied by very high blood sugar levels because there is no insulin to push glucose into the body’s cells. The body goes into overdrive in trying to protect itself both from the high blood sugar and the inability of the cells to get energy and produces an excess of ketones to compensate. Ketones are acidic. Under normal circumstances, a body in ketosis is still able to maintain a very narrow PH band, but not in ketoacidosis, where the diabetic is overwhelmed by the acidity and quantity of ketones, along with the high blood sugar. This state leads to death if untreated with insulin.

On the other hand, ketosis in a normal body is rather different. In normal quantities, ketones protect the body from the neurologic degeneration and the mitochondrial abnormalities associated with diabetes. A common myth you will hear is that the brain runs solely on glucose: it does not. The brain also runs on ketones, and in fact it runs 25% more efficiently on ketones than it does on glucose. The heart increases its efficiency by the same percentage in the presence of ketones. However, in ketosis, the body will reserve glucose for the places that need it most, like the brain.

Medicine has known since ancient times that fasting reduces the frequency or even eliminates epileptic fits. It is ketones which protect the epileptic’s brain from dysfunction due tothe changes in gene expression they cause as the body adapts to the ketogenic diet. Scientists are now discovering that ketones protect sufferers of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s too, and one wonders what other brain diseases they might help. In the 1920s, the ketogenic diet was devised to produce the beneficial effects of fasting whilst nourishing the sufferers of epilepsy. The diet is designed to get the blood concentration of ketones as high as possible. This means fluids are restricted (due to the possibility that the body would wash excess ketones away), carbohydrate is restricted, and so is protein. The diet has been rediscovered in recent years and is used in patients unresponsive to medication and appears to be particularly effective in children. There are claims that the diet is less effective in adults, but I have not found the scientific source of this claim. J. suffers from Juvenile Myoclonic Epilepsy, and we have both observed a lessening in his symptoms over the last year or two since the changes to our diet.

The thing about my appalling health is that I go through periods of hazy exhaustion, dumbness, spaced-out-ness and irritability, and then I have startling patches of clarity and energy. I’ve always had a tendency toward this, but ever since the warfarin treatment I consider my pancreas to be a dysfunctional idiot and even wonder whether I would be better without it. Many times in the last couple of years I have seemed to become trapped in some sort of low blood sugar ADD state in which I am unable to concentrate on the simplest programming task and have been entirely unable to face writing anything creative (anything at all!). Whilst protein and low GI carbohydrates keep my blood sugar more stable, based on my experiments, they also appear to make me gain weight and feel foggy and tired.

Those first two weeks on Atkins were the most unbelievable for me, and I’ve been trying to recapture them ever since. I had more energy than I knew what to do with, no neck pain, no cracking joints, no drowsiness or confusion, and I could cope with a much higher amount of stress. This feeling has slowly faded and only re-emerged in patches, such as how I felt in Spring in France last year (eating all that fatty French food). This last week I have felt better than I have done in all that time, since I was a child in fact. My tiredness after meals is gone. I have been able to concentrate on work and I’ve been very productive. I’ve actually been able to write again and I’m charging through the chapters of my book! I feel completely blissed out and inspired to do things. I have been able to work on my feet in and around the house for hours without sitting down.

The other week, however, I fell off the bandwagon by eating a (homemade) Passanda curry that probably only had about 15 grams of carbohydrate in it, mostly as onion, and lo-and-behold, by lunchtime the next day I felt awful, my back was all stiff and I was tired again.* I’ve slipped a few of times since then and these relatively minor slips have caused havoc the following day. Ten or fifteen grams of carbohydrate is enough to cause the gain of a pound or more of water. This seems a physiological impossibility, but it really happens, I bloat and swell up like a balloon. I’ve gone out and bought a blood glucose monitor as I’m starting to wonder whether my extreme reactions to diet mean I’m getting closer to diabetes than I am to hypoglycaemia. Type II diabetes is characterised by an initial slow reaction to high blood sugar, followed by an overkill of insulin that can send blood sugar plunging. My tiredness after meals might be down to high blood sugar. I’ll let you know the results when I’ve plucked up the courage to use it.

Carbohydrate and Weight Loss

The overall proportion of fat in our diet has decreased by all of five grams in the last thirty or forty years (it’s impossible to feel full or enjoy food without it). The amount of saturated fat has gone down. By contrast the amounts of refined carbohydrate and thyroid-blocking polyunsaturated and trans-fats in our diet have rocketed through the roof.

The only way to lose weight in the presence of insulin is to eat a diet so low in calories and so low in fat that you create a deficiency and the body is forced to mobilise stored fat reserves in the presence of insulin (a physiologic contradiction that results in the unpleasant headaches, cravings and wild blood sugar swings one experiences on weight watchers and slimfast diets). One does not have to use one’s brain to know that starvation diets damage the thyroid and insulin mechanism. If you want to lose weight you need to lower your insulin levels, and the only way to do that is to cut the amount and change the quality of carbohydrate in your diet.

GI and GL are respectively glucose index and glucose load. They represent the speed at which glucose enters the blood stream and its overall impact on blood sugar and insulin levels. Carbohydrate varies in quality from largely low GI/GL natural wholefoods to largely high GI/GL ultra-processed store foods. Dr. Atkins has always insisted that people who want to lose weight need to stick to low GI/GL foods to help level out their blood sugar, but was also very specific about the quantities and types of food that could be eaten (only green vegetables for the first couple of weeks, then a few berries and nuts). Since Dr Atkins has passed away, Atkins Nutritionals Inc. has started to ditch the “net carb count” concept in favour of a more complex glucose-load based “net Atkins count”. This hasn’t been going down very well amongst Atkinsers who use low-carb messageboards. The general consensus is that Atkins Nutritionals Inc. has been selling out on Dr. A’s established health and weight loss methods in order to flog more low-carb frankenfoods. Dr. Atkins was very specific about which foods could and could not be eaten on Induction, and there are numerous stories of weight loss stalls after eating these low GI/GL frankenfoods like high-protein bars, Splenda and other artificial sweeteners, soy foods, glycerine and other additives due to multiple factors that haven’t been accounted for with mere GI/GL, from food allergies to goitrogens to glycerine, to the wrong types of fat. Dr. Atkins himself appears to have been unaware of the goitrogens contained in soy and other food, and perhaps through lack of knowledge or even hoping to avoid confrontation, was vague about the types of fat that were best for weight loss.

More recently a plethora of half-baked GI/GL diets have come onto the scene, claiming to be the ultimate answer to weight loss when really they’re just a repetition of old ideas put forward by various early 1980′s diabetes researchers, without the controversy of actually overtly low-carbing (or indeed high-fatting), so they can be marketed to mainstream doctors.

My problems with GI/GL diets is firstly their generally hazy stance on both the types and quantities of fat in the diet. Fat is a substance that lowers the GI/GL of any food, but which these diet gurus would rather limit to miserly food-pyramid proportions because they haven’t bothered to critically study any research papers on saturated fat and cholesterol. One minute these people are praising nuts and seeds for their “good fats and minerals”, the next they are telling you to limit your fat to 25% of calories (less than the amounts in the typical Western diet!), exposing you to potential blood-sugar swings and hunger, and always ignoring the fact that fat has a GI/GL of zero and actively lowers the GI/GL of any food it is consumed with, and furthermore it is the most satiating food you can eat!

Secondly, on a low GI/GL diet, yes glucose enters the blood stream more slowly causing less of a surge of insulin, but the glucose still goes into the blood stream and still gets taken up by insulin, which is still outputted in the presence of carbohydrate. Certain types of foods produce a greater insulin output for the same GI/GL than others: for example white bread has a higher insulin index than white rice for a similar GI/GL; this suggests that other factors are at play which have not been accounted for. GI/GL diets do cause weight loss, it’s just that the weight loss stalls long term leaving the dieter stuck on a permanent plump plateau. You will never be Jennifer Aniston or Renee Zellweger (the 106 pound version) on a GI/GL diet, the insulin mechanisms of us Westerners are simply too damaged by years of abuse.**

Thirdly, the GI/GL diet can be bad for your health. Take for example peanuts. Peanuts have a very, very low GI/GL, far beyond what should be expected from the proportions of macronutrients in them: there’s something else in peanuts that slows down their GI/GL. Peanuts, along with a very many other low GI/GL nuts, beans and grains, contain enzyme inhibitors, goitrogens (thyroid inhibitors), and polysaccharides (particularly amylopectins, cellulose etc.) that slow down the digestion by taxing the digestive system leading to unpleasant symptoms of gas, constipation and even diarrhoea, and you’ve guessed it, the goitrogens in them also slow down your thyroid, exactly what you don’t want when you’re losing weight. These foodstuffs are the mainstay of low GI/GL diets. The types of carbohydrates in low GI/GL grains like rye and whole wheat (certain polysaccharides), proteins (gluten), and lectins are irritants that cause digestive problems.

Insoluble fibre consumption actually increases the risk of colon cancer as it scrapes its way along the delicate lining of your gut and fosters the growth of unpleasant bacteria, whilst mineral-rich beans and nuts are also high in phytates that block the absorption of said minerals by the body! Whole nuts, seeds and grains need to undergo some labour-intensive processing before they are fit to be eaten in any quantity. Like beans they need soaking overnight in salty water. Then they need baking in a low temperature oven to complete the neutralisation process of the enzyme-inhibitors, and this still does not neutralise the polysaccharides responsible for IBS and flatulence (see The Specific Carbohydrate Diet for more information on bacterial growth and polysaccharides). How many GI/GL diet gurus will tell you that? Why don’t they tell you that? Because they don’t know anything about food!!! Put that in your pipe and smoke it Dr. Gillian McKeith and Dr. Patrick Holborn.

I’m sorry (I have two friends currently experimenting with GI/GL diets, to whom I am apologising) these diets are for people who want trendy low-carb advantages combined with an unchallenging world view, and are afraid to take risks with “dangerous artery-clogging” fat. Ultimately these diets are orthodox food-pyramid low-fat diets and doctors have been recommending those since the eighties with some success on the general population’s eating habits; however we’ve yet to see the nation slim down or stop having heart-attacks as a result of these changes, in fact quite the reverse.

