How do you feel after your meals, and your snacks for that matter? Do you feel full of energy or does a snooze sound appealing?
How does your tummy feel? Flat or bloated? Does it feel comfortable or are there niggly little pains?
If any of this sounds familiar it may be down to something you have eaten. Just because a food is thought of as healthy, it is only healthy if it suits your body chemistry. We are all different.
We have all heard someone, even ourselves, saying "Oh, that just doesn't agree with me ..." and yet they still continue to eat it until pain or discomfort triggers a moment of realisation and they decide it might just be better to forego a little pleasure on the taste buds to avoid pain or other debilitating symptoms an hour or so later.
This can be caused by candida albicans as I explained on a previous page, repeatedly eating the same foods over and over again or a lack of digestive enzymes.
If you are suffering in this way and just can't work out which food is bothering you, kinesiology may help you solve the puzzle.
Dairy
Dairy foods have had a bad press over the years so it is worth mentioning that not all dairy products are bad for you. This also doesn't mean that all dairy products are good. There are two elements to dairy products which can cause problems for people.
The first is lactose or milk sugar. Human beings were never meant to consume milk past the age of about 3 when we were supposed to be weaned off our mother's milk. Mother Nature then switches off the production of an enzyme called lactase which breaks down the lactose in milk into a digestible form.
Being resourceful beings our ancestors cast their eyes around and decided to try the milk of other animals, which tasted good but in the case of cows' milk can cause digestive problems like bloating and diarrhoea which aren't so good. There is now a milk called Lacto Free which is easily obtainable in supermarkets in the UK and doesn't cause problems because it has the lactase enzyme added. Lactaid is the brand available in the US.
The other potentially troublesome component is casein or milk protein in cows' milk which tends to cause problems like eczema and asthma in those who are sensitive to it. The protein molecules in cows' milk are larger than those in both human breast milk and goats' milk.
Semi-skimmed goats' milk is easily available in large supermarkets and tastes very nice.
I have just found this link to help people identify the amount of lactose in various products, it looks very helpful so click on the underscore:
_http://www.stevecarper.com/li/list_of_lactose_percentages.htm
Grains
If we reflect back on the foods available when we were in our hunter-gatherer phase and still living in caves, grains weren't consumed. If you look at an ear of wheat, it is not something you can eat without processing and it makes you wonder what the first person was thinking when they ground it, it wasn't as if they already had a tasty recipe. We have been struggling to digest foods made from the grains wheat, barley and rye for around 10,000 years and we are still struggling as there are so many foods containing it.
We simply do not produce enzymes to digest it. Our ancestors may have adapted to a degree over the centuries but after the Second World War a clever chap called Norman Borlaug of Wisconsin University hybridised wheat varieties to produce the dwarf variety we are used to seeing in fields today, in order to increase the yield so we would never have to endure rationing again. He even won a Nobel Prize for this variety of grain which many now find difficult to digest. Evolution is a very slow process and if we ever managed to digest wheat before Norman Borlaug, we didn't instantly start producing the right enzymes afterwards.
There are a lot of people suffering symptoms such as bloating, gas, indigestion, constipation, diarrhoea, stomach pains, lethargy etc or IBS if you want a label for it, who have no idea that a large component of their diet is causing the problem.
The 'usual' diet starts the day either with toast or a wheat based cereal, lunch usually consists of a sandwich and the evening meal often includes pasta, pizza, bread or a pie and then we snack on biscuits or cakes in between.
The suggestion of removing wheat, barley and rye, the gluten containing grains, usually horrifies most people including doctors. They say you can't remove a whole food group and remain healthy. Why not when that food group is making people ill? There are plenty of substitutes nowadays and it doesn't rule out rice or oats, although there are a very few people who are intolerant to those too but not because they contain any gluten. Oats contain their own protein called avenue, which is where Aveeno lotion gets its name from.
Grains are not the only source of the vitamins and minerals we need to maintain a healthy body. Fibre can be obtained from fruits, vegetables and even linseeds and they aren't as abrasive as wheat bran can be on the intestinal tract.
Removing gluten grains from your diet usually removes a lot of uncomfortable digestive symptoms like bloating, abdominal pain, fatigue, diarrhoea or constipation depending on how it affects the person in question, and other disparate symptoms. A recent patient told me that his arthritis was greatly relieved by taking wheat out of his diet before he came to see me. I merely confirmed what he suspected.
