Today while sitting at lunch with my older son he says, “Let’s have pizza.” At which point I have to remind him that I cannot eat pizza. I have a food allergy.
About this time last year I tested positive for Celiac’s Disease, which is simply an allergy to the gluten that is found in wheat, rye and barley. Based on a variety of symptoms I have likely had the condition for years and it actually took doing my own “testing” through diet changes before I convinced the doctor to run the test. Initially I was pretty bummed knowing all of the foods that I would have to give up. However, it did not take long to figure out that almost everything I would want to eat I could still make at home using gluten free products. Eating out is quite a different story and even though plenty of restaurants have gluten free menus there are still cross contamination questions to take into consideration. All in all I have not found the diet to be too difficult to manage. The only food I have not found a way around is egg rolls (rice paper wrappers do not fry easily and I almost set the kitchen on fire trying it!). And, unfortunately, gluten free beer is just not tasty.
Not only did discovering this allergy make an improvement in my health, it made me start looking differently at what we are really eating. I have never been a very discriminate eater and processed foods are what I have grown up with. But, over time I have begun to form my own opinions about how foods are affecting human health and after my son was born I decided to work on some big changes. I am a believer that the hormones and antibiotics pumped into cattle and chicken are a huge contributor to numerous health problems seen today including early development in girls and the sudden increase in autism. I could rattle off a list of problems that could all logically be linked to these meats. For that reason, we are planning on bringing back five deer during hunting season to stock our freezer with and are hoping to also have a cow from a family member slaughtered as well (we know what they have been fed and that they are all natural). Not only will we be able to remove all of the unknowns from purchased meat, but we will also be removing a lot of fat from our diet (venison is super lean) and it will save us a ton of money.
The next step for me is to begin removing processed foods from our home. That one will be a little tougher because it will involve a lot more cooking from scratch than I am capable of at the moment. Hardly a day goes by that I do not hear something on tv urging people to not eat foods with ingredients they cannot pronounce. And as I have had to look more and more closely at ingredient listings searching for gluten I have realized that there is no way some of the stuff we are ingesting can be good for us. It will be many, many years before science starts putting two and two together with a lot of these food issues, too late for most of us around today. That is why I want to make informed and healthy decisions for my kids so that when they do learn that high fructose corn syrup can turn you into a yellow, three-eyed, vampire-werewolf that they will already be one step ahead.
I recently heard on a show that the diet of some civilization near the north pole consists of 70% whale blubber and yet they do not have heart disease or many other ailments that we see in the western world. Asian cultures do not have the staggering obesity rates and have fairly long life expectancies also. These are both examples of how we are getting it all wrong as far as our diet and we really need to get back to more natural ways. Unfortunately, that is tough simply because eating badly is so much cheaper. But, I am hoping that my family can make it work because yellow is really not my color.
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