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The No-No List

For a number of years I've been having problems with my eyes. Specifically dry eyes. I've gone to a number of doctors, followed a lot of advice (warm compresses, preservative free eye drops, gel drops, washing eyelids, take fish oil capsules (a whole variety of them including TheraTears and Omega 7) and taken a number of prescriptions including Restasis. For a period, the preservative free eye drops and Restasis worked.

...And then nothing did.

One of the eye doctors I went to spent a good deal of time researching and trying to find a solution for me to no avail. I stopped by Pharmaca a few times for fish oil drops and various vitamins I'd heard might help (Vitamin C and A in particular). The first time, they recommended Omega 7; it wasn't enough. The second, much to my horror, they suggested I might be gluten intolerant. Gasp. I LOVE bread and pasta. Besides vegetables, I LIVE for starch products. Besides, gluten intolerance had to be a scam, the latest fad, right?

Well, the well-timed discovery of an excellent article ("Against the Grain" Columbia Magazine) in one of my husband's alumni magazines and desperation can make a person consider all sorts of things and I found myself in a naturopath's office to see if I really could be gluten intolerant. I was given a test using a Vega machine where we discovered a sensitivity to:

Peanuts (tragic to the nth degree; I've eaten peanut butter nearly every day of my life)

Additives: Nutrasweet, Saccharin, Splenda & MSG (no real loss since I don't tend to eat "diet" foods and I've had issues with MSG before)

Alcohols: Grain alcohol, beer, white & red wine (barely sensitive), tequila (severe sensitivity) and sake (barely sensitive)

Grains: Wheat flour, sprouted wheat, spelt, barley, oat, rye, triticale & kamut

Sugars: Refined sugar and corn syrup

Caffeine: Cocoa, chocolate (the ultimate tragedy), coffee, black tea, decaf coffee; pretty much anything with caffeine in it, no matter how little.

The naturopath did say while the test gives us a starting point, it is fallible and suggested some bloodwork as well. My initial "prescription" based upon extensive questioning about my diet & lifestyle is to cut the above items from my diet for 6-8 weeks, increase my fat intake (apparently I'm not getting near enough fat in my diet) and overall, eat better. From there, we'd see if I had any improvement and work on adding foods back to see if any particular food was the prime culprit. Sounds easy enough except it turns out, wheat products and corn syrup are in just about *everything*. It's unbelievable.

It seems daily I find another item that contains something on the No-No List (my name for it).

My favorite tartar sauce and barbecue sauce contain corn syrup and / or high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Okay, so I'll make my own, right? Turns out most pickles contain corn syrup and or / HFCS, so do most ketchup brands. Tough to make something when the ingredients used to make the product contain the very things you're not supposed to eat. Argh! Thanks to Twitter and a lot of label reading, I was able to find some products without corn syrup / HFCS.

Heinz makes an organic CS/HFCS-free ketchup.

Woodstock Farms and Nalley both make CS/HFCS-free pickles

I'm in my second week of the No-No List and I've had a few failures. A couple of glasses of wine, an entire bag of wheat & MSG containing pretzels, and today, I ate tea sandwiches and chocolate cake and drank multiple glasses of iced tea at an afternoon party. Time to get back to the business of being healthy.

For dinner tonight, I decided to make peanut sauce (with almond butter) and noodles only to discover that soy sauce contains wheat and / or gluten (some contain just one, some contain both). My friends on Twitter suggested Tamari (check the label because some brands do contain wheat / gluten) as a substitute. I heavily modified a sauce recipe I found a few years ago and it turned out pretty well.

Rice Noodles

Raw Veggies: thinly sliced carrots, thinly sliced radishes, sugar snap peas, bite-sized red pepper chunks, thinly sliced mushrooms. Thinly sliced green onions and jicama would make good additions as well.

Chicken or turkey would be a nice addition too although I didn't use either.

For Sauce:

6 T almond butter

2-5 T Tamari (I only used 2 but the original recipe calls for 5)

2-3 T warm water + more as needed for consistency

1 T sesame oil

1 T rice vinegar (I only had about a 1/2 T so I used a bit of apple cider vinegar to get the full tablespoonful)

1/4 tsp crushed ginger

1 tsp or to taste, crushed garlic

Mix together in blender or small food processor.

Cook noodles as directed, coat with sauce and top with veggies. A meal in minutes.