Protein and Weight Loss

The body requires protein at a ratio of about 0.001% of body weight per day in order to maintain protein mass. That is, if you weigh 50kg (110 pounds), you will require 50 grams of protein to do the necessary maintenance and repair to your system. Protein makes up about 20-30% of the weight of raw red meat (the rest being water and a roughly equal quantity of fat), so your entire protein requirements for the day will be satisfied by the equivalent of a six ounce steak. Any excess protein you consume in a calorie/carbohydrate deficient diet will be converted to glucose at approximately 56% of its weight through a process known as gluconeogenesis. So if you consume an extra 20 grams of protein, you’ll get a net result of an extra 10 grams of glucose entering your bloodstream, albeit so slowly it won’t raise your blood sugar above normal. You don’t get a much lower GI/GL than protein, which like fat does not raise the blood sugar above normal at all, though unlike fat it does cause insulin release. The net result of protein consumption is that it lowers blood sugar by causing insulin release faster than any excess protein can be converted to glucose.

Gluconeogenesis is the synthesis of glucose from non-carbohydrate precursors such as lactate, glycerol, pyruvate and certain amino acids. Approximately half of the amino acids found in meat are glucogenic. Gluconeogenesis occurs predominantly in the liver and can also occur in the renal cortex. It has a key role in the maintenance of blood glucose levels during certain stresses e.g. prolonged starvation. After about 24 hours of fasting, glycogen reserves are depleted and the body reverts to gluconeogenesis to supply glucose for tissues with an obligatory dependence e.g. the brain.

Considering the average Atkinser can consume 100 grams or more of protein per day, this may add up to an extra 25 grams of glucose going uncounted, and a deal more insulin too. I believe the proportion between the overall net insulin release and fat consumption, along with individual metabolic insulin and thyroid differences is the reason why some Atkinsers suffer unexplainable weight-loss plateaus even when counting calories, whilst others have never felt better and fat is melting away. Jst check out low carb forums and you’ll see what I mean. Imagine a see-saw with insulin on one side and fat-burning hormones on the other side. Some people have a different “weight” (insulin output) on the see-saw to other people, and they have to go to different extremes to lighten their load on the see-saw to cause weight loss. It may be that all they have to do is reduce calories, whilst others must reduce calories and GI/GL, whilst others have to also lower overall carb consumption, and others still have to lower protein consumption and fat-fast their way to weight loss. All this of course presuming that thyroid function and metabolism is equal!

The ketogenic diet is very specific about keeping protein consumption down to the bare minimum RDA to keep gluconeogenesis and insulin under control. The longer a body does a task, the more efficient it becomes at it. I believe the reason I only lost weight very slowly when I went back on Atkins Induction earlier in the year was that my body became extremely efficient at burning fat and converting excess protein (and other factors such as glycerol and lactate) into glucose, that I was eating too much protein, and therefore my insulin levels didn’t drop down to the necessary levels required for rapid weight loss. Gluconeogenesis can be quite taxing to the body, and as protein causes a moderate insulin output it forces the body to perform gluconeogenesis from protein in order to keep the blood sugar stable. I believe this may be part of the explanation for my former exhaustion after eating meals.*** Whilst most orthodox low-carbers would probably pooh-pooh this as some sort of evil establishment anti-protein-ism, I would ask them to explain why I had to cut protein in order to get into ketosis, and why my eczema has now cleared up! The problem was not calories, because I had also reduced them, to no avail.

Dr. Atkins has always said that protein is a “free food” but that as one becomes less hungry in ketosis one should reduce the amount of protein one eats. This is vague. Atkins is very vague about the proportion of protein to fat that should be eaten. The problem is, if one has a body that is particularly good at converting protein to glucose (as in someone who has eaten excess protein in a low carbohydrate context for months or years), and that body is very eager to output insulin at every given opportunity, one is going to find it much harder to get into ketosis and get hunger under control. J is still eating in the way that I used to eat – lots of meat, moderate carbs, not much added fat apart from buttered vegetables. I am fascinated by how much greater his hunger levels are compared to mine.

We probably all know of someone who went on Atkins and “got kidney pains” or “had a painful big toe and thought it might be gout” and was scared off. Silly ex-Brooksider Claire Sweeney went about flogging a diet book of her own the other year, after claiming to develop a kidney infection after going on Atkins. “I was snacking on packaged ham all the time. [...] After three or four weeks I started getting pains in my lower back and my kidneys. Then I got a temperature, then I got uncontrollable shaking. I never miss a day’s work, but suddenly I was bedridden for two days with a kidney infection.” Sweeney says the diet made her lose energy. This would only happen if she never got into ketosis. Obviously if she was snacking on packaged ham “all the time” she hadn’t actually read the book. But Atkins is open to interpretation because he doesn’t give specific ratios of macronutrients. Some people do go all out for lean meats like ham and chicken and fish, and they suffer ill health and can’t stick to the diet as a consequence. I mentioned “Rabbit Starvation” in the previous posting: if one eats nothing but lean meat, one gets very ill very quickly. If you drink alcohol, restrict calories and fail to drink enough water to let your kidneys process all the protein you have eaten, you downright deserve to get kidney infections and gout for grade-A stupidity. Perhaps if Atkins was more specific about limits, people like Sweeney wouldn’t have an excuse to abuse the diet and then swan about making cash out of its apparent failure.

Fat and Weight Loss

If you want a really dangerous diet, try The Zone or South Beach. The Zone requires caloric ratios of 40% carbs, 30% fat, 30% protein. The Zone is actually a low-fat high-protein diet, because even the Western diet contains more fat than this (about 35% fat). Considering that by weight, red meat contains over twice as many calories as fat as it does protein, you are forced to live on fish and chicken, and you can’t butter your greens. South Beach is Atkins without the animal fat: low-fat white meats are complimented by olive oil – the very fat your body most likes to store. Protein digestion requires vitamin A, which is only found in animal fats, not vegetable oils. Both of these regimens induce vitamin A deficiency, and therefore symptoms of headaches, weakened immune system, fatigue, blurred vision and thyroid problems. Vitamin A is also essential to the health of the thymus gland, which regulates the immune system. You may have a friend or two who is very tall and gangly, possibly with round shoulders and an undershot jaw. If you find out what they ate as a child, you may be astonished to discover their diet was very lean and they probably have a particular addiction to carbohydrates as a consequence of the lack of fat in their diet. These are the symptoms of vitamin A deficiency on growing children: uncontrolled, precocious growth and frequent infections.

I tried going back on Atkins Induction before by reducing my carbohydrates to less than 20 grams a day. The weight loss has been very slow and has reversed almost immediately that I increased my carbohydrate consumption again. The reason I increased my carbohydrate consumption again is that I never got through the cravings the whole time I maintained Induction (very strange, they usually disappear within a few days). I’ve tried going back on Induction and also adding coconut oil to my diet. I managed to lose 5 pounds in about 3 weeks, not bad you might say, but hardly the whopping stone in two weeks I managed the first time around on Atkins. Again, I stopped because of the cravings, and because coconut oil is disgusting, and because if I forgot or was unable to take it, I’d get the shakes pretty quickly, and I don’t like being dependent on supplements.****

This time around I’m losing weight and I have absolutely no carbohydrate cravings so no desire to stop. I’ve finally managed to flip the switch properly. I am amazed that I have had to go to such extremes. I have been taking coconut oil, but if I don’t take it I’m not getting the shakes as I did before. The reason I am succeeding is because of fat.

Fatty acids are simply chains of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms filling the available bonds. Saturated fat is the most stable fat, as all available bonds are saturated with hydrogen. It’s inert. Monounsaturated fat has one hydrogen atom missing, and polyunsaturated fats have many hydrogen atoms missing. There are many ways of classifying fats. Saturated fat is the fat least likely to oxidise. Monounsaturated fat is good too. Polyunsaturated fats should be avoided completely with the exception of the EFAs found in cod liver oil and evening primrose oil, as they interfere with the prostaglandin pathways necessary for good health and weight maintenance. Polyunsaturated fats are sticky and reactive because their carbon bonds are not filled – vegetable oil will stick to and stain a metal pan in a way that saturated fat will not. Aside from having a disgusting taste and greasy feel, polyunsaturated fats also stick to the lining of your arteries. Scientists have known for decades that by far the major fat found in atherosclerotic deposits is polyunsaturated. It makes you wonder how the lipid hypothesis was ever formed. Trans-fats (hydrogenated vegetable oils found in pastry shortening, vegetable suet, margarines and most processed foods) are even worse, a metabolic poison, one of the main factors in the development of heart disease, and should be avoided at all costs. This has been done and said before in better ways by countless other people. Know your fats!

What seems to be quite important with regards to weight loss is more the length of the fat chains than anything else. The body prefers to store the longer-chain fatty acids found in olive oils and polyunsaturated vegetable oils, and it prefers to burn the shorter-chain fatty acids (coincidentally these are saturated) found in butter, cream, coconut and palm oils. This is because longer-chain fatty acids require L-Carnitine (an amino acid) to push them into the cell mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells, whereas shorter-chain fatty acids enter by passive diffusion. L-Carnitine production is inhibited by insulin production, and it takes several weeks for a healthy body to adapt to produce enough L-Carnitine after one begins a low-carbohydrate diet. Production of L-Carnitine will never fully normalise so long as one is producing excess insulin (i.e. if you have belly-fat).

Coconut oil (sometimes called MCT oil) is mostly made of a medium-chain fatty acid called lauric acid. Amongst other things it has anti-microbial properties and helps to bolster the immune system. Lauric acid is too short for the body to store as it enters mitochondria by passive diffusion (without any help from L-Carnitine). If the body wants to store lauric acid, it has to go to the effort of joining it up with other triglycerides to make longer chains, so it would rather burn lauric acid as this is a more efficient thing to do. Therefore coconut oil is highly thermogenic. Coconut oil is also thermogenic because it is
ketogenic, breaking down easily into ketones. Remember what I said about cranking up the gear stick? Coconut oil helps people to lose weight by satisfying their hunger, providing quick energy, stimulating the thyroid and heating up the body’s temperature. It helps sick people recuperate and normalise their immune systems for several reasons, including its antibacterial properties, and also that many enzymic reactions essential to health are switched back on and speeded up when the body is warmed properly. A few months ago I talked about fever therapy as an alternative cancer therapy! People with poor thyroid function are known to be at a greater risk of cancer than those with good thyroid function, and coconut oil can correct poor thyroid function.

