Doughnuts

I went last weekend to a well-known theme park and spent much of the day eating junk food. This included a bag of beautifully light but unexpectedly large doughnuts that we picked at the end of the day for a few pounds.

By Sunday I was stiff and acheing all over my back and shoulders and stayed that way for most of the week. You may think it was the rides - and I expect they played a part along with the long drive to the venue. But the truth is I stayed off the real back-breakers. The worst ride we went on was a pirate ship type swing and, despite his bravado, my young companion started getting a tumbling tummy before I did. Being a little taller than him I realised I could prevent sickness by bracing my legs on the down-swing - worked very well.

Actually I've had a bad week and it's largely because the Singulair ran out early last week. So it's not been just the backache, the rash on my abdomen started to return and my left eye got sore again as it was in 2006.

So I managed to organise myself to see a GP. That involves taking a morning out to call and make an appointment and then having a free morning 48 hours later. The total time involved is much less than this but you certainly need two free mornings. I saw a registrar and, having asked after my asthma, he agreed to re-prescribe the drug. I explained that asthma is the one thing I don't have. He then took my blood pressure, which turned out to be remarkably healthy - and that's good news because it suggests the inflammation caused by this problem isn't getting to the arteries.

The thing about doughnuts is I don't normally get to eat them. When the family get them, they invariably have jam inside so I abstain. So presented with two bags with ten largish doughnuts between them, I wolfed down four. The problem, as with much fast food, is you don't know what they are cooked in. Doughnuts use quite a lot of oil I believe and it may well have been sunflower oil, which is no good to me.

I should record I took the boys to a McDonalds later and, as is quite common, they failed to produce the grilled chicken salad I asked for and I had to combine a side salad with chicken nuggets. As I said, junk food all day.

Invisible on the NHS

Oh dear! The sub-title of this blog refers to the British National Health Service. Let's be fair - after a long delay in getting my first appointment with a consultant I was treated pretty well. Being prescribed a drug - Montelukast - by letter is a little unusual but it works.

Yet it seems salicylate hypersensitivity is invisible on the NHS.

The NHS Choice has just launched an on-line food allergy testing tool. The idea is to distinguish between allergy and intolerance.

I've checked it out and it tells me I possibly have a food allergy. The problem is it's not quite true. Salicylate hypersensitivity is something a little different. I'm telling people now I have a metabolic disorder - there's something wrong with the metabolism - and that seems a better description. I double-checked by typing salicylate into the NHS Choice search engine and absolutely nothing relevant came up.

It's not as though it's uncommon. My dietician has other cases. My research has shown there's some scientific understanding of the condition if you look in the right places. There's even a drug.

Now after mentioning possible food allergy, the NHS Choice site suggests that nuts, fish, milk, eggs and wheat are the most likely foods to cause a problem. Tell that to the experts, who do not like the idea of wheat allergy.

Now I thought I had wheat allergy and my GP didn't contradict me when I told him my suspicions. I reacted to pasta and pizza and I ate a lot of pasta - still do. I was tested for it and the results were negative. That did not surprise the consultant as wheat allergy is actually pretty rare. And let me tell you - wheat allergy is miserable. Avoiding wheat and gluten for six months was far tougher than the way I live now. The gluten free food is expensive and insubstantial, cooking with it is impossible. It's true that catering departments know about it - but their menus tend to be unpalatable. I lost half a stone in six months and lived in permanent hunger.

And in fact, it seems, I was reacting to everything else - herbs, concentrated tomatoes, spices, peppers etc. So which is more common salicylate hypersensitivity or wheat allergy? I have a feeling nobody knows and I also think that suggesting wheat is a common allergen is misleading, as it's also a common food.

Chocolate wiki

I can't leave the chocolate question alone so I've been over to Wikipedia.

At last that's reassuring... "it would be necessary to eat more than a dozen chocolate bars to get the same amount of caffeine as one cup of coffee," according to the Wiki-article.

I don't suppose these are plain chocolate bars and no doubt it means a strong cup of coffee. Now all I have to do is to find out how much caffeine there is in decaf coffee.

Caffeine in chocolate - now it's sort of official

You know how it is...an idea gets in your head and you can't get rid of it. Everybody seems to be talking about it. That's how it's been with chocolate and caffeine over the last few days.

