(08-16-2025, 10:13 AM)Michigan Swamp Buck Wrote: Holy Crap Ricky!
I know we all have to eat something, and that nutrition is a very tricky business that needs to be tailored to the individual, but damn, you got some chemistry going there!
I got into nutrition 30 years ago with a book I had on the subject. Even back then, it was apparent that it was pretty complicated to come up with a diet that suits an individual. Eventually, I just monitored myself on food consumption when I experienced some symptoms after eating. Lactose intolerance was easy to figure out, plus my Dad's side had it, so I was aware of that.
I played with table salt intake based on the the RDA, my concern was getting enough iodine. I noticed the effects after about a couple months when I cut out all table salt and avoided it as much as possible in the foods I ate. My go to has always been taking a fist full of vitamins and supplements around breakfast or lunch. Lately, I've been playing with supplements for three things basically, managing blood pressure, enhancing T production, and easing my arthritis, along with the usual daily vitamins.
I need to cut down on fats and carbs I suppose, although they help when I'm doing hard physical work on a daily basis for long hours. I need more fruits and veggies too, but have been reading about problems with foods like tomatoes that I like fresh off the vine. Not that I have many allergies that I am aware of, and I have to over do the foods that cause me problems, like grapefruit, to notice the reaction.
It helps to acknowledge cravings but it can be hard to figure out exactly what you are craving. I'll go through several foods and still not determine what I'm hankering. I want to add more nuts, but the price on mixed nuts is crazy and I usually just settle for peanuts. I guess I just have to pay up for a daily intake of nuts, apparently they are pretty important to your diet.
Yeah, figuring out cravings to combat things in the environment or to balance metabolic insufficiency is not easy. There are multiple chemistries in all the food you eat, and our bodies metabolism can take out what it needs from foods and ignore what it doesn't need and we just excrete what we do not need somehow. I could eat a lot more foods when I worked hard and sweat out byproducts of metabolism and detox some food chemistries through the skin which helped to take stress off the liver and kidneys. so with the acquired epilepsy, I cannot fire up everything in my body more, the extra energy created causes partial seizures, so I rarely work up a sweat....I got this epilepsy over twenty three years ago and it took me over a decade to figure out how to correct my diet. I suppose I could build a sauna and take one a few times a week, that is what the Finns used to do.
Oh, I love vine ripened tomatoes and I will not lie, they taste so good I feel it is worth the hives I get from them. Also, since I cannot properly metabolize and detox that chemistry of tomatoes from a lack of some of the P450 enzymes because of my genetics, all I need is a little bit of that tomato chemistry occasionally to receive the health benefits that others need more of....so I do not need to avoid them, just moderate consumption on the low side to be healthy. If I think it is worth it, I will suffer the consequences. If it was just my skin, I would not worry about it, but it screws up my guts too if I eat too much.
Same goes for lasagna, my wife makes the best lasagna I have eaten...it is worth it. And Pizza, I like it, but if it is really good pizza, it is worth the suffering. Just because I am intolerant to something does not mean I am going to destroy my happiness, I just try to use those foods as a treat.
I also don't grow tomatoes anymore, if they turn out really good, those hives persist for months. Most times the stores tomatoes are just so so....they are safer if they don't taste like they were grown in heaven. The Ahmish tomatoes sold at markets here are really good, good thing they are only around for a month and are expensive...I am a little frugal buying expensive foods...growing them is cheap....On top of that, last year the chipmunks ate half of my cherry tomatoes and a quarter of my super hot chilly peppers. How can they eat those chili peppers, they must be using them to dare other chippies into taking a bite of them....Yeah, humans do that, why not chippies.
Didn't grow anything this summer, fell on the ice and screwed up one shoulder and the other arm in late winter, the shoulders torn flat fanny tendon has healed, but damage to the other arm is still weakening the arm considerably. So running the tiller and weeding and digging potatoes is still a no no. One good thing from the fall, it knocked all the calcium deposits off my neck bones, I can again rotate it about a hundred eighty degrees to my shoulders easier.
It takes a lot of research to decipher cravings, and a lot of time spent evaluating what was read while trying to go sleep afterwards. I am getting faster at evaluating things, but I still have to search for info to verify my conclusions which are mostly right now, but often need tweaking to make them adaptable. A lot of food that people deem unrelated completely have similar chemistries or close chemistries to them. and some things restore enzymes other enzyme creation in our body needs to create the enzymes that cure the problem. That is what many meds do, but the problem is that our bodies will make other enzymes when we sense the chemistry in meds and make the enzymes to take apart a food our bodies associates that chemistry to...and those improper enzymes cause side effects to the meds. Something pharmacutical companies know but do not inform anyone about. Fixing things in your diet is way better than taking pills, and that adjustment is genetic specific from the way our ancestors ate. We do not all wear the same size shoe.