Unfortunately as virgin coconut oil tastes pretty awful it’s hard to eat off the spoon. Coconut based curries like Korma and Thai curries are a good way to eat it, though they make it harder to count the carbs. When coconut oil is added to a ketogenic diet it allows the dieter to ease off on the ratio of non-fat to fat, allowing more protein and carbohydrate into the diet because it bypasses the requirement for L-Carnitine, which is dependent on lowering insulin levels.

Dairy fats like cream, butter and cheese are moderately thermogenic as they also contain a higher proportion of lauric acid to other fats, but more long chain fatty acids too. I find that dairy fats agree with me more than coconut oil, which actually burns so fast and so hot in my body that I am hungry again after a couple of hours.***** Dairy fats keep me full for longer.

Monounsaturated olive oil and polyunsaturated vegetable oils are not terribly useful for weight loss. The length of their chains are long and this encourages fat storage. The major component of adipose tissue is oleic acid, also the major component of olive oil (55-85%). Oleic acid is also found in animal fats (about 45%), along with shorter-chain saturated fatty acids.

Ketosis

Ketosis – proper ketosis – not the half-assed kind of popular diets, has some slightly uncomfortable symptoms. They should not be confused with symptoms of low blood sugar.

Symptoms of Low Blood Sugar******

These occur within the first three to four days of the diet and will probably be highly unpleasant.

• Weakness and exhaustion
• Irritability
• Confusion, woolly head, poor attention span, lack of focus
• Apathy and depression, moodswings
• Headaches
• Palpitations
• Blurred vision

Symptoms of Ketosis

• These occur after the first few days when the body adapts its metabolism.
• Energy rush
• Feelings of bliss and calm
• Thirst
• Fruity odour to the breath (only if inadequate amounts of water are drunk. Fruity breath fades as the body becomes more efficient at utilising ketones)
• Mild, occasional stomach discomfort
• A lack of constipation (unlike high protein Atkins or Zone style diets, a ketogenic diet will keep you regular)

Severe Ketosis

If you experience the following symptoms, you need to ease back on the coconut oil or eat a few carbs!

• Severe stomach pain
• Diarrhoea
• Nausea
• Throat tightening or palpitations (caused by adrenaline surges as your body struggles to raise blood sugar)

What Happens After Getting into Ketosis?

During the first couple of weeks of ketosis, the body mainly lives off ketones, reserving glucose for the areas of the body with obligatory requirements such as the brain. The body adapts further during this time as insulin lowers and it learns to produce L-Carnitine, becoming more efficient at fat processing until the muscles no longer require ketones for energy and these too are reserved for the brain and other obligatory organs. At this point the muscles burn fatty acids directly (with the aide of L-Carnitine), negating the need for ketones. The diet takes about two weeks to adapt to, and changes will still be occurring as much as six weeks after the diet begins: this is a strong reason to stick with the diet and give your body chance to adjust, as you may experience many strange and unpleasant symptoms and cravings that are only temporary. No one really has a genetically “fixed” or “natural” diet with regards to macronutrients (much as some people are eager to believe in metabolic typing and blood typing, I am afraid it is unscientific bunk), though we may have minor genetic quirks with regards to micronutrient and mineral requirements or our own particular tolerance levels of various macronutrients. Unfortunately the people who need a low-carbohydrate the most (people with mood disturbances, insulin-resistance, belly-fat, diabetics, hypoglycemics, hypothyroids, alcoholics, and particularly stressed, irritable or nervous young women*******), are the people who will experience the most problems, and these people should focus on the use of coconut oil and L-Carnitine supplements.

The Ketogenic Diet

This has been my routine for the last week or so:

Supplements

I consider the following supplements essential to good health and weight loss, particularly the cod liver oil and dolomite. I have not experienced any leg cramps and I believe this is because of the combination of fat-soluble vitamins and calcium/magnesium supplementation.

• 1 tbsp cod liver oil (essential to thyroid health and rich in vitamins A, D and omega 3s)
• 2 tsp wheat germ oil (source of vitamin E)
• 1200mg dolomite (source of calcium and magnesium, calcium is essential to thyroid health and magnesium is a regulator of other minerals, balancing calcium)
• 1 gram vitamin C (this is the only vitamin for which I haven’t been achieving RDA, mainly through laziness rather than carbohydrate restriction, I must point out that the vegetables and fruits highest in vitamin C are also the lowest in carbs, such as broccoli, red peppers and blackcurrants)

Breakfast: 2 egg yolks, 1 whole egg, slice of butter, slice of lard or dripping, heaped tbsp crème fraîche, salt & pepper. Scrambled lightly in a saucepan.

This is a seriously fortifying breakfast, I defy anyone to eat this and be hungry before one o’clock. The idea is to eat as many calories as early in the day as possible. All of the animal fat in this breakfast will help you to absorb the nutrients from your supplements.

Mid-morning: decaf coffee with a good glug of cream

Lunch: 1 tbsp coconut oil melted in water with small amount of salt and cream added to help disguise the flavour (optional). 2-3 ounces of chicken liver pate or 1 ½ ounces unpasteurised camembert cheese and 1 ½ ounces Parma ham or2 ounces of smoked salmon, balanced with a spoon of sour cream or crème fraîche (fish, even “fatty” fish is extremely low in fat and will not control hunger unless additional fat is added to the meal). Salad leaves or ½ red pepper or ½ avocado or 1 ounce lacto-fermented cabbage or sauerkraut.

Note that it helps to consume “live” lacto-fermented products on a daily basis for intestinal health.******** Protein should be of highest quality (i.e. meat) and should be consumed either raw, or as organ meats, to achieve the most benefit from the smallest quantities.

Mid-afternoon: decaf coffee with cream.

Tea: 1 tbsp coconut oil melted in water with small amount of salt and cream added to help disguise the flavour (optional). 3-4 ounces cooked weight of lamb, steak or pork chop (these contain approx equal weight of protein and fat) or 2-3 ounces cooked weight of chicken in homemade (i.e. no MSG or additives) curry made with coconut milk (chicken is lower in fat and higher in protein, the coconut “balances” it, fish would have to be cooked in a similar way). Seasonal green vegetable such as broccoli, cabbage or spring greens.

If you’ve eaten according to plan for more than three days, you will not need to snack in the afternoon and probably won’t be hungry at tea time. You shouldn’t drink anything but water between meals to allow your body to rest. If you are hungry, then another decaf coffee and cream should be enough. Don’t skip a meal because you aren’t hungry, it is better to eat at tea time than feel hungry just before bed time. The body burns fat stores during the overnight fast, eating before bedtime will scupper this to some extent.

Evening: decaf coffee with cream.

The Results

Originally when I went on Atkins I noticed the following changes to chronic symptoms, some of which have reemerged during the last few months as my health has deteriorated again:

• My eczema cleared up (it reemerged again a year later).
• My blood sugar evened out and I stopped being hungry all the time.
• My asthma cleared up and didn’t return, even during hayfever season.
• I still got hayfever during the height of the season, but all of my daily allergies reduced to nothing. I am barely allergic to cats and dogs anymore.
• I used to come up in all manner of mysterious rashes and itches on a daily basis and these went away.
• My skin stopped being so greasy and so dry.
• I have otis externa in my right ear, it’s an eczema-like inflammation I’ve had since I was about nineteen. Sometimes the pain would be unbearable and I used to have to put cream in my ear every day for years. It still gets inflamed sometimes, but it doesn’t really bother me anymore since Atkins. I still have to wear hats when it’s cold though.
• My regular migraines went away and so did my terrible back and neck ache.
• I was no longer ready to fall asleep after meals and didn’t feel tired in the afternoons anymore.
• I actually had some motivation to do things in the evening rather than just watch television.
• I stopped getting flashes of anger and experiencing panic and irritability. I stopped being whiney and sighing and being indecisive.
• I stopped getting depressed.
• I stopped feeling crap all the time and stopped coming down with colds every couple of months.
• All those mysterious aches and pains went away.

Since making the changes in my diet I’ve noticed the following changes to my body. I’ve tried to be as scientific and objective as possible about this. Fortunately I’m pretty self-aware with regards my physical state and how it relates to what I have eaten.

• As of two weeks of being on the diet, the eczema on my face has completely cleared up. I noticed prior to this period that any deviation from the diet caused it to reappear.
• I was previously experiencing the occasional skip in my heart beat rhythm, as often as once a day. I now hardly experience this at all. I think I might have had one last week, and that was after eating additional carbohydrate.
• My physical endurance is much greater. I endured an entire day – 9am till 5.30pm, on my feet walking and standing when I went to Alton Towers last weekend! I didn’t get irritable or tired at all and hardly sat down, and in spite of being in a socially stressful situation I was even able to make friends. I credit my survival to the packed lunch I took with me of Camembert, Greek yoghurt, pistachios and foie gras! I felt completely normal the next day (unheard of!).
• I no longer feel tired, foggy and apathetic after meals.
• My symptoms of low blood sugar have changed. They only appear when I drop out of ketosis from deviating from the diet (anything over 20 grams of carbs). Before, I would get irritable, panicky, confused, blurry eyes, I would sigh a lot, and couldn’t be bothered to prepare something to eat. Now I don’t seem to get these symptoms, or get them only mildly. Instead I’m overcome by a strange draining sensation of weakness where I feel like I have to sit or lie down before I collapse and I can’t do anything. I usually stay like this for about ten or twenty minutes, and then I have enough energy to get up and do something – whilst these symptoms are equally as disabling as the confusion and apathy I was experiencing before, I am able to rescue myself because my mental and physical endurance is greater, and I seem to be able to get up and keep going in spite of feeling weak. I think this may have something to do with gluconeogenesis – before I would have been making excess protein into sugar where now my body is relying more on fat for energy. I think gluconeogenesis may have kept my blood sugar more stable but was having detrimental effects on my health due to it straining my body and making me grumpy.
• My mucous membranes all over my body seem to be regulating themselves better, not too dry, not too wet or greasy. My skin is not too dry any more, in fact I don’t really bother using moisturiser at all now.
• I am more content and laid back and more able to cope with social situations that previously made me anxious.
• My driving lessons have been much better. I am more alert and have been doing some quick thinking.
• I actually feel like doing some writing again and getting on with my book! Before I found the thought daunting.
• My varicose veins aren’t as bad.
• I am warmer and don’t seem to get cold hands or feet nearly as much.
• My joints and back have stopped feeling stiff and clicking, though if I eat sugar I start clicking again the next day. It feels like my whole body has started relaxing. If I bend over or stretch and I’ll get unexpected crunches that feel different – as though my joints are loosening up properly instead of staying stiff.
• I stopped what I call “carping”, that is, carb-craving for sweet things after meals. Fat is stopping me craving carbs!

