Oxalates

[davidn]

As I'm sure you're keen to be updated on my constantly poor health as my conditions and cures continue to suck all the possible enjoyment out of life from every available angle, I've just been told that I should try to limit my intake of oxalates to hopefully prevent a repeat occurrence of last month. Even though I attempted a chemistry degree for two years I didn't know what exactly these were before yesterday, but they're found mostly in plants and berries, and other things virtually at random.

Most of the things on ze list aren't things that I'm going to have a lot of difficulty avoiding - indeed, I'm very pleased that I now have a legitimate reason to refuse my mother-in-law's tofu nut balls, and also to avoid brown bread. But there are a couple of pretty big ones hidden in there... chocolate is dangerously high in oxalates and has to be avoided. Who (except quadralien) survives without chocolate? At least it's only a component of a few of Britain's best biscuits (others being Jammie Dodgers and Fox's Crunch Creams).

Virtually all kinds of nuts are bad, and even though that wouldn't normally bother me, there's a certain cereal that I have eight boxes of in the cupboard (having received a new shipment from my brother just the other day) that I now have to severely limit my intake of. Breaking the rule against the foods on the red list won't instantly kill me but is just generally a bad idea - maybe if I'm strict with other yellow-classified foods I can work them in occasionally.

Soy sauce is on the red list as well. That was something that I'd never had before coming to America - it's very nice indeed, as long as you get the kind that's not just salt water with some caramel food colouring in it. Though that's the only variety I'll be having from now on.

So that's a brief overview of the refreshed dullness of the future of my natural lifespan, but to look on the bright side, without the power of Crunchy Nut that time's probably going to be significantly reduced.

Comments

[kjorteo]

Who (except quadralien) survives without chocolate?

Hi.

Well, to be fair, I like light milk chocolate (though not dark because I literally cannot taste it) but gave it up as part of the "eat healthier" part of my eat healthier/exercise more thing.

Edit: On the other hand, I see oatmeal and beans are questionable and peanuts are right out. Considering my entire diet at this point is oatmeal at morning, what basically amounts to a bean and cheese sandwich at night (going for something burrito-inspired, but since I have a bread machine, not a tortilla machine....) and peanuts for snacking and with meals, there goes pretty much everything right there.

[davidn]

I think I probably said this on your post on the same subject, but I don't much like dark chocolate either, although working next door to someone who organized chocolate tastings and tried new things out on us did make me sort of appreciate it (even the stuff with bacon or lavender in it - who thinks that up?)

And with a diet like that I wouldn't have thought that you would exactly have had to cut down on anything as part of an effort to eat healthier...! Given your incredible sort of hoarding eating habits, it makes me wonder if before you settled on your character you ever considered some sort of chipmunk :)

[kjorteo]

That's my diet after I cut down and decided to eat healthier. :)

Before, I couldn't help but notice that breakfast was usually fine (since it was usually just cereal of some sort) but dinner was actually stressful for me. I'd have to decide what to have tonight, try to weigh what I was in the mood for versus how long it would take to make versus how much time I had versus how much of everything I had left or whether I was out of anything. I had to keep all sorts of tertiary things (pasta? Well, I'm going to need pasta sauce for that, then, and about three different bottles of herbs and spices on top of that so I can actually taste the sauce) and that led to getting all sorts of things I'd use maybe once or twice before they've sat there long enough to go bad. Also, woe unto me if I ever wanted anything perishable, since I don't get to go out to go shopping more than once a month or so. The whole system was just a mess.

Therefore, I wanted to overhaul dinner and make it as much of a pleasant no-thought-required simple task as breakfast. I didn't mind having the same thing every day (in fact, it reduces the "oh God what do I want to make tonight" stress I just mentioned above) and standardizing it would cut down on needless unused condiments and such. All I needed was to come up with something whose primary ingredients were non-perishable (or at least lasted somewhere in the half a year range) so that I could stock up (thus getting around the shopping problem) and be set on food for months before having to stock up again.

