darkoshi | gluten free

I ate gluten-free for 2 to 3 weeks. (During the first week I still ate some things which I later realized had gluten in them).

It didn't improve my hand & finger issues.

But I did notice an improvement in my digestion.

To begin with, I have regular bowel movements (usually every morning), and rarely suffer from constipation or diarrhea. But my stools are often soft, and sometimes I have a lot of gas and bloating.

During the weeks of eating gluten-free, my stools were less soft and more well-formed. My butt required less wiping (really!). The stools were lighter in color. I was less likely to have an additional soft & gaseous BM during the day.

Last week, I ate gluten again, as I wanted any tests the doctor did to be based on my normal diet. My BM's went back to how they were before.

Also, I lost about 5 pounds, which I can't explain. It returned me to my previously-normal weight, before I slowly gained these 5 pounds over the last several years. I wasn't hungry and I don't think I ate less than normal. I'm not even sure this was a result of the GF diet, or when exactly the weight was lost. I step on the scale every once in a while, so it happened fairly recently. When I had fasted for that partial day in mid-May, my weight fluctuated less than a pound. So it happened between then and now.

Update: I re-checked my notes; I noticed the weight loss already after the first week of going gluten free. So it happened within one month of the partial day of fasting. Maybe the fasting had more to do with it than the gluten-free, even though it wasn't immediately noticeable after the fast. It's weird, still inexplicable.

..

So maybe I am somewhat sensitive to gluten. Maybe that could somehow be related to my joint issues; maybe I just need to avoid it for a longer period of time.

It wasn't hard to eat gluten-free. There are so many GF products available in the supermarket; I hadn't realized til now how many items are even marked as certified GF. I didn't feel very limited overall.

The biggest problem was that my kitchen and freezer are still stocked with mostly non-GF foods. I hadn't realized how many vegan meat analogs contain wheat gluten. Even the soy-based ones tend to also include wheat gluten.

Now I'm curious to see if I'm sensitive to any other foods. I may try avoiding both soy and gluten for a while, though that would be hard. Or maybe corn.

.

I read a page which explained leaky gut well, and another page on food sensitivities to gluten/gliaden vs FODMAPs. But can't find the page now. Here are some similar ones.

https://www.mygenefood.com/zonulin-leaky-gut/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3384703/
https://draxe.com/7-signs-symptoms-you-have-leaky-gut/
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/12/09/459061317/a-protein-in-the-gut-may-explain-why-some-cant-stomach-gluten
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/22/314287321/sensitive-to-gluten-a-carb-in-wheat-may-be-the-real-culprit

Sudden thought: If it's only a FODMAP issue for me, and I'm only sensitive to the carbs in wheat, then maybe I'd only have to avoid wheat flour, but could still eat all those gluten-based meat analogs!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Ditching both soy and corn is *really* difficult in the US. Soy lecethin is in everything, and the main source of most sweeteners is corn syrup.

Corn syrup might be easier to avoid, precisely because it really is in everything. I avoid it by reading labels with the intention of either buying something with real sugar (or preferably no sugar and no sugar substitutes) or else not buying it at all. I don't pay attention to soy lecithin as an ingredient but since I have certain issues that it might make worse, maybe I should *makes mental note*.

If your issue with soy is phytoestrogen sensitivity (eg endometriosis/ovarian cysts/other such horribleness) it's not just soy. Sweet potatoes, fennel, some other things, can also be problems, as can bisphenol-a, aka BPA, which is used as a plasticizer in the polymer lining of many canned goods. Again, a huge PITA, but: if you can buy stuff in glass or foil-lined packaging (like POMI brand tomato sauce and chopped tomatoes, which are sold in foil cardboard packaging) that seems to help a bunch in reducing symptoms. I don't know how eg soy lecethin can be that horrible, but it sure appears to be.