Where Next?

Over the course of the last few weeks, the diet has changed. I eased off on the coconut oil as for a couple of days I had all of the severe ketogenic symptoms, including stomach pain, nausea, diarrhoea, and throat tightening and palpitations. I have ceased to take the coconut oil at all now (too disgusting) and have stopped deliberately indulging in fat when I am already full (grin). This has put an end to these symptoms, which were entirely of my own making. They did not bother me terribly at the time as the energy rush and feelings of bliss and calm I experienced (and continue to experience) made them absolutely worth it. Even the three days of hell I went through to get into ketosis were worth it!

At the moment my plan is to continue as I am. I think my weight loss is going to slow down so I will start to exercise as soon as we get the builders out of our hair (we’re having our house renovated, and it would be too embarrassing to jump up and down on a rebounder with builders popping in for a cuppa!). I’m going to test my blood sugar, however I am at risk of a false negative because I’m on a diet that practically cures type II diabetics. In spite of all this excitement about weight loss, I went on the diet primarily with the intention of trying to fix my fibromyalgia and eczema and that’s what I’m prioritising. Some time in the future when I am feeling happy and healthy, I’ll try increasing the carbs so my diet is more like Kwasniewski’s Optimal Diet. If it works out I’ll stick to that, if it doesn’t I’m going to try to stay in mild ketosis for the forseeable future, stopping weight loss with extra fat, as anything that feels this good simply can’t be bad for you.

Notes from October 2007

As you can see from the breakdown of what I was eating daily, my diet was still quite high in food chemicals. I do not believe I really reduced food chemicals, I just changed my macronutrients in a way which helped me to cope with food chemicals. At the time I didn’t even know what food chemicals were.

* As you can see I blamed a food chemical reaction caused by a curry on carbohydrate. I was stuck in this mentality for a long time. This is because I DID have reactions to pure carbohydrate and I felt fine for most of the time that I avoided carbs. Salicylates were the ultimate cause of my hypoglycaemia, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and low-carbing negates hypoglycaemia too.

** Caused by additives and alcohol more than carbohydrates.

*** I still believe that excess protein was causing my exhaustion, not merely the consumption of amines/glutamates. Excess protein makes ammonia, and some people, particularly autistics, have problems processing ammonia.

**** Here I am complaining again that coconut oil gives me the shakes!

***** Was this really true? Or were the polyphenols in it affecting my insulin output?

****** These really are symptoms of low blood sugar, not just food chemical sensitivities.

******* Stressed young women – the stereotypically food chemical sensitive! I knew I was seeing something but I didn’t know what to name it.

******** I refute this now. There’s no actual evidence you need lacto fermented foods in your diet, if you’re eating properly. You might need lacto ferments if you eat too much starch.

Snippet

I was very desperate in the autumn of 2004, fatigued and suffering from worsening eczema in spite of trying everything under the planet to fix it, from pharmaceuticals to vitamins and minerals to numerous elimination programs and radical changes in diet. My eczema seems to be closely related to blood sugar fluctuations and has gotten worse over time as I fail to keep my blood sugar in check in spite of rigorous dietary control.

Notes from October 2007

This is from an irrelevant post that I’ve since junked – but I thought it was worth keeping this snippet just to remind me how bad my fibromyalgia became after I returned to the UK. My face itched all the time. I was constantly fatigued. I was ashamed to leave the apartment because my skin was so bad. During the autumn I was in floods of tears over little tiny things. I could no longer face doing any programming work because I couldn’t concentrate at all – I was deep into ADD. I wanted to write, but I couldn’t write because the thought of writing filled me with dread. I couldn’t make a simple phone call because the thought made me so nervous.

What was I doing differently?

• I was ordering vacuum packed organic meat of the internet, that was dispatched by overnight carrier. It wasn’t kept cold enough, and always smelled slightly sulphurous – it was full of amines and glutamates.
• Because this meat made me hungry, I ate more of it. My protein consumption rose from about six ounces a day to eight or ten ounces. I’ve since learned that extra protein makes me very tired.
• I ate in a slightly calorie deficient way in France. I always had energy as a result. But back in the UK I couldn’t keep it up.
• I think I really needed some sunlight.
• I was happy and I felt like I was ‘on holiday’ when I lived in France. Back in the UK it was like being flung back into my old depressing life again.
• I stopped taking vitamin E and replaced it with vitamin K1.
• In a desperate attempt to cure myself I had tried all sorts of things like B vitamin megadoses and eating lots and lots of liver and fermented products – the Weston A. Price Foundation’s fault – I blame the crying on those. I was eating kefir and sauerkraut most days. I got a juicer and started making green juices because I thought I needed some vitamins that maybe hadn’t been discovered yet.

Poor me. I started putting weight on, and putting weight on, and I couldn’t figure out why. I was very scared that there was something seriously wrong with me. There was – fibromyalgia is very serious. Unfortunately it’s very difficult to get genuinely trustworthy information about it on the internet so I tried all kinds of crank cures. I had no idea I was being affected by food chemicals. Though I certainly felt poisoned by something.

The porker diet

Or, “Yet Another Health Saga”

Where did it all go wrong?

Four months ago in December I was absolutely desperate: the eczema that had reappeared on my face in August was getting worse and worse, I was absolutely exhausted and strung out, and really, really worried that I was re-developing the hypothyroidism and fibromyalgia/chronic fatigue syndrome of my teenage years. My hypoglycaemia seemed to have returned with a vengeance.

Atkins had fixed all these problems a year and a half previously. Had I simply staved off some horrible disease in my body by going on Atkins? Was I becoming diabetic? Things just weren’t right with me. In France in the spring I’d felt absolutely fantastic and slim, but following an extremely stressful June/July in which everyone descended on us in France, I came down with a serious chest infection and was knocked out for a couple of weeks. I developed spells of heart arrhythmia, leg cramps from mineral loss, and dry eyes that were only fixed by huge (but miraculous) doses of vitamin A (50,000 I.U. +). I put on half a stone in the space of that two week illness. I could feel myself getting fatter every day, my body was totally out of control in spite of being very careful with my diet, and it was horrible. Stress can cause weight gain by messing with blood sugar and the thyroid. The whole time people were visiting I was downing 500mg of vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid) every day, because I just couldn’t cope without it. I was irritable and tired and snappy and really just wanting some peace and quiet to recover.

What Was I Thinking?

When I returned to England in August I bought an electronic scale to replace the €20 piece of crap I’d been using in France, and realised I really had put on nine pounds in France, going from 7 stone 12lbs to 8 stone 7lbs . I (stupidly) blamed this on liberal use of dairy products and embarked on Atkins Induction again, cutting out all of the nourishing yoghurt and cream I’d been eating because of the carbs and calories it contained. Then I had to go on a gruelling (yes, gruelling!) shopping spree as having given most of our household items away before we left for France, we were without many of the essentials that had been in our fully equipped French flat. For example: pans, plates, cutlery, utensils and mattresses! So I did all this whilst on Atkins Induction, had a rotten headache the whole time, didn’t eat enough calories because I thought the weight would come off faster, and thought I would either collapse from exhaustion or die from constipation. I got down to 8 stone 2lbs and then relaxed. Within a few days I was back at 8 stone 7lbs. I gave up for a while. I was still taking my pantothenic acid in order to cope with all the stress.

A couple of weeks after this I developed eczema again. I’d had eczema before going on Atkins, but after changing my diet the eczema had cleared up all by itself. Now it was back, I felt like a freak and I was constantly fatigued.

Pill Popping

I bought pill after pill to try and fix the eczema. Eczema is sometimes a zinc deficiency, yet zinc actually made my eczema worse! Omega 3s didn’t work. I even resorted to those horrible steroid creams. Tiny amounts sent me nuts and gave me the shakes. My eczema did not respond at all, in fact, it would flare up even worse after about three or four days of using the cream. Eczema can be associated with hypothyroidism, and all of my other symptoms corresponded with hypothyroidism too. I was at a loss, because trying to treat the hypothyroidism with the usual vitamins and minerals (iodine, selenium, vitamin A) made no difference at all. I couldn’t cope without the B5; I would be a physical and emotional wreak without it. Over the next few months, three more times I tried to lose weight and the same thing happened each time: I’d take two weeks get down to about 8 stone 4lbs, relax, and within three days I’d be back up to 8 stone 7lbs, except it turned into 8 stone 8lbs, then 8 stone 9lbs, then 8 stone 10lbs.

There wasn’t a vitamin I didn’t try. I worked my way through all of the B vitamins one at a time. Having spent at least a couple of hundred quid on different vitamins and vitamin combinations and hours and hours of time on the internet, I finally focused on B5, and I learned that the reason B5 was called the “anti-stress vitamin” is because it makes coenzyme-A, a miracle energy-producing enzyme that sounded amazing. Maybe I was coenzyme-A deficient and that was the problem?* I had no energy at all. Only one company makes coenzyme-A. It’s incredibly expensive, around £60 to buy from anywhere but the manufacturer, where it cost me $70 for ninety capsules. Desperate enough to pay that kind of money, I placed an order with them and I have been waiting for my coenzyme-A to show up ever since! But more about that in another post.

Biotin, duh

I’ve since discovered the most stupid piece of information, hidden away and not published anywhere on the usual nutrition websites. Biotin deficiencies can sometimes cause facial eczema; they’re usually only seen in very small babies as biotin is made in the colon from beneficial bacteria, and these babies don’t yet have those bacteria. The eczema is very distinctive: it appears on the chin, around the mouth and nose and the eyes, often in symmetrical patterns. But I was still eating live yoghurt and kefir, though not as much as I had done in France. Surely I couldn’t lack beneficial bacteria! So could a biotin deficiency be caused by antagonism with another vitamin?

