Month: June 2013

It is very easy to take tragedy at face value. To look at a situation that is temporarily bad and see the problem and not wish it on anyone. Yet oddly the abilities I have in the kitchen were the result of a minor tragedy. At the time it was a huge problem. Thirty years later is was simply a miracle. My mother is a lovely woman. She is great with kids. She is extremely intelligent. She has many great qualities. Her cooking is not one of them. This is not an issue for her. She proudly displays the refrigerator magnet that proclaims “If God had intended for me to cook, why did he invent restaurants?” She makes five things well, four of which are stews. It is difficult to set a stew on fire. You only think that is a joke because you never ate her brown “steamed” broccoli. Or frozen broccoli that was still frozen and made a clanking sound when put on the plate. Once she made a pie crust that was so tough that we stacked plates on it to see how many it would take to dent the crust (the answer is ten heavy ironware dinner plates..before we quit because we were afraid the plates would fall) which also had undulations in it. I think we just used a steak knife to free the...

When we first got the diagnosis it was tempting to change everything at once. To eliminate overnight the entire big eight, to immediately get antifungals, to run out and get allergy tested to heal as fast as possible. I will pass on what the nutritionist said to me. Don’t do it. She advised me to go home, remove all the gluten and dairy that day but to make a plan for the rest. In her words, just feed him hot dogs and potato chips if you need to. It wasn’t like he was digesting anything anyway. Then remove the big eight except for fish, shellfish and nuts (she told me we would know if he was allergic to those…and he wasn’t) and then get rid of the fungus and then the minor allergens. Gradually add in more nutritious foods. Otherwise it would have made me crazy. Now we have a rhythm. After three years it is simply what we do. We did the three rounds of anti-fungals and the sub-lingual vitamins and the supplements for calcium. We lived through the Epsom Salt baths to ensure magnesium for a weak digestive system. We added the zinc whose deficiency that had caused the canker sores and we lived through the year of powdered polyethelyne glycol every day which we purchased in bulk. And we went from therapist to therapist now that...

I was in the park the other day talking to a fellow mom about the whole issue of “junk science”. Junk science is everywhere. So in the interest of humor and with a nod to Jeff Foxworthy, I present “It Might Be Junk Science If” It might be junk science if…the documentation of sources would be unacceptable in the second grade. My son did a report on Opossums for school and they insisted on knowing where the research came from. Reporters who say things like “studies show” without highlighting which actual studies show this “fact” are probably just making stuff up. Literally. There may be no actual study at all. You should always be able to see the original study. I am still waiting for the one about eight glasses of water per day. Did they test eight against six? What happened to people who only drank six glasses of water? Who did the research? It might be junk science if….it makes your life way easier. This is stuff like, chocolate is good for you, or kids don’t benefit from homework, or you only need to exercise 10 minutes a day. Very often there is a grain of truth in these statements…like one drink a day is good for you once you know what one drink means…and it means that a single small Margarita is 4 drinks (2 shots...

In one of those stranger than fiction things, it appears that Dunkin Donuts is planning to introduce gluten-free donuts by the end of this year which leaves me wondering…for who? You see, back before I knew what was wrong with me, I loved Dunkin Donuts. I think I had an average of two donuts a week in there. A large coffee, some donuts and I was happy. Now of course, I would barely be willing to drink the coffee in a place where flour hangs in the air. Which is the essence of the issue. People who eat gluten-free seem to fall into three different categories, none of whom is the Dunkin Donuts customer. The first group is celiacs like me. We require dedicated oil, dedicated fryers, a change of gloves when handling our food, a severe scrubbing routine for electric mixers (I worked in a restaurant, between batches of perfectly sanitary cake batter, mixers were often rinsed, not scoured) and other cross contamination routines to ensure our safety. My guess is that we will not be comfortable with their standards. I am sure they are more than sufficient to avoid food borne illnesses, but we require a level of vigilance that I don’t always see. The second group are elite athletes and health buffs. Not to make too big a deal out of it, but these are not...