Diet

I started a new temporary diet in a holistic attempt to heal my chronic inflammation.  It's complicated, but if I were to sum it up for people who don't really care but politely ask about it anyway:  inflammation is autoimmune, your gut is like 80% of your immune system, so if your gut is out of balance with bad bacteria, it causes a host of degenerative diseases such as chronic inflammation.  So my diet is an attempt to starve out the bad bacteria while replenishing it with good bacteria.  The two-pronged approach is to eat lots of easy-to-digest foods (that gets digested in the upper part of the GI tract and passed right through the lower, hence starving the bad stuff; also, not eating any sugar, including fruit, which feeds the bad bacteria) while eating a lot of probiotic foods (repopulating with good bacteria).  Ideally, this is for every single meal of the day.  I started off strong and am kind of burned out so I have been cheating a little lately, eating harder-to-digest foods, and I can tell the difference.

I could go on forever about digestive health.  In fact, I did but I erased it.  If you're interested, here is a good page that summarizes it:  Probably the Most Important Thing I’ve Learned About Health: Digestion & Elimination

I got a book out of the library by Weston A. Price called "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration."  Dr. Price was a dentist who traveled the world and found that people who traditional, nourishing diets were virtually free of cavities, tooth decay, and dental crowding.  They had wide jaws, generous nasal passages (unlike me -- I'm a mouth breather), and wide hips (for easy childbirth).  They were almost free of degenerative diseases and digestive disorders.  These societies, of thousands of people, didn't even have prisons.  As soon as these societies introduced "modern" foods, all the above became rampant  Amazingly, this was back in the 1930s!  "Modern white man" foods were simple things like white flour, canned produce, and refined sugar.  Imagine how "far" we've come since then.

After reading the book, I'm certain that my serious health issues are because of my diet when I was developing (starting with the fact that I was given soy formula, since Mom had to work and I had such a severe anaphylaxis to cow's milk that I was hospitalized).  Dr. Price's book is full of "before/after" photos and I am a perfect "after" specimen, with my severely deformed jaw and teeth, chronic health issues, mouth breathing, and narrow hips.  With all my health issues and the time and money I've sunk into treating them, truly I can attest an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  I'm sure if my parents had known, they would've done differently, but now we know.  The damage is done, but not for Michael.

And THAT is why I am so concerned about what Michael eats.  He is fighting an uphill battle, having to overcome my defects.  (He won't be able to truly overcome them.  It takes a couple generations to fix, and he didn't get the best start.)  I rarely let Michael eat any grains and if he does, it's fermented (e.g. sourdough) or sprouted grains.  He never gets refined sugar (he sometimes has honey or stevia), not even on his birthday.  More difficulty, I am trying to get him to eat nutrient-dense foods, such as raw egg yolks, liver, broth, and fermented cod liver oil.  (Sample dinner:  "Salisbury steak" made from a mix of ground beef, ground liver, and other offal, with a sauce made from ghee, reduced bone broth, and a raw egg yolk whisked in at the end.  He actually likes it!)  It's easier to keep things out of his diet than to get things in, but he's getting a little better now that he knows he can't hold out for fruit anymore.  I had been giving him fruit or sprouted bread or whatever just so he'll eat *something*, and now I don't.  He eats what I give him or doesn't get anything.  (Although sometimes I bribe him to eat nourishing foods with his favorite treat -- raisins.  However, it never gets to displace the healthy foods.)  It's tough love.  :-)  Right now he's snacking on dehydrated bone broth chips and grass-fed beef snack sticks.

Ideally I would've done all this as soon as he started eating solids.  This is a difficult time to start -- toddlers are notoriously picky.  I have Mommy Guilt over the stuff I gave him as a baby, genuinely believing it was healthy (liked puffed wheat cereal and oatmeal).  But as long as he's still growing, it's not too late!

I promised Ben I'd loosen up a little bit once Michael is around school-age.  Like, when he's 6, he can go out occasionally to Chick-Fil-A with the grandparents as a special treat, that sort of thing.  Until then, he's growing so quickly that I believe it's important he eats only wholesome foods.