Yes. Vitamin B5, pantothenic acid, when taken in large doses for an extended period of time causes a biotin deficiency because biotin is also required to make the enzymes that pantothenic acid produces. Wasn’t I stupid?

The next morning I didn’t take my B5. I felt absolutely shocking, but I realised straight away that my eczema wasn’t burning as much. I went out and bought some biotin. It was the best £7 I ever spent. It substituted for the B5 and calmed me down, and within two weeks my eczema was under control. I stopped taking the biotin and weaned myself off all of the other high dose B vitamins I’d been taking to try to control my stress. My eczema faded right down to a simmer. I still had some pinkish patches around my eyes and on my chin, and I had peeling skin around my nose. I was more irritable, but I was just about coping, and now I was off the B vitamins my skin had calmed down. I felt constantly exhausted and certain I was hypothyroid.

So What IS All This Calorie Crap Anyway?

The stupid thing is, the most obvious cause of hypothyroidism is dieting. I thought that on a satisfying diet of 1,800 calories a day I was eating enough and possibly too much. I wasn’t. That’s really fluffy logic considering the government admits the average UK woman claims to eat 1,500 kcals a day and is about a stone overweight. No wonder I couldn’t lose weight. On a diet of 25% protein, 15% carbs and 60% fat, somehow I was in Rabbit Starvation, eating too much protein and not enough fat.**

What’s Rabbit Starvation?

Rabbit Starvation is a term used by the North American Indians and the Eskimos and reported by arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson during the early part of the 20^th century to explain the curious phenomenon of illness, hunger and speeded-up starvation on a high protein, low fat, low carbohydrate diet of rabbits (a sort of native nutrition version of dubious diets like South Beach). Rabbits and Caribou (reindeer) are just too lean for natives to live off. A man can eat and eat and never feel full, he becomes sick within a few days without enough fat or vitamin A required to process the protein, which causes great strain on the body. The natives agreed it was better not to eat at all than eat rabbits and other lean meats, because one would starve to death more slowly by fasting. Incidentally, the same is true of a diet composed entirely of white rice because of the B vitamins it drains from the body, beriberi is a faster and nastier way to die than starvation.

Another Example of Orthodox Medicine Being Thick

The stupidity about hypothyroidism is that because most hypothyroid patients are overweight they’re told to diet to “cure” their condition. This usually doesn’t work and the patient ends up on drugs. There is possibly nothing worse that a hypothyroid can do than restrict calories. We should by now all know the old adage: diets don’t work because restricting calories slows down the thyroid and causes weight gain in the long term.

Coco Nuts

I tried coconut oil. Coconut oil is amazing for the thyroid as any alternative medicine site will tell you. As soon as the packet arrived, I opened a tub and ate three tablespoons. I was almost sick. Extra virgin coconut oil, the sort you should use, has a kind of a sickly taste to it. I had a brief spell of indigestion because I’d never eaten it before (this has never returned). Coconut oil is full of medium chain fatty acids, which the body physically can’t store because they’re too short, so it’s forced to burn them which raises the body temperature and stimulates the thyroid. I had so much energy that day that I went out and did a ton of shopping and bought a box of dumbbells and a rebounder (mini trampoline) from Argos and carried them home on foot without stopping. I then leapt on the rebounder and jumped up and down to Kylie for about an hour and a half. I was zinging. For the rest of the day I walked around saying things like “I’ve never had such a rush,” and “I feel like I’m on speed!”***

Unfortunately it didn’t last: some people can stomach it, but the coconut oil was just too sickly to eat by itself, and I’d be overcome with revulsion at the thought. I couldn’t find a way of cooking it into something that would disguise the flavour. Scrambled eggs just tasted of coconut. J. wouldn’t cook with it at all, so I couldn’t fry meat in it. The only way I could consume it was in Thai curries, and there’s only so many of those you can eat in a week. The other problem was, I’d eat some, have a huge energy rush for a couple of hours, then get a come down later in the day in which I would feel exhausted again, have a headache, and get really, really hungry.**** I still believe in coconut oil, but I think with me at least, it needs to be moderated with other fats.

The Caveman Diet

My next venture in this farce was going Palaeolithic. No grains, no dairy, just like a caveman. Eczema and thyroid problems can be caused by food allergies and orthodox medicine generally defines eight groups of common food allergens: gluten grains, nuts, peanuts, soy, eggs, cow’s milk, fish, and shellfish. I excluded those all in rotation, and together, and got nowhere at all. In fact, my eczema flared up again.

I was so hungry in the afternoons that I ate nuts by the bagful. I got constipated pretty quickly doing that, because nuts and grains contain enzyme inhibitors (designed to stop them growing before they’ve been planted) that do horrible things to human digestion. To eat them as a staple, you have to sprout them or soak them in brine and then bake them in a low temperature oven to neutralise the enzyme inhibitors, but its just not practical to find the time unless you’re a dedicated housewife.

Palaeo is very useful and cleansing for people with food allergies. But the problem with Palaeo is what it leaves out it doesn’t replace: the average caveman ate a variety of interesting foods that we’d find repulsive today; from gnawing on raw bones to crunching on insects. It’s impossible to get enough calcium or magnesium on Palaeo unless you make a bone-stock every day and eat a whole bunch of nuts. It’s also pretty damned difficult to get enough fat, as we eat so much muscle meat in the West, cut off the fat before it’s even sold, and breed our animals lean. Our ancestors prized high-fat organ meats, brains and marrow. Many Palaeo folk actually still cook with butter as they’re unable to get (or don’t want to try) lard and tallow anymore. We’ve evolved to a high fat diet. Remember those ice ages we lived through? We hunted the woolly mammoth to extinction just to get at the fat.

Fat, duh

So during this saga, I developed a theory. Thinking about Palaeolithic and Neolithic nutrition I kept coming back to Rabbit Starvation. I kept thinking about the Eskimos who enjoyed such perfect health on nothing but fish and seal blubber, about how their diet was 80% fat, and that they had enough energy to only eat two meals a day, and had a reputation as the most cheerful, calm and optimistic people on the planet. They would gorge on fat yet despite their beautifully formed round faces and underneath their heavy furs, they were actually a very slender people. Like the French, who according to epidemiological studies eat an average of 2,500-3,000 calories a day, 1000 kcals more than the British, yet are more slender and more healthy than the British.

Then I read an interesting article about body builders on muscle beach, prior to the drugs era, who would eat 32 egg yolks for breakfast, and as much as 6000 calories a day without putting on fat (surely they didn’t burn it all!), in order to gain muscle. It turns out that calories are more important than protein for gaining muscle weight, it’s just what you do with those calories that counts.

Eat Fat, Lose Fat

Then I readSally Fallon & Mary Enig’s“Eat Fat, Lose Fat“, which turns out NOT to be another low-carb bandwagon book. They advocate a lower carbohydrate consumption (less than 70 grams a day), moderate protein consumption (around 15% of energy intake), a 2,500 in their words, “moderate calorie consumption diet for weight loss” and a LOT of different types of fats.

Polish Atkins

I also checked out “The Optimal Diet” website. It’s been nicknamed “Polish Atkins” in the press. Dr. Jan Kwasniewski is the author of the diet and formulated it after considerable experimentation on himself, his family and his patients. He uses it to cure chronic illness as well as obesity, including arthritis, nerve disorders, mental problems, atherosclerosis and calcified arteries, and (interestingly to me) chronic venous thrombosis. On “The Optimal Diet”, you eat about 10-13% protein only, limiting total protein consumption to around 50 or 60 grams a day depending on your weight, about the equivalent of a six ounce steak for the entire day.***** This partially is because any excess protein above your body’s requirement gets converted to glucose at a rate of 56 grams per 100 grams, which can mean an extra 25 grams of glucose to a typical Atkinser, and it’s also quite an expensive, taxing process for your body. You eat slightly less carbohydrate than protein, around 40 or 50 grams, and the remaining energy – all 80% of it comes from fat. That’s much more fat and more carbohydrate than the diet I was on, not losing weight and feeling worn out.

Back To France

I also began thinking back to when I was in France and I how great I felt in the spring when I was really thin and energetic and calm. I remembered how it was on a short weekend trip to France in January before we moved, I’d fallen off a six week weight-loss plateau and came back about 4 pounds lighter than I’d left. I’d eaten some really fatty hotel meals, including foie gras (goose liver pate) and confit de canard (duck preserved in its own fat). I realised how much dairy, foie gras, liver and super-fatty French lamb chops (the English ones just don’t compare) I’d been eating during the spring. I knew I was eating far more calories than I ought to but I hadn’t gained any weight. Another sign of hypothyroidism is constipation, something I’d always suffered from prior to Atkins, that had actually improved after the first few weeks of Atkins, and every time I went to the loo in France I remember thinking how brilliantly healthy my movements were! Additionally, fat also acts as a lubricant in the bowel. Why are all those Niçoise girls so slender and hourglass shaped with waists to die for? The Niçoise had to be the most attractive race of human beings I’d ever seen. It’s all the duck and goose fat and the butter they eat! Duh!

The Grand Unifying Crazy Theory

So the theory about hypothyroidism is the dumbest, most obvious theory in the world:

A cause of hypothyroidism and fatigue in the Western world is saturated fat deficiency. Fat soluble vitamin deficiencies and mineral deficiencies combined with trans-fat and vegetable oil consumption are real problems for the thyroid, but only contributing factors to an underlying problem: not enough calories, and not enough high-quality fuel. Furthermore, eating more fat in the absence of glucose (both from carbohydrate and protein) speeds up the metabolism and enables the extra calories to be burned instead of stored. In fact, you can eat slightly more carbohydrate than on Atkins, because fat lowers the glucose index and glucose load of all food.

Duh

I finally got this realisation through my stupid, thick head a few days ago. I was too scared to try eating more in case I put on weight, because after all, Dr Atkins says (though he is very often misquoted) “calories do count, but not as much as carbs”. I think I must have lost my way.