So this morning there was a scare about coffee causing miscarriage. I get up and there's some kind of expert being interviewed on the television. She talks about not drinking coffee (if you're pregnant) and how there's caffeine in tea. Then the presenter says: "But isn't there caffeine in chocolate?" The expert pauses, as I hold my breath and reach for my ears, before she says "yes". Apparently dark chocolate is the worst, because, of course, it is the most concentrated. She seemed to think that white chocolate and probably milk chocolate would not do too much harm.

Well that seems to be the end of snacking on dark chocolate because it's "healthy". I can't snack on milk chocolate - it would be plain foolish - but I suppose the occasional chocolate snack will do no harm. I wonder about chocolate drinks?

Defac chocolate?

...And if there were caffeine in chocolate, surely someone would have developed a decaf chocolate by now?

Chocolate

People keep telling me that chocolate contains caffeine. I wish they wouldn't.

Shampoo alert

Don't follow my advice about buying Tesco shampoo. The conditioner's still fine but the shampoo has been bothering me since I used it. It's Christmas and I'm already pushing my tolerance levels to the limit, eating dodgy chocolates and fudge with funny flavourings and accepting foods pushed at me because they're bound to be okay (although to be fair everyone's been very kind and tried to help. I had rice pudding on Christmas Day following by a chocolate Christmas cake). This morning I used the shampoo and it might have been acid. My skin hated it. I then checked the ingredients - there are lots of chemical names, none of them readily identifiable with wheat or maize. The only identifiable ingredient is castor oil - which is made from the castor bean and is by no stretch of the imagination wheat or corn. I'll be writing to Tesco...

A Happy Christmas!

A very happy and joyful Christmas to all and a reminder that the season is about more than food!

A year ago I reflected on this subject a couple of days before Christmas and talked of how the changes in my life were helping me to contemplated the true meaning of the season.

At that point I hadn't reckoned on the challenges of Christmas Day - trying to wash rock-hard, dry turkey steak down with watered whisky and watching, while still hungry (hungry at Christmas dinner) whilst others wolfed on thick Christmas pudding and dark, sweet Christmas cake.

Since then we've perfected the art of cooking a juicy joint with minimal seasoning. We can produce salicylate-free gravy and I don't try to substitute whisky for wine any more. I'll keep the whisky in a separate glass and enjoy it properly. I'm still losing weight in December rather than gaining it after having politely refused umpteen mince pies.

But the essence of that meditation remains. Christmas lunch may not be so enjoyable but the real joys of the season are still there for the taking.

Hair care

Sometime ago I found a conditioner in Tesco called "wheatgerm and cornsilk" and have been using that pretty successfully.

I paid another trip to Tesco's and this time found a shampoo with the same ingredients. Of course if you have wheat intolerance it's the opposite of what you want but now, for me, it is ideal and these are pretty well the only plant products I can handle.

Eating fish

Since my recent discoveries about Samter's Triad and omega 3, I have stepped up the eating of fish. Let's hope the oceans don't run dry through overfishing, as some people fear may happen.

The trouble is that cooking fish is not easy and certainly not fast. You can buy frozen battered fish and that's simple to cook but takes a little time.

I've tried cooking white fish in the past and struggled to make it tasty. These days they seem to sell it as just "white fish", I guess because cod is increasingly rare and it's probably Alaskan pollock.
I'm looking for quick meals and so far I've tried:
cooking in a white sauce - this curdled after I added cheese;
grilling - you can't go wrong but without seasonings you can't taste it either;
frying and battering - the instructions were on the packet and involved beaten egg and breadcrumbs. Presumably people buy crumbs in packets as my bread signally failed to crumble. I ended up with some partially battered fish and frying the bread crust and remainder of the egg together - using rapeseed oil of course;
spaghetti sauce - not recently as I seem to recall it was hard to get any taste out of the fish. You can't add soy sauce as it completely kills what taste there is of fish and besides, may be high in omega-6 but that's not clear to me yet.

I've also in the past used tinned fish with spaghetti sauce, such as sardines, and then the problem is the opposite. If you're not careful you end up with a mixture that is too rich.