Lyme report

I started my new Lyme protocol on August 9th, and the ensuing brain fog is still really thick, but I did want to describe what's going on for any readers with Lyme.


I'm taking Septra DS, Zithromycin, and Omnicef on MWF, twice a day. Plus Flagyl ThF, twice a day. Two weeks on, one week off.  Mega probiotics including Saccharomyces boulardii.


So far I have this to say: yikes.  All symptoms worsened, some dramatically so.  LD was completely correct to insist on my taking Neurontin -- she said my central nervous system was going to go nuts once on antibiotics and oh yeah, she was right. My sleep is messed up, short term memory a goner, shooting nerve pain all over, no energy at all.


Wheee!


At least this worsening seems to be following the usual path. I watched Under Our Skin with my sister-in-law last week, and as harrowing as the movie is at times, it was pretty wonderful to see people sicker than I've ever been rebound to good health.


Anyway, obviously I'm hoping that this period is over quickly and I'll be back to posting. At the moment though, I can barely string a sentence together.

Finding the Food

Easily the most important moment in trying to make significant changes in the way you eat is the moment you buy the food. If high fructose corn syrup, Oreos, and Mountain Dew don't make it into your grocery cart, you skip that whole routine back at home of "Have it now? Save it for later? Maybe just one? Oh what the hell, I'll finish the box and be done with it!"


So to wean yourself away from processed food you can steer your cart around the perimeter of the store, hitting the vegetables, fruit, dairy, and meat sections and then straight to the checkout line. It's those inner aisles where the junk sits, and obviously if you don't go down them you can't lose your head.


That's what I did for years, ever since starting the Feingold Diet for my son back in 2002. But since then, there's been a genuine food revolution, and now it's easier than ever to get your food directly from the farm.  Now I'm lucky enough to get meat and eggs from Polyface Farm, my milk from Avery's Branch Farm (and when I say my milk, I'm not kidding. Thanks to Virginia law, I own two shares of a Jersey cow.) I get vegetables and fruit from our local farmer's market.


Three ways this is massively better than supermarket shopping: first, the taste is vastly superior for all the foods just off the farm. We're so spoiled by Polyface chicken that a Bell & Evans organic roaster seems flabby and tasteless now. Second, the nutritional content as well is shockingly better for the farm food. In a comparison done by Mother Earth News:

                        regular supermarket eggs              Polyface eggs
Vitamin E          .97                                                  7.37
Vitamin A          487                                                 763
beta carotene   10                                                   62
omega-3 fats    .03                                                  .71
cholesterol        423                                                 292
saturated fat      3.1                                                 2.31




Not just marginally better, eh? Polyface, with its pastured chickens rotating through new grass, crushes the competition, those sad chickens jammed in -- uh, I don't want to think about it. Did you watch Food, Inc. yet?

Third, and this is really the point of this post, making the change from supermarket to farm makes getting your food much easier, once you get used to the new habit. I pick up milk once a week, meat and eggs once a month, fruit and vegetables once a week. Yes, I still have to pop over to Whole Foods or Integral Yoga for stuff I can't get from the farm yet, such as mushrooms and cans of chipotle, and to support my serious cheese habit. But at least for nearly three-quarters of the year, most of what we eat comes straight from the farm, and the cries of happiness at the dinner table are much louder and more delirious because of it. 


If you're looking for a milk source, try here. For farms in your area that sell direct to the customer, look here.

Snack of the Week

Organic cherries and fromage d'affinois. Bliss.

Ode to Butter

While I do remember a period during my childhood when we had Fleischmann's margarine -- I was young enough to be mesmerized by its golden paper -- soon enough my mother was swept into the Julia Child craze and we had butter ever after. I did a lot of cooking during college, buttery cooking, and in the years after, still coasting along on Julia's influence, never veered into the world of fake spreads or margarines that were so highly promoted during the 80s and 90s. My loyalty to butter was completely about taste though. In those fat-phobic days, I figured if I was going to eat fat, it had better taste very good.


So it was a delight eventually to find out that butter is one of the healthiest things you can eat. Here's Julia Ross, in The Mood Cure:


Butter is so packed nutritionally, with its ten vitamins, ten minerals, eighteen amino acids, and eleven kinds of fat that it's hard to know where to begin. It's tremendously high in vitamin A, which it helps deliver to your eyes (night vision is absolutely dependent on an adequate vitamin A supply). Vitamin A regulates the female sex hormone progesterone too, providing many mood as well as fertility benefits. Then there's butter's butyrate, the fastest burning of all fats. This very special fatty acid is used extensively in your brain. For one thing, it serves as a base for making GABA, your natural Valium. It can also protect you from colon cancer and is used in medicine in precancerous colon problems to do just that.


And here's Sally Fallon Morell in Nourishing Traditions:


Fat-Soluble Vitamins: These include true vitamin A or retinol, vitamin D, vitamin K and vitamin E as well as their naturally occurring cofactors needed to provide maximum benefit. Butter is America's best source of these important nutrients. In fact, vitamin A is more easily absorbed and utilized from butter than that from other sources....Butter added to vegetables and spread on bread, and cream added to soups and sauces, ensure proper assimilation of the minerals and water-soluble vitamins in vegetables, grains, and meat.


The advice we've been getting for decades to avoid butter in favor of polyunsaturated oils is doubly poor because not only do we miss out on all the benefits described by Ross and Morell, but the fats widely used to replace butter are a nutritional disaster (I'll get to polyunsaturated oils in a future post). For list of healthy fats and a list of fats to avoid like the plague, go here. For more on the health benefits of butter from the Weston Price Foundation, go here.


I don't want to come across as someone who would urge you to eat stuff like lentil loaf in a single-minded focus on health. I'm all about the taste, and no question, butter is where the taste is. I've finally discovered, since it was my mother who was cooking Julia and not me, that the way top restaurants make their food so fantastic is just...butter. Lots and lots of butter. A really good dish can rise to unimagined heights with extra butter. One of my favorites is Matt Stone's Creamy Grits. It's a great dish for cold weather, and sending the kids off to school with full happy bellies, but I'm so devoted to it I made it even during this summer's heat wave. Usually I put a big handful of grated cheddar in there instead of the parmesan. And lots and lots and lots of butter.