Pigging Out

I’ve been eating nearly 3000 calories a day for the last three days. I have deliberately gorged and have eaten so much I’ve felt sick a couple of times. I have felt so satisfied all the time that I’ve been almost uncomfortable. On day one, I had a 1000 calorie breakfast of scrambled egg made from one whole egg, two egg yolks, butter, pork dripping and a couple of fluid ounces of cream, followed by a whole slice of rye bread absolutely slathered in pork dripping and a large handful of raspberries, and on top of this a bitter cocoa drink with another couple of fluid ounces of cream in it.****** I had so much energy I ran all over town doing errands and even had the courage to use the telephone (I’m scared of talking to people on the phone) not once but twice, and even went into a kitchen shop by myself to arrange a measuring for the kitchen. I spent about five hours on my feet and I wasn’t hungry until four o’clock in the afternoon, when I had another huge meal composed mostly of fat. Then I sat down and set about sending a strong-worded email to the coenzyme-A people who still hadn’t sent me my order!

When your body starts working properly it’s amazing. I’m left with a feeling of wonder as I realised a pesky purple bruise that had been hanging around suddenly turned yellow and has now disappeared. My troublesome sometimes-dry eyes leaked gunk for the first day, then cleared up and now I swear I can see better. Perhaps I had a low-grade infection my body realised it needed to fight now it’s got more calories. I normally ache the day following large amounts of walking. I didn’t, I awoke revived and even bounced on the bed. My thought processes are clearer again. The patches of eczema under my eyes and on my chin suddenly pimpled and then shrank right down and I’m sure this time they are going to disappear for good.******* I no longer need to take my essential fatty acids to lubricate my skin, my skin is lubricating itself without them. I’ve stopped all my vitamins because I don’t need them. I forgot to take them (I never forget to take them, because I feel atrocious without them). I’ve put my E45 cream away because I don’t need that either. My pesky ovulation-time problems are under control. My previously bloated belly has flattened out completely. I noticed this phenomenon in France but was never able to figure out what it was that I’d eaten that some days had such a positive effect on my body shape! It was FAT, duh! I feel incredibly warm and had to throw the sheets off the bed, when normally I’m huddled up. My after-meal sweet cravings are gone. I was just looking for energy. This whole time I was so fatigued, all I needed was energy! Duh! Oh yeah, and in the last three days I’ve lost three pounds. Go Figure.

J. is having problems coming to terms with what I’m eating. He’s nicknamed it “The Porker Diet” and thinks I’m being “very naughty”. Admittedly, I would probably get first prize in an “Xtreme Dieting” competition for this one. My mother would be absolutely horrified. But J. can’t deny that I’ve lost weight. I actually think the reason my skin and scalp condition is better than his (apart from the eczema…) is because when he wants a snack he goes for the leaner ham, whereas I go for the fatter cheese.

Of course I’m not going to keep up the 3000 calorie routine; I’ll continue to monitor my weight and probably reduce it to that “moderate” 2,500 calorie intake Sally Fallon talks about, depending on the effect it has on me.

The Moral of This Story?

You might think you’re eating a healthy diet on Atkins, but unless you’re eating like an Eskimo, you’re probably not.

The Porker Diet:

• Protein foods are not free, and they’re not as filling as fats. You’ll probably only manage to eat about 4 ounces at dinner time if you’re eating enough fat through the day.
• Think Animal Fat. Vegetable oil is BAD. Olive oil should be limited to small quantities because your body prefers storing oleic acid. Coconut oil is great if you can stomach it.
• If you cut the fat off your meat (or you don’t eat meat) you’re doing your body a great disservice. Don’t do it, it’s wrong. You’re only saying “ugh” because you’re confusing the chewy gristle with the melt-in-mouth fat, and as you’ve never actually tasted it so you don’t know how good it is!
• Eggs should be eaten in abundance. Throw away some of the whites and add some cream to your scramble to get the fat content really high. The protein in the yolk is of extremely high quality, as is liver and kidney protein, and is therefore valuable in a lower-protein diet than Atkins.
• A slice of smoked salmon goes very well with a big dollop of cream cheese. Mmmm.
• Make chicken liver pate and have a slice with some vegetables or salad for lunch. Then eat an entire 200g pot of high-fat Greek Yoghurt. I dare you.
• Add fat, fat and more fat to everything! Eat like a pig! Make stews and add fat! Add fat to sauce reductions! Add it to gelatinous soup stocks! Butter your vegetables until they’re yellow!
• Drink really creamy cocoa or coffee, it will satisfy you for hours. Don’t worry about how much cream you eat, just eat until you’re full. Preferably it should be organic Jersey cow cream. I want to see butter globs on top of your coffee!
• Try some lard, go on, don’t be scared. Pork and beef dripping are really tasty and not at all unpleasant to eat once you overcome your conditioned prejudices. Slather rye bread with lard, it’s absolutely delicious. It’s not too high in carbs and is slow-release (at 35% carbs for a 12 gram slice) and will have a really low GI/GL with all that fat, and won’t harm your bowel as the fat will lubricate it).
• Allow yourself some root vegetables for the same reason (slathered thickly in butter of course). Remember you’re not doing Atkins Induction.
• You can get away with more fruit too (drenched in cream). Clotted cream is the densest material known to mankind and really good on raspberries.
• Home made custard and ice cream is a GREAT IDEA. Keep the sugar low, and enjoy all the cream and the egg yolks in it.
• Saturated fat deficiency gives you wrinkles and pimples, ages your skin prematurely and dries it out. It also gives you cellulite. Throw out your moisturiser and use coconut oil, olive oil or butter on your skin.
• No artificial sweeteners or soy. They screw up your thyroid.
• Nuts are pretty much a waste of time as a staple because they’re high in lower-quality protein and the fat is of a kind your body really much prefers to store. And those enzyme inhibitors in them constipate you. A tablespoon of nuts is plenty, so control yourself.
• It’s really not that hard to enjoy fat. If you start off suddenly eating a lot and you’re not used to it, you might feel a bit gippy or eat too much and feel sick. This is actually because your thyroid is sluggish, and good thyroid function is required for proper digestion of fats (Fallon and Enig recommend starting out on coconut oil as it requires less digestion. Cream and butter are good too, though not as good as coconut oil). So start out slow and build up, you’ll soon discover you’re in an upward cycle of recovery.
• If you feel hungry at an odd time then drink some water in case you’re actually thirsty, and if you feel hungry five minutes later then eat some more fat. Hunger is bad. Hunger tells your thyroid to slow down.
• If you feel tired or lethargic and it isn’t bedtime, you’re hungry. Eat some fat!
• If you feel cold and your thermostat is above 20 degrees Celsius, your thyroid is sluggish. Eat some fat!
• You have a digestive tract similar to a wolf. You are supposed to gorge until you’re full, then rest between meals. Eating less often helps to control your insulin levels. You won’t need to snack if you’re eating enough.
• Once you’ve burned off the fat around your stomach, your belly will get really full and stick out when you eat, then go almost concave the next morning. I call this the “Jennifer Aniston”.
• Recite this daily: “Bugger off Dr. Gillian McKeith and all ye contemporary nutritionalists with thine constipating sermons of skinless chicken breast, tofu and sunflower seeds! ‘Eat lots of nuts and seeds.’ What am I? A f*cking budgerigar?”

Edit: please note, you can’t eat 3,000 calories a day forever and then complain when you haven’t lost any weight. Duh! Did I ever say that this was a long term weight loss diet? NO! This diet is designed to stimulate the thyroid in order to help heal the body and resolve health problems. By stimulating the thyroid it MAY cause short-term weight loss. For sustained weight loss, it should be followed up with a FAT FAST. Weight loss should never be attempted by people who are ill, pregnant, or breast feeding.

Update

I noticed I got a comment on the Aussie Optimal Diet Forum. I am really amazed by how much interest this article has generated. It’s flattering to read about yourself as being “great”!

The comment also says I didn’t give Dr. K the right credit for the diet, so I just wanted to defend myself a little bit… I didn’t want to credit a diet of 3,000 calories to Dr. K because I read that he would only recommend 1,800-2,000 calories for me per day. My health was such at the time that I needed to give my system a bit more of a kick than that. The macronutrient ratios are the same as Dr. K’s for weight loss only, Dr. K doesn’t recommend you try to stay in ketosis forever. The diet is also very similar to The Ketogenic Diet recommended for epileptics, and the Atkins Fat-Fast. I didn’t want to credit one person without crediting the rest as I felt it would be unfair. I’ve since learned that Dr. K feeds his patients diets of 3,000 calories per day when they visit Arkadia. Wow. I needed to give him more credit than I knew!

However… in the update to the porker diet I wrote you’ll notice I’m virtually following The Optimal Diet apart from not eating quite enough carbs. My body is particularly resistant to weight loss, I also have some serious blood sugar problems, and whilst a lot of people can lose weight on the regular Optimal Diet, I can’t. But I do intend to follow The Optimal Diet to the letter eventually, as soon as I stop being afraid of gaining weight!

Notes from October 2007

* I was in fact genuinely coenzyme A deficient – salicylates block the recycling of pantothenic acid and require coenzyme A in order to detoxify them.

** Yes, I really was in Rabbit Starvation. Rabbit starvation happens when you break down protein for energy. Breaking down protein for energy causes higher levels of ammonia, and when the liver’s ability to remove ammonia from the body is exceeded, it results in exhaustion and diahorrea. I didn’t have the diahorrea (though I had bouts of IBS), but I did have the exhaustion. Whenever I eat too much protein this happens, and I believe it’s because I have high ammonia levels due to a genetic upregulation that is common in autism.

*** It’s only just occurred to me that coconut oil is so high chemical it actually gave me a salicylate happy-high. Which also explains why it gave me low blood sugar and the shakes.

**** See what I mean about coconut oil being very high chemical? I was very lucky to spot these symptoms from coconut oil as my diet was full of salicylates at the time.

***** Prior to changing my diet, I’d been eating roughly double this – around 100+ grams of protein per day in the form of meat and nuts.

****** As you can see from this breakfast, my high-fat experiment caused improvements that were’t due to me lowering the chemical content of my diet!