The burrito-sandwich-things are actually quite good, and since they consist of bread (which is ordinarily good for a few days at best, unless you happen to have a gigantic CostCo-sized 25 pound bag of flour and a bread machine and can simply make it as needed, at which point it's fine,) refried beans (canned, keep forever,) and cheese (most aren't good for that long, but Velveeta keeps forever,) I'm good. And not having to worry about dinner anymore is a godsend. And it's all reasonably healthy (you'd think the Velveeta wouldn't be, but it actually compares favorably to most other cheeses I've seen but for an unholy amount of sodium, which I made up for by switching to unsalted peanuts and rice crackers instead of Ritz) so I think I'm pretty much set at this point!

[davidn]

All that about dinner is certainly true - it does become an exercise in resource management, and even though we try to be careful we usually have to throw revolting things out of the fridge every couple of months before the bacteria on them evolve to the point where they discover fire. Though in my own case dinner is mostly a mystery as to just how badly and creatively I can somehow mess it up this time.

[kjorteo]

You do seem to be somewhat unlucky in that regard! Were you the one who somehow managed to mess up that one-minute Easy Mac stuff at one point? It's been a while since I heard that story and I tend to get the people involved and finer details like that confused.

[davidn]

Well, in a word, yes. Though I want to say again that it was EasyMac under difficult circumstances.

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

Apart from chocolate (oh, so, so glad I don't have to worry about this oxalate business) I think I'd cope with it, since no major cuisines are ruled out. You just might need to have smaller portions and fill up on whatever's on the green list, but ultimately that's not a bad thing and could even be healthier regardless of oxalate content.

I would check the Crunchy Nut carefully though - the cynic in me believes there's less nut in it than you think. You might even find that scarfing down a boxful each day has less oxalates than this thumbnail-sized piece of 85% dark chocolate in my mouth, and I wouldn't bat an eyelid if it were true, either.

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

In addition, if you drown them in milk and make sure you drink it all up, it might just counteract the effects of the oxalates within it, anyway. There's hope for you yet!

Drink it up, you say?

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

Does that involve a straw that reaches acrooooooooss the room?

Re: Drink it up, you say?

[davidn]

I promise you, you make even less sense than the ZZT forums sometimes :)

Re: Drink it up, you say?

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

[distantj.livejournal.com]

Heyy David. It's been a while.

Anyway I thought I'd let you know I know what it's like to have such health issues. I'm sure you remember me telling you about my stomach cramps and IBS that I had for a few years.

I saw that you were on Mebeverine, which I was put on a while back, before peppermint oil capsules, which I found actually worked better, but I'm actually 99% free of IBS now since taking this other stuff called IntestAid IB.

I thought perhaps I could recommend it to you, if you still have a really dodgy stomach. Look it up, it's basically a nucleotide supplement - stuff which we chucked out of our diet after the war (stuff like offal and tripe) contained nucleotides, which our DNA needs to replicate itself. Without it, the DNA just uses bits of dead cell and stuff when rebuilding the insides. It's not a problem for most of the body but the parts of the body which replace themselves the most often, like a snake shedding it's skin, are the intestines, which are completely replaced something like every 28 days. It's practically an intestines transplant, though not beyond your own DNA obviously.

After about a month taking these I started feeling better, now I've been taking them for maybe 4 months and I've felt like a hundred dollars, with mild cramps popping up only every now and then, usually if I've eaten fish and chips or something uber fatty. Other than that I'm good with life, I even take my girlfriend out to meals and stuff now.

So I thought I'd let you know... I know what you have is probably very different but you never know! Give it a try.

[davidn]

An interesting suggestion! Medicine in America seems to be as not-quite-the-same as everything else between America and Britain - the same stuff is often around but under different names, so it's likely there's something like that. Sorry to hear that you went through the same thing that I did, though...

Recently I was put on... something beginning with O, under the trade name Levsil, but I haven't been taking it very much - it's meant to be a gentler variety of Mebeverine but it has worse side effects. I'd been relatively OK since 2006 until last month - this is just the end of a worse condition at the moment, probably brought on by the anxiety caused by it!

[distantj.livejournal.com]

Ahh, possibly the aftermath of some sushi-related food poisoning by the sounds of it!

Well, I'm glad you're generally better!

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

Mebeverine did shit for me. Literally.

[davidn]

I had no idea that so many of us shared this - I thought I was the only one falling to pieces sixty years too early. I was on it to stop horrendous stomach pain, I remember it being quite gentle and just being able to stop and forget about it after a couple of months.