Invisible Nasty Stuff In My Food

Sugar that is in all it's forms and hidden carbohydrates and grains and all sorts of nonsense in my food.  I found Fructose in my Pickled Onions, Sugar in Pickled Dills, Sugar and Wheat Flour in Mustard, sugar in Worcestershire Sauce and the list goes on and on.  Sugar is absolutely everywhere and in so many different forms.  Fructose must be the criminal of them all, a naturally occurring sugar but my goodness what it does to your body....

Then all those carbohydrates that everyone tells you are so good for you too.  It's been a bit of an epiphany in some ways and as I said some years ago, having cancer has a silver lining in that it made me begin to take a bit more control of my diet and my lifestyle.  

My goodness though, I thought to myself this morning, I've been through the mill on this journey.  I was feeling particularly beaten up and sorry for myself this morning as only a bruised wrist and sore bladder area and still the faint reminder of pissing razor blades can make you reflect on what you've just been through.  Not once but now 11 times!  Sure other people have worse things and far blacker prognoses than I (and that's good to remind you to give due proportion to your own situation) but it's me feeling like this and whilst I have general empathy for others it is me who is experiencing this.  

When you start to dig into your lifestyle and the "advice" you are given and then scratch away a bit more you start to find out loads of things.  Without going into too much detail it has been interesting to read that there were hardly any diabetics, cancers or heart problems a few centuries ago.  Sure people died of some diseases and nasty things which we've now cured but in general it is only recently that diabetes and heart disease have been with us and it appears that since the "balanced diet" appeared in the 1960s there has been a rising number of cases of these diseases.  There are plenty of books out there about the Paleo diet and Atkins and others like Protein Power and The Insulin Factor and works by Tim Ferriss and Gary Taubes are also worth looking up.  The popular Mercola website also has lots of information on it - although it can be a bit "Daily Mail" in its delivery of the news....  Nearly all of them highlight the link between carbohydrates (in all their forms) or sugars if you like that screw with your body and cause insulin to work against you rather than for you.  

If you get a moment when you look at a packet of food or jar or bottle have a look at the ingredients - it will surprise you what is in it.  Mustard for example had sugar and wheat flour in it.  I have now bought ground mustard powder and make my own as needed.   A jar of pickles generally has for example Onions, Vinegar, Fructose, Salt and some other stuff.  We try and make our own now as it is difficult to find any that don't have sugar / fructose in them.  How on earth diabetics can keep track and control over this is beyond me.  

Finally in this rant, the consensus is that the food pyramid has carbohydrates at the base and vegetables and fruit thereafter then diary and then meats and fish above that.  Surely something is wrong here - carbohydrates are cheap and plentiful but will kick the daylights out of your body and make you fat (if you are so inclined that way) and then fruit which our ancestors only had limited supplies of and only in season and certainly they didn't have the highly modified fruits of today which are high in sugars and low in fibre.   The whole thing is arse about face and this supply of cheap and plentiful carbs and fruit and processed food which hasn't been with us that long is leading to a major problem with the population including diabetes, heart disease and cancers.  It's a bit of a "Go Figure" thing.  

I know that since I've been on a low carbohydrate, low insulin (GI), high protein diet my weight has fallen away, and generally my health is better than it has been for some time.  I feel quite fit and healthy and problems I used to have with sleep patterns and in many ways the ups and downs I used to get are things of the past.  The fatigues I used to get don't happen and whilst I know I'm not as fit as I ought to be I'm still much much better than last year, no longer out of breath or getting panic attacks/claustrophobia so regularly and I fit my clothes and actually feel good about myself.

I hope that as I recover from these biopsies I'll do some more exercise as I know I should (much as it sucks) to increase and perhaps accelerate weight loss and also, if there is any residual tendency towards Type 2 Diabetes in my system, to completely reverse that.  It would be good to go to my Doctor and show my Blood readings and shove those under his/her nose and question their letter to the Hospital and also ask why they didn't think to talk to me about it, advise me or get me tested (unless that is what the yearly blood test is actually about)?  It wasn't a fasting one last time so I kind of doubt it as far as I recall they need to make sure they aren't injuring my Kidneys.  Oh well - sure it will all come clear when I eventually get to see them.