******* Sadly, my eczema didn’t disappear on the high fat diet, but there was a big improvement in my skin.

Vitamin K, warfarin and hypoglycaemia

Vitamin K is a fat soluble vitamin. There are three main forms of vitamin K: vitamin K1 (Phylloquinone or phytonactone), which comes from plants; vitamin K2, a family of substances called menaquinones, which are made by intestinal bacteria and found in animal foods and fermented foods; and vitamin K3 (menadione), which is a synthetic substance.

Depleting Agents: Antibiotics, antiseizure medications, chemotherapy, x-rays, the freezing of foods, aspirin and salicylates, air pollution, mineral oil, high doses of vitamin E and A.

Vitamin K plays an important role in the intestines and aids in converting glucose into glycogen for storage in the liver.

You know, sometimes you just have an “oh” moment where everything just suddenly makes sense. I had that a couple of days ago. I felt like Fenchurch in the phone box in So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.

It was a big “oh”.

It was the kind of “oh” that expanded outwards in a ripple, triggering one memory after another that suddenly clicked and fitted and suddenly I understood, and I felt justified, and I hadn’t been going crazy in the hospital, and all of this pain and ill health and confusion and worry all made sense and was within my control to fix. I burst into tears.

Vitamin K plays an important role in the intestines and aids in converting glucose into glycogen for storage in the liver.

I had no idea. All of the reading on vitamin K that I’ve done (and I’ve done a lot) all suggested that vitamin K was used only for building bones and clotting blood. But no one studies vitamin K, it’s a neglected vitamin, so no one knows anything about it or what else it might do.

It was the warfarin all along. That’s why my hypoglycaemia got so much worse in hospital. I knew it. I knew it and I’ve been searching for the answer for the last year but I’ve never found a single study on warfarin and glycemic control. Somehow it has eluded me – how, I don’t know, because now when I type “vitamin K” + glycogen + glucose into google, I get about three thousand pages back.

Warfarin is a vitamin K antagonist. No wonder I couldn’t keep my blood sugar stable. No wonder I was hungry all the damned time, no wonder I thought I was going mad because I was so angry with every one and every thing. Warfarin causes reactive hypoglycaemia.

This makes total sense to me now. It was around day 4 of my stay in hospital that I woke up so weak and shaky I thought I was going to faint; the doctors had messed up my warfarin dose and my INR was something like 4.3 – way too high. I felt so confused all of the time I was in hospital, I was so panicky and fluttery I couldn’t sleep, and I had a couple of panic attacks that made the nurses scared I was having a pulmonary embolism. These things are to be expected under such circumstances, but how much of that psychology was actually biology?

What happens when you can’t store carbohydrate as glycogen? You don’t have a supply available to regulate your blood sugar levels in between meals. All that carbohydrate that I was eating that normally would have been converted to glycogen, was turned straight into fat instead. I was left on a rollercoaster, confused, emotional, and a complete hypochondriac.

This explains the interactions between warfarin and some diabetic medications that I could never find a scientific explanation for on the web.

I knew there was a connection, I knew it was the warfarin, I felt it (you might say with an ironic smile) in my bones. I can’t believe this, but it’s so bloody appropriate. The cure that kills! I could draw the history of my health as a diagram, and all the illness I’ve experienced go right back to one source: pharmaceuticals.

I go to the doctor, who puts me on the pill.

Which makes my breasts painful, and I get headaches and throw up on the first night of every month.

Which causes me to go back to the doctor.

Who puts me on the third generation pill.

Which causes me to develop deep vein thrombosis.

So I’m sent to hospital.

Where they give me warfarin.

Which gives me reactive hypoglycaemia. I put on weight and get really angry and stressed all the time. I question my sanity.

So I go back to the doctor, who tells me to eat lots of complex carbohydrates!

Thank god I broke the cycle and didn’t take that last piece of advice.

If I should ever have another DVT, I will not go on warfarin. Warfarin is not a natural substance, it’s a toxin that needs to be removed by the liver. Heparin, on the other hand, is a natural substance that exists normally in the human body. That’s not to say it’s harmless. I can tell you a harmless way of treating blood clots: tocopherols and cod liver oil!

The pancreas has the second highest amount of vitamin K in the body. This suggests the vitamin may have something to do with controlling blood sugar. In the first study of its kind, researchers in Japan looked at vitamin K’s effect on glucose and insulin. In a study on rats, they found that vitamin K deficiency initially impedes the clearance of glucose, then causes too much insulin to be released. This can be plotted on a graph that looks very similar to what occurs in diabetes. Lef.org

This is exactly what was happening to me. This is reactive hypoglycaemia. Thank you and bless you, Japanese vitamin K researchers!

Even after I went on Atkins, I had strange episodes sometimes lasting a couple of days, and one lasting as much as a week, in which I was irritable and didn’t seem to be able to control my blood sugar at all. This is in spite of being very careful. During this week when I became ill, I was at my wits end, I just didn’t know what to do. I’d had a mild head cold for a couple of days and was having a few sinus headaches, but the lack of blood sugar control was far in excess of normal for a cold.

Then I read somewhere that salicylates like aspirin can affect blood sugar control, though there was no explanation given for why. I’d been using a Vick’s Inhaler all week in response to my sinus headaches – it contains methyl salicylate! I threw it away, and by the next day I’d recovered! Even the headaches were gone! I have noticed similar confusion and irritability after taking aspirin itself, I’ve even noticed a difference like this when taking anti-viral and anti-bacterial herbals like olive leaf extract, echinacea and goldenseal root. They must contain salicylates or something else that has the same effect on vitamin K. Now I know that salicylates and aspirin contraindicate vitamin K I feel sure that this was the mechanism that caused me to lose control of my blood sugar again!*

Furthermore, I had episodes of uncontrollable blood sugar that I could not associate with any pharmaceutical, which I categorised at the time as general illness – these bouts of hypoglycaemia seemed to be associated with constipation, bloating, or less frequently, diarrhoea. As a large portion of vitamin K is absorbed from the intestines, I believe these episodes of poor intestinal health to be the cause of these bouts of hypoglycaemia.** I attribute my slightly improved glycemic control of recent months in part to following the advice of The Weston A. Price Foundation, and eating live cultured yoghurt every day.

Not long ago, I went through a rough patch just after the aspartame/MSG incidents.*** I was very irritable for a couple of weeks. At the time I was due to be flying in and out of the country, so I had been taking 1000iu of vitamin E every day in preparation. It was working, as I developed one or two bruises on my legs. I don’t normally take such a high dose of vitamin E for an extended period, unfortunately they were the only capsules I had with me in France (whose Nazi anti-vitamin laws preclude me from buying anything in a useful dose over here). At high doses, vitamin E acts as a vitamin K antagonist, that is partly how it thins the blood. Was this also an episode of relative vitamin K deficiency?

Vitamin A also antagonises vitamin K at high doses, and something similar happened a few weeks later when I developed a chest infection and began taking a high dose of cod liver oil to combat it; I had a rapid heartbeat, panicky feelings, and I was swinging between loss of appetite and constant hunger… I can’t separate these symptoms from the infection itself, but at the time they felt like a loss of blood sugar control. More relative vitamin K deficiency?

You know what else? Warfarin also screws up your brain. It gives you Alzheimer’s!

[Osteocalcin is] one of the calcium-grabbing proteins in bone. But bone is not its only location. It’s also found in the brain, along with other vitamin K-dependent proteins. People with the E4 protein [a dysfunctional protein] have undercarboxylated osteocalcin not only in their bone, but also in their brains. Kohlmeier believes that people with E4 clear vitamin K too fast from their bodies. This leaves too little vitamin K for the brain proteins. Calcium can’t be regulated properly and may cause some of the damage seen in [Alzheimer's Disease]. Studies show that AD patients have severely dysregulated calcium in their brains. Kohlmeier believes that this has to do with their lack of vitamin K – the vitamin necessary for controlling calcium in both the brain and bone. Lef.org

AD begins slowly. At first, the only symptom may be mild forgetfulness. People with AD may have trouble remembering recent events, activities, or the names of familiar people or things. Simple math problems may become hard to solve. Such difficulties may be a bother, but usually they are not serious enough to cause alarm.

However, as the disease goes on, symptoms are more easily noticed and become serious enough to cause people with AD or their family members to seek medical help. For example, people in the later stages of AD may forget how to do simple tasks, like brushing their teeth or combing their hair. They can no longer think clearly. They begin to have problems speaking, understanding, reading, or writing. Later on, people with AD may become anxious or aggressive, or wander away from home. Eventually, patients need total care. [Alzheimers.org]

1. The seven warning signs of Alzheimer’s disease are:
2. Asking the same question over and over again.
3. Repeating the same story, word for word, again and again.
4. Forgetting how to cook, or how to make repairs, or how to play cards — activities that were previously done with ease and regularity.
5. Losing one’s ability to pay bills or balance one’s checkbook.
6. Getting lost in familiar surroundings, or misplacing household objects.
7. Neglecting to bathe, or wearing the same clothes over and over again, while insisting that they have taken a bath or that their clothes are still clean.
8. Relying on someone else, such as a spouse, to make decisions or answer questions they previously would have handled themselves. [Alzheimers.org]

Hell, I was forgetful, repetitive, confused, and unable to program or do simple sums… I was a mental basket case… I blamed all of these symptoms on the hypoglycaemia itself, but now I wonder if maybe something more was going on than just that! If a vitamin K deficiency damages the brain as well as the body, then considering what it has done to my body, I dread to think what damage it has done to my brain, what it’s changed, reprogrammed, taken away, destroyed, and what it has made me more vulnerable to in later life.

A lack of vitamin K is implicated in calcium deposits in the arteries, because vitamin K drives calcium into the bones where it belongs. Arthritis can be associated with calcium deposits in the joints, soft tissues and connective tissues, so vitamin K deficiency may also be implicated here. No wonder, when I asked the hospital nurse “how long will it take for my DVT to dissolve?” she answered. “We don’t know. Sometimes it calcifies.” The goddamned warfarin is the cause of the calcification!