I don't know if my issue's phytoestrogen sensitivity, or if there's enough soy in my diet to cause or exacerbate it, only that based on certain things I've observed I'd gather I have enough estrogen to go around for many women with some left over, and it's made my life more hellish than it ever had to be.

If looking for soy on labels and not buying foods with added soy would help with that I'd do it, but I have no idea if it would or not and my symptoms are so bad I figure that's not going to do much to improve my condition, anyhow. I really don't know.

But re: chopped tomatoes in foil cardboard, if the foil's on the inside of the packaging that's not good, as aluminum leeches easily into food and is pretty horrible for overall health, so I wouldn't jump on that, either.

That's an interesting point. Aluminum cans are coated on the inside to keep the aluminum from leaching into the drinks (which I only learned recently). So presumably, the foil in those cartons are coated too, especially for tomatoes which are acidic. Based on this page though, the foil in the cartons is coated with polyethelene, and doesn't have BPA:
http://www.bodyearth.net/health/bpa-and-canned-tomatoes/

So I googled polyethelene and this was the 1st result: https://myplasticfreelife.com/2011/04/bpa-free-does-not-mean-safe-most-plastics-leach-hormone-disrupting-chemicals/

While this page: https://www.care2.com/greenliving/which-plastics-are-safe.html says polyethelene (in the forms of PET, PETE, HDPE) is safe, the author at the first link goes to pains to say she read a 33 page report detailing why it's not. So I dunno.

It wouldn't be a big issue except coincidentally I've been reading how BPA in particular is bad in a number of ways and can act as a a form of estrogen, and I used to drink (through early 2016, from roughly 2003 or '04 or so) water from plastic bottles (all my water, 24/7) and re-heated food in plastic containers from the 90s until a few years ago, so I'm thinking that could be the resultant estrogen imbalance I'm suspecting, which is making me side-eye all plastics pretty hard now.

I'm to the point I want to stop buying plastic throwaway cups, throw out all our plastic food containers, and replace everything that can leach anything with glass or stainless steel. I'm not looking forward to it because of cost and the fact that I can expect OP to drop and break all the glass anythings within a few months, but for our health even that extreme of spending (to replace it all on a regular basis) might be worth it.

There's something going on with my joints now, too: more on than off over the last few weeks I've had a bone ache that runs through my spine, legs, neck and hands, all at once, all day/all night. I'm on OTC pain relief for it as I write this. For months before it was just my neck (and that seemed bad enough). I don't know if it's the beginnings of a form of arthritis or some other issue, but I'm thinking I have to minimize any possible causes or aggregators of inflammation before it gets any worse.

Edited (typos, clarity) Date: 2018-07-08 04:11 am (UTC)

I think plastic containers are ok for storing dry food, but I try to use glass for everything else. I'm beginning to be leery of canned foods (and soda cans) too after reading about the coatings used in them. But I'm torn because I like the "flame roasted" tomatoes that only come in cans, and it's nice sometimes to be able to just open a can of beans or soup, etc., for a meal.

That sounds bad with your joints. I hope it is only temporary and that it will get better. Neck pains are the worst. At least my problem is only in my hands so far.

So it turns out it's temporary in the sense it's cyclical, so when my hormones bottom out during and after the end of each cycle, that's when the really severe (spine's the worst, by far) pain hits. So I do feel better now!

But I think I've about had it with my joints (inside left wrist has had tenderness and pain today; my bad foot seems to bother me more and more, which is weird) so I got a bunch of collagen off of Amazon, and some glucosamine and chondroitin, and tumeric pills with the Bioprene black pepper added in because ~~getting old's for the birds~~ these are all said to help with joint pain (the one form of collagen is specifically for that, while the powder's for that and improving skin texture/smoothness/tightness and I'm a bit vain, so yeah).

Considering the worst of the pain is/was cyclical I can assume it will be coming back every month so I just feel like I have to do something.

