Eating out on the diet
One of the most important difficulties everyone encounters right away is the problem of eating away from home. Not many people, even twenty years after I first wrote this book, have much idea of what it means to follow a strict exclusion plan, so you can expect little help or sympathy from restaurateurs or hotel staff
Part of this is prejudice and part ignorance of the issues involved. Allergies still have the stigma of ‘all in the mind,’ and even close family might not be sympathetic to what you are trying to do: expect some rebuffs. There is an unfortunate tendency in the population to view a meal such as a chop and vegetables as inadequate eating in some way; it makes many people feel uncomfortable. There is a misconception at large that a ‘balanced meal,’ supposed to be so desirable, consists of a little bit of everything, including wheat, dairy, sugar and stimulant drinks. So if you are eating with others, expect attitudes that vary from scorn to indifference.
Restaurant eating is even more impractical: most menus feature little or nothing without wheat, milk or sugar, and the dieter is left out in the cold. If you can find a place with understanding staff that will cater to your needs, so much the better – enjoy yourself. But the usual reception for anyone who wants to be different is being treated as a crackpot. Quite likely this will offset any pleasure you may derive from successfully eating out. Again, there often arises a need to defend the status quo, as if in saying ‘I don’t want your food’ you are implying it is unwholesome or disgusting. Waiters and chefs are more likely to be hostile than sympathetic, but try it if you must.
Vegetarians
Food allergies affect vegetarians like anyone else, perhaps even more so. Does this surprise you? The rule about allergies and intolerance is that the more you eat a food, the more likely you are to develop a reaction to it, so avoiding meat may lead you from one type of unhealthy eating into another. As I said earlier, vegetarians rely heavily on grains and dairy Wise products – which just happen to be the two commonest and most severe bandit’s foods. So eating them steadily and repeatedly in whole grain bread, quiches, pastas, pizzas, nut cutlets, cheeses – as vegetarians love to do, is just inviting trouble. Even soya is well into the top ten allergens and so tofu and TVP (textured vegetable protein, meat substitute) are also likely to quickly become a problem.
The second alternative is to use a fast or half-fast approach. It is drastic but will give correct answers if carried out and interpreted correctly. The half-fast would consist of one vegetable and one fruit, instead of meat; otherwise, all the information given in Chapter 14 on fasting applies in full. If you really can’t face even a half-fast, follow the elimination diet with allowed food that you feel like eating. But it is very important to maintain variety: don’t eat several foods over and over again, or you may make yourself ill due to those foods.
Alcoholic drinks
All alcoholic drinks contain brewer’s yeast. Wine otherwise contains only grapes. This is the reason you rarely hear of alcoholics who drink only wine: the alcohol content of beer may be lower, but there is nothing in wine that gives the same grains and sugar “lift” as lager, stout, pills and beers. Spirits give a bigger effect still, and many alcoholics soon progress to whisky, vodka and gin.
I demonstrated this to my own satisfaction nearly thirty years ago and have found nothing to change my mind. I did this by giving alcoholics shots of pure ethyl alcohol: it didn’t satisfy their cravings, whereas doses of the appropriately administered foodstuffs, such as wheat or corn, immediately relieved the withdrawal symptoms.
Casebook 12
A man I met in Spain, middle-aged and very portly, was exceptionally fond of vodka. Let’s call him Abe (he was Jewish). Abe had had several heart attacks and considered him lucky to be alive; every day he woke and thanked God with a prayer at sunrise. But a very short conversation with him (at his own bar!) revealed he was almost certainly intolerant of wheat and that this was the cause of most of his health problems, including the obesity. I pointed out that most modern spirits are made from wheat or corn (or both) and that even vodka was no longer normally made from potato. Drinking spirits when you have a wheat allergy is a bad idea, I explained to him.
Alcoholism
Actually, it isn’t the alcohol that causes the physical ill health of addicts, either. Cirrhosis of the liver and pneumonia are probably the two main causes of demise associated with alcoholism when it reaches dire proportions. The reason the liver is damaged is that it lacks certain essential nutrient ingredients, namely meth online and colane. These are normally supplied in the diet, but alcoholics are notorious for not eating and – despite a frequent appearance to the contrary – it is malnutrition that is their undoing, not the alcohol per se. This so lowers their resistance to debility and disease that pneumonia claims a victim where these days it normally would not. If you are an alcoholic – that is, if you can admit it to yourself and want to do something about it – use the elimination diet plan.
Bad trade off
The trouble is that all this success has an important tradeoff: you cannot suppress one type of reaction without doing the same to all the rest. Thus the ability to fight bacteria, which is an important and necessary sort of inflammation required to keep the body healthy, is concomitantly diminished. Furthermore, the adaptability of the body’s systems to cope with toxic foreign substances is compromised; thus food and chemical intolerances get worse. Far from being a wonder drug, as they appeared at first sight, steroid hormones are actually a deadly two-edged blade that may often do more harm than good; certainly as a long-term cure they have little to offer.
Last word
A number of well-known creams and ointments are basically steroid preparations, such as Bet ovate, Derogate and Signaler. Look for the generic names be tame rhizome or defame rhizome. Incidentally, do not be assured that active drugs are not absorbed from the skin when used as unguents; they are, and this is of special concern with babies, who may absorb enough in relation to their tiny body weight to constitute a serious overdose. Many doctors do not seem to realize this important point. Probably the best known of all steroid drugs is prod insolence. The most widely prescribed is the birth control pill, which often is not thought of as a steroid at all.
