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by lightweb 5028 days ago
In a quest to heal my wife's life-long bouts with Fibromyalgia and other chronic pain disorders, we have had to try a number of things over the years. Food has been our biggest change to date.

We had to switch to buying organic foods because anything artificial sets her body off. Anything with pesticides does it too. This rules out pretty much all conventional produce entirely.

We also had to stop shopping from the center of the food store too. We cut out all the processed stuff and started cooking whole meals. We are extremely picky about what type of meat and dairy products we purchase because of GMO-containing animal feeds (not to mention anti-biotics, other things which are like anti-biotics but not called that; really insidious stuff, growth hormones, bad water, pathogens from neighboring operations, etc).

We started buying only pasture-raised animals and this year I'm learning to hunt since we moved to a place conducive to that activity. We're also getting dairy goats to help offset our $3500+ per year un-pasteurized dairy/cheese/butter costs. I mentioned in another comment that I'm raising 50 chickens for meat and eggs and have already learned to butcher them. They taste AMAZING!

We follow the GAPS Diet and Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions cookbook, and also the Weston A Price foundation. We take lots of High-Vitamin Butter Oil and Fermented Cod Liver Oil. We infuse a variety of herbs. We take pharmaceutical grade Pro-biotics when necessary.

There is a shit-ton more to food than just saying "Eat Organic" or not. We have to understand nutrition from an old-world view as well as a new-world understanding and blend the two together. The very soil that the food is grown in and the animals are raised on contains so much life that has a lot to do with how nutritious the food ends up being.

I could go on and on but I'll stop. I will say it's been a huge odyssey for us, on the quest to stop chronic illness. It is definitely working and worth it, however.

Oh, I treat my ADHD this way too.

1 comments

It is extremely unlikely that GMO animal feeds have any measurable effect on the meat you end up eating.. i have no doubt that your diet is healthy, but it seems like you are irrationally excluding more sustainable foods in favor of less sustainable ones. Would you be willing to do a blind test on GMO fed vs non GMO beef?
This is a lot like my occasional bouts with MSG sensitivity (cue MSG pedants in 3 2 1...). I thoroughly believe the science that shows a lack of correlation between pure MSG and the reported symptoms of said MSG sensitivity, but so what?

Every time I get the characteristic syndrome: a splitting migraine with auras and a general sense of fatigue it has been after eating heavily MSG-laden food. What makes this frustrating is that it doesn't always happen. But again, so what? The easiest way to avoid this unpleasant state of being is to avoid heavily MSG-laden food and by that I mean MSG's use as a food additive and not the amounts naturally present in just about everything (so calm down MSG pedants). It is one of the 20 basic amino acids after all.

I have my own theory here but no inclination to investigate because the above rule has almost no perceptible effect on my life, and life is too short to go on some sort of crusade to prove the existence of something I already know exists because I have experienced it repeatedly.

I suspect there is some additive (i.e. an anti-caking agent or preservative) put into some commercial MSGs that is the real culprit and not the MSG itself. I further suspect the sensitivity itself is variable depending on metabolic state.

And this relates to the person you're replying to: WTH would they want to do your blind test on GMO versus non GMO if eating non GMO is working for them and they can afford it? I'd hope that given recent events involving contamination of pet and human food from China that you'd be open to the presence of inappropriate substances in the food chain: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/world/asia/08food.html?pag...

Is it really such a stretch to be open to the notion that there's something real but difficult to quantify going on here?