Re: plastics: I looked up replacement glassware since writing this and there's just no way - even the cheapest crap that will either come already broken and chipped or chip, crack, break or explode in our faces more or less instantly (according to some truly horrific Amazon reviews, some complete with pics) is out of our price range for now. Steel's not of huge interest to me since you can't reheat in it and there's not much of it out there, anyhow.

My main concern in the meantime is how we put still hot or warm foods into plastic containers to store in the fridge, so I'm afraid some plastic leaches. But I don't reheat anything in plastic (I'll literally go hungry first) though OP still does. I've told him just take some of our ceramic ware to work and reheat your lunch on that but he hasn't done so yet.

Edited (typos, clarity) Date: 2018-07-16 05:27 am (UTC)

I just noticed something about the cans of food in my cupboard. A lot of them say "Non-BPA lining" on the labels. One has it written in ink on the top of the can, along with the expiration date. All of the cans with organic beans/tomatoes say that; the cans of non-organic food don't.
So that's a bit of a relief, although I can't be sure that whatever they are using instead of the BPA lining, is really safer.

I opened a can of coconut milk earlier today, which had an expiration date of 2016. (I don't know how that happens! Can it really have been 2 years since I cooked with coconut milk or bought any? But I guess so; time flies and I don't cook as much as I used to, since Q moved to his own place.) The contents smelled a little weird, so I threw it away.

Coconut milk is a strange substance to begin with: we had a six pack in here not too long ago (Goya, if I recall correctly) as an experiment because we'd never tried it before. So I tried it in my coffee: blech. Then we mixed it into our home made tapioca pudding (which, when made with whole milk, is one of my favorite foods on Earth): yuck (ruined it; made the texture quite mealy, too). Used it in one of my curries: ick (I like yogurt or even sour cream better, with yogurt being by far the best).

Also, it's hard to pour, with about 40% of it clumped up at the bottom of every can while the rest was very runny. I mostly found it quite odd to deal with, though not too bad-tasting by itself.

I haven't checked any of our cans for any such label, though, since this is the first I knew they had such labels! That's good to know (and I'll check, asap). We're having a bit of a food kerfuffle lately because I won't eat anything (besides the coconut milk) but tomato products (for my homemade sauces) out of cans and we have enough canned foods at this point to really add up, beans included, also many vegetables and a good deal of fruit.

I also won't eat beans anymore (and we have bags and bags of beans) because of the side effects, so my diet's changing from OP's quite a bit (Is it edible? He will eat it. I will not, unless it seems safe and is preferably sort of nutritious) and while I'm not sure how happy to feel about it (I miss beans a lot, mostly - canned or dried) it seems silly to turn back on these changes just to make him happy.

Re: expiration dates, that's kinda up to you. Canned foods are said to be perfectly good for years past their dates: if you really want to hang onto one past it's date, I'd open and smell and swish it around and check over what's in it quite carefully before using, is all. (Medicines can last way beyond their expiration dates, too, as long as they've been stored properly, which usually just means "in a cool, dry place").

Edited (clarity) Date: 2018-07-16 05:47 am (UTC)

Also, a few days after we started this thread I opened our fridge for the first time the next day (probably to get my half and half for the coffee) and just stopped cold and stared: everything on every shelf was packaged or wrapped in plastic. Or foil. Or cardboard with some sort of shiny substance on it (the milk and cream containers).

I was like, "Wtf? I'm gonna switch to glass containers for what reason when everything I buy at the store (even the organic stuff) comes in plastic or something else I don't trust to be safe?" Which means inevitably my next round of online research will be on what do manufacturers put their products in, anyhow. Like, not just the ones in our pantry, but the ones that stay in the fridge or freezer? Because how much good is it doing anyone to get rid of plastic storage containers if everything we buy that goes into cold storage also carries some risk from how it's packaged?

Yeah, I was thinking mostly of corn meal and corn vegetable, but corn syrup would have to be avoided too. As well as dextrose and corn starch, etc., which are also made from corn. At least corn syrup has been out of favor for a while, so a lot of "health" foods already are using other sweeteners instead.