A lack of vitamin K, and vitamin K therapy are also indicated in certain types of cancer. It’s a mega antioxidant, and as well as regulating the blood’s ability to clot, it also prevents blood clots by preventing platelet aggregation and producing anti-clotting factors as well as clotting factors, and in fact warfarin knocks both on the head, starting with the anti-clotting factors. This is why a period of hypercoagulability may occur in patients when they begin warfarin therapy. Incidentally… patients with Factor V Leiden are more susceptible to this risk due to the nature of the factors involved. Typical. Vitamin K is depleted by chemotherapy, yet chemotherapy actually makes the blood more likely to clot.

Towards the end of her life, my paternal grandmother didn’t eat properly, she ate like a bird and even then the wrong kind of food. She became forgetful. She developed Alzheimer’s Disease. She also developed osteoporosis. Then she developed breast cancer. She was given oral chemotherapy drugs. On these, she developed Deep Vein Thrombosis and died of a Pulmonary Embolism. As far as we are aware, she did not have my defective clotting gene – I inherited that from my maternal grandfather. This all makes perfect sense to me. Every one of my grandmother’s problems was associated with a vitamin K deficiency.

It is so ironic to me to think that I have taken megadoses of every single vitamin, mineral and nutrient that is indicated in blood sugar control. Vitamin K is not in the literature, alternative practitioners just don’t know about it yet, the information on the internet is patchy and sparse. The Japanese studies exposing vitamin K’s role in blood sugar control were done in the year 2000, which goes to show just how fast information doesn’t filter through the medical community or leaps across continents.

It’s even more ironic that I’ve been taking high doses of vitamin E to antagonise vitamin K, it means I may have been prolonging my own ill health through attempts to keep myself healthy. Vitamin K was the one vitamin I was afraid to take, and it may be the one vitamin that I needed all along!****

To clarify the roles of vitamin K (VK) in the pancreas, twice oral, glucose tolerance tests were examined in 12 healthy young male volunteers before and after 1 week of VK tablet intake. Blood were collected by venipucture at 0, 30 and 120 min after 75 g oral glucose loading. They then took VK tablets (90 mg/d of menaquinone-4) for 1 week, and the second glucose tolerance test was examined. The subjects were divided into three groups by serum descarboxy prothrombin (DP) levels; four of lowest DP (L-DP), middle of DP (M-DP) and highest DP (H-DP) levels. They were compared by one-factor analysis of variance and Scheffe’s F (group differences) and paired t -test (the effects of 1 week of VK intake). Age, body mass index and glucose status [plasma glucose (PG) and immunoreactive insulin (IRI), hemoglobin-Alc, fructosamine] of all groups were almost the same, but the IRI of the H-DP group was higher than that of the other groups at 120 min after the glucose loading (mean+/-SEM; L; 10.6+/-0.9, M-; 17.5+/-4.2, H-; 40.4+/-6.0 microU/ml). One week of VK intake tended to decrease the plasma DP levels of all groups and significantly reduced IRI of the H-DP at 120 min by half (before; 40.4+/-6.0 vs after: 18.4+/-4.6 microU/ml). The IRI/pG ratio in areas under the curve (AUC) of H-DP from 0 to 120 min after the loading was significantly decreased by 1 week of VK tablet intake (before: 31.0+/-7.4 vs after: 20/1+/-3.8 microU/g). These results suggested that there may be some relationship between pharmacological dose of vitamin K and insulin response. Copyright 2000 Harcourt Publishers Ltd. Possible effects of one week vitamin K (menaquinone-4) tablets intake on glucose tolerance in healthy young male volunteers with different descarboxy prothrombin levels.

To evaluate the effects of vitamin K (VK) on pancreatic function, especially on acute insulin response, 25 healthy young male volunteers were given an oral load of 75 g of glucose, and their mean daily VK intake was estimated by a one-week food check list. After excluding low (<20) and high (> or =25) body mass index (BMI) subjects, the remaining 16 participants were divided into three semi-equal groups according to VK intake. Blood VK status of the low VK intake group tended to be poorer than that of the high intake group (median of 5 samples: prothrombin time; 12.5 vs 12.2s and protein-induced VK absence-factor-II; 23 vs 15 mAU/ml), but fasting plasma glucose status was not markedly different between both groups: [plasma glucose (PG); 87 vs 86 mg/dl, immunoreactive insulin (IRI); 6.7 vs 5.3 microU/ml, HbA1c; 4.8 vs 4.9%]. However, at 30 min after glucose loading, PG of the low VK intake group tended to be higher than those of the high intake group (160 vs 145 mg/dl) and IRI was lower (36.1 vs 52.3 microU/ml). Insulinogenic index (incremental IRI/incremental PG, 0-30 min) of the low VK intake group was significantly lower than that of the high intake group (0.4 vs 0.9). These results suggested that VK may play an important role on the acute insulin response in glucose tolerance. Relationship between acute insulin response and vitamin K intake in healthy young male volunteers.

To investigate the effects of vitamin K (VK) on pancreatic function, intravenous glucose tolerance tests were performed in rats fed with and without low VK diet (including less than 20% required vitamin K1). Plasma glucose and immuno-reactive insulin (IRI) were determined. It was found that at 0 min., plasma glucose and IRI levels in low VK group were slightly less than in the control (glucose, 204.5 +/- 21.7 vs. 229 +/- 19.6 mg/dl, IRI, 6.6 +/- 1.3 vs. 9.3 +/- 1.8 ng/ml mean +/- SEM). At 3 min. after glucose administration, plasma glucose was higher (391.8 +/- 25.6 vs. 371.8 +/- 18.7 mg/dl) and IRI, lower (11.8 +/- 2.1 vs. 18.2 +/- 3.6 ng/ml) in the low VK group. The disappearance rate of plasma glucose in the low VK group at 5-10 min. was significantly less than in the control (6.7 +/- 2.2 vs. 11.9 +/- 1.8 mg/dl/min.). Incremental IRI area at 0 to 5 min. in the low VK group is less than in the control (15.2 +/- 4.4 vs. 25.0 +/- 9.1 ng/ml/min.), but at 5-60 min. and 0-60 min., it was found to be significantly higher compared to the control (210.3 +/- 55.2 vs. 32.5 +/- 47.1 ng/ml/min. at 5-60 min.). Dietary low VK intake would thus appear to induce a tendency of poor early insulin response, and late hyperinsulinemia to the glucose load in rats. Low vitamin K intake effects on glucose tolerance in rats.

Notes from October 2007

* Even at this very early stage, I knew salicylates were part of the problem. What I didn’t know was that fruit and vegetables contain salicylates too!

** I should have examined my diet more closely at the time – I believe during these periods of intestinal ill health I was exposing myself to more food chemicals than usual.

*** Vitamin K also protects against glutamate toxicity.

**** I believed that I needed to stop taking vitamin E and start taking vitamin K, so I did that as soon as I got back to the UK. The only supplements of vitamin K that were available at the time were Solgar 100ug phytonadione tablets. I started taking a couple of those every day.

However, within a month of being back in the UK I was overcome with fibromyalgia symptoms – I couldn’t think, I was exhausted, I had constant brain fog, and my dermatitis which had previously completely disappeared, came back with avengence. By autumn, my skin was so bad that I was ashamed to leave the apartment.

My response to this was to start using lots of fermented foods and organ meats – rich sources of vitamin K. I ate yoghurt every day, I ate kefir every day, I ate sauerkraut, I ate kimchi. I tried eating liver every day for a week – a total disaster.

More recently I have tried megadosing vitamin K2 supplements on several occasions. It is good at giving me pain in my DVT leg. It calms me down. It helps my skin a bit. Thus far it has not proven to be a cure.

As a smug aside

Yes. I really did write this over three years ago, long before the Weston A. Price Foundation declared vitamin K to be Price’s activator X and renewed their promotion of fermented foods for this reason. In fact, what I didn’t really understand about WAPF’s output back in 2004 was the emphasis on vitamins A and D for bone health, and the lack of any dialogue on their site about vitamin K and bone health. I thought – surely it wasn’t possible that activator X was vitamin K, because they must have already examined vitamin K and dismissed it! It just shows you that you can’t let other people do your thinking for you. My sign-in name on yahoo has been “vitaminkgirl” for many years now.

Coeur de boeuf

The old woman next door is watering her cats again. She has four or five cats and is constantly calling them to the back door for treats – “kittieees-kittieees-kittieees”, she sounds like the call of a bird. She doesn’t see too well and when she gets the hose out to water the plants, her beloved kitties always get in the way. They leap in front of the stream to bat it with their paws, then look astonished and wet in the aftermath.

I had coeur de boeuf (beef heart) for lunch. It’s rich in coenzyme Q10, minerals, and B vitamins. Heart food. Did you know that saturated fat is the food of the heart, that the fat around the heart is rich in saturated fat to provide fuel, that the heart runs exclusively on ketones? A medical fact little known by the public.

I bought the coeur de boeuf from Monoprix sliced, so at least it didn’t look like an actual heart – unlike the pork heart, which was whole in the tray. It looked just like normal muscle meat, apart from the occasional funny looking vein attached, and the sealed look of the muscle wall. I fried a slice in butter. I thought it would be tough, for some reason I equated toughness with strength, but of course the opposite is true, it is actually very tender and flexible. You would be forgiven for describing the texture as somewhat slimy when you first put it in your mouth. I had to fight my squeamishness. It’s actually a very smooth meat, not rough like muscle meat, perhaps down to the type of protein it is made from, such as collagen or elastin. The taste is quite pleasant, lighter, more flavoursome and more complex than beef, with a slight hint of liver flavour to it.

You can buy fromage de tête in France, even in the supermarkets. It’s a pate made out of pig’s head. Couper la tête de porc en deux… begin the recipe instructions on the internet. Place in a large pot, add the feet of the pig and cover in cold water. Add garlic, shallots and a bouquet of herbs to taste and simmer for six and a half hours. Add the tongue (la langue de porc) and cook for another thirty minutes. Add wine, de-bone the feet and head and peel the tongue, and cook for another thirty minutes. The mixture is then chopped, cooled, gelatine is poured over it, and it’s left in the fridge for 24 hours. Everything but the oink, indeed! The end result is nutritious and tasty – or so I’ve heard. I plan to try out a few more delicacies. Brains are supposed to be good for the brain. I haven’t dared try them. Goosefat, lard and offal are about my current limit.