Posts

Showing posts from April, 2021

The Fizzy Electrolyte Dance

Image
  Photo credit: reddit user u/cata_tonic (2010) In the 1990s I could go into any health food store, or well stocked supermarket and find Emergen-C,with electrolytes, and back then, it was a great product.  Over time though, it lost more and more good features, until I was switching to Trace Minerals Power Pak, and whenever possible, I'd find a box here and there of Emergen-C Electro Mix , which was not a separate product at first.  But ElectroMix is now permanently gone, I think.  Another electrolyte mix that's no longer any good is Vega, the ingredient list is far shorter, and the price has tripled.   I think the "vitamin water" craze has nearly killed an extremely important part of human nutrition and self care, meaning, the electrolyte mix industry.  I think what happened is, people want to drop something in their water bottle and have it NOT fizz. I think they are annoyed at having to wait until the fizzing stops to put a cap on their Nalgene bottle.  But the real

Why Gluten Free Wheat and Non Allergenic Peanuts are Not the Answer

Image
  Woman looking uncertainly at light bulb. Photo by Anete Lusina from Pexels Sometimes "good" news makes me angry. This is one of those times. We keep hearing news of gluten free wheat and it's getting annoying.  This isn't the first such news and probably won't be the last.  But the fact is, this news is not for us, the people with Celiac Disease, it's for the food processing corporations that make packaged foods.  The big news in the past few days has Israeli scientists smugly showing lab devices in nice photos, but I think the optimism is premature.  An Israeli startup, Ukko, is working on two food tolerance problems (paywall if you close the page) , using CRISPR to edit the genes of the plants, wheat and peanut.    Normally, if you said to me, hey I've got a less allergenic peanut, people will get sick, but they won't have anaphylaxis from it.  I'd be jumping up and down and demanding that all ordinary peanut butter should be made from it.

Correcting the Response to the Blood Clots Risk in Some Vaccines

Image
  Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels I'm not a health professional, or a teenager, but the popular media response to the Blood Clots news is WICKETTY WHACK!  We're doing good confusing everyone.  Full points for good old American doublespeak in the news.  Let me try and correct the confusion, because it doesn't take much science confidence to figure out what the wrongness is.  Let me take a moment out of the usual stream of Celiac articles because I do have personal experience with life threatening blood clots.  I'm not going to claim that I can explain every detail or that I know as much as Dr. Fauci, but I can understand thrombotic thrombocytopenia just fine, at a layman's level. And you can too. UPDATE:   The expert panel voted 10-4 with one abstention to allow the J&J vaccine to be given once more, with a warning to women of childbearing age who may be taking birth control drugs that also increase blood clot risk.  Please don't understate the serious

Guaca-Tuna! Guaca-Tuna! Yeah!

Image
  Here's an easy yet innovative recipe for picky eaters.  This tuna sandwich doesn't smell fishy, or taste strongly of fish.  It doesn't even really taste of guacamole very much.  Somehow all the strong flavors cancel each other out and a neutral crowd pleasing tuna salad is born! I'm squeamish about "fishy" smell when it comes to eating healthy tuna or other fish.  Mayo with tuna is okay, but it tends to magnify the fishy flavor and smell for me, and I usually have to load it down with onion, which just makes it even more smelly.  So I searched around for a better way.     It's fun saying Guaca-Tuna!   There's a small following of people who like to make tuna salad with guacamole, and another group who like to use cottage cheese.  After some experiments I found a recipe I like best, and it's so easy! It can be used in exactly the same way you use any tuna salad, in a sandwich, on celery sticks, or topping a green salad. You can even make a tuna me