I've definitely considered giving up casein, but I only have 150-200 dollars a month to spend on food and my dietary choices as a celiac are extremely limited. I eat the exact same thing every day - fruits mixed into a smoothie with inexpensive egg soy and whey protein powder(the likely culprit of my continuing intestinal issues), leafy greens, peanut butter, and kidney beans mixed with brown rice. I LOVE food and it sucks to never eat anything else(especially when running 4-5+ miles a day makes me absolutely ravenous), but this stuff covers my dietary needs along with the el cheapo Swanson antioxidants I only spend about $15 a month on to help fill in nutritional gaps.
I'd suggest giving up dairy totally for the next couple of weeks before trying to move forward with anything else. That might do the trick, or it might take a little bit longer to know whether it's getting better or not. If you decide it's definitely getting better, give it several more weeks and decide whether it's getting better fast enough to figure that your gut is going to eventually completely heal that way.
Almost everyone who has a problem with cow's milk and cow dairy products also has a problem with beef. I'm pretty sure that if you find yourself having a problem with diary proteins, you also need to strictly avoid beef. That would be the next thing to give up if giving up dairy doesn't work sufficiently well (assuming you once in awhile have some beef).
Having lamb when/if you can ever afford it is a good beef alternative. Few people have issues with lamb. Whether that's because of its cost--so you've never had it on a basis close to everyday, thus not increasing the exposures--or maybe because it has no relationship to drinking cow's milk--or something else about its chemistry--I don't know. I just know it's relatively safe for most people with digestive problems. Pork is less likely than beef to bring a problem too, but more so than chicken and turkey are. You might also have a problem with eggs; that's more likely than for pork but less likely than beef. (I'm remembering this from long ago with my testing, where the reporting sheet went down the line in order of the probabilities taken from stats on a large US population. Divided into 3 columns on one sheet, I think I recall that eggs were in the first column and pork was in the second.)
I'm honestly not sure what I'd do if I couldn't eat beans or the protein powder - those were both inexpensive compromises to begin with. Meat isn't as economical, and with the help of the concentrated protein powder I'm definitely getting all my essential amino acids. The amount of these two foods I eat a day only comes to about $1.00, whereas even a half-spoiled steak from the meat clearance rack would set me back at least $3. I might try switching over to brown rice protein powder instead, though I'm still not sure what I could replace the beans with. They're just about the only food in my current diet that's even remotely filling.
Brown rice powder is _low_ on protein.
The two most affordable sources of protein, if you can't eat soy or beans, would be eggs or chicken on sale. But as a first step (if simply avoiding dairy and beef doesn't work), try just eliminating the soy only for a couple of weeks; you'd still have beans left as your major source of protein that way. Only if that doesn't work, you'd need next to go on to eliminating all beans.
I have never been a believer in limiting egg consumption because of cholesterol, and I think the more recent research doesn't back up the idea of limiting yourself on eggs either. You could hardboil something like 8 eggs at one time in your largest pan, making sure you don't overdo it (edge of yolk will turn grey if you do that), cool them a bit in water, and refrigerate what you don't eat right away. Rewarm briefly in a bowl of hot water from the faucet when ready to eat some more eggs on later days. If you also have something like cooked brown rice on hand (Uncle Ben's offers one that will cook in ten minutes), eggs will make a nice meal with the addition of some good vegetable(s) and a bit of fruit. Rice is the only grain you're not very likely to have a problem with digesting. (As well as glutens, corn sensitivity is very common, so just figure on skipping all the common grains other than rice. I don't know anything about more exotic things like quinoa. Once you get yourself stabilized, you can always reintroduce corn on an infrequent basis.)
You might buy whatever kinds of chicken happen to be on sale there and boil (simmer) it up in water (or chicken broth with some lemon juice added if you can afford that) on the weekend and have that at various points along with some of the brown rice that you also cooked over the weekend. (Cook your brown rice in the leftover water/broth.) Assuming you have a microwave, that kind of warmup cooking doesn't take very long, though it's not quite so fast as a shake. You might think of yourself as being Chinese? I think the Chinese have been doing something like this for centuries when meats were scarce. In one case, try scrambling up some eggs and leaving some leftover to combine with some meat scraps in a pan with some oil (virgin olive oil if possible) and (ideally) some onions (classically, green onions) to warm up with your rice, all scrambled up together. I have also done this with some finely chopped fresh kale too and it's tasty.
I know you are thinking that I don't have a clue as to what it's like to be trying to operate with your monthly income and your need for quick meals. That's mostly true, but my imagination is pretty good, Moleface. I can also imagine being in your shoes and having to drop out of grad school due to an overwhelming disability. Then where would you be in your progression to a PhD and the possibility of doing the work in your life that you most want to do to support yourself?
I'm not in your shoes and can't know where you might find the increase in a food budget that this would mean now and in the foreseeable future. But even if all you were considering here were the economics of the situation and your life, you'd be better off to spend the extra money on fixing your health now via necessary food avoidance of offenders, even if you have to borrow the extra money that getting enough protein in a healthy diet might require.
Wayne Persky was once in your shoes, and wound up having to drop out of graduate school altogether due to an overwhelming disability. This is no little problem you're dealing with. It's worse for you than it is for me, because most of the time I'm reasonably close to a bathroom here at home. But you can't stay in school forever if you're liable to having accidents when you go somewhere there's no bathroom right by your side. It can become a disability. I've had really bad problems a couple of times away from home, and it's so humiliating I never want to go out. And think ahead to having to deal with this as an oldster, like me: these problems are totally exhausting, to an extent that it's not in the ballpark of your normal use of the word exhausting. I feel as if I'm going to pass out much of the time nowadays when that stuff is going on. And in all my health problem history investigating, inflammation keeps coming up as the historical root of most, if not all, of the issues.
As far as I can tell, inflammation issues wherever they occur in the body generally all starts with the gut and its responses to what you eat. I realize now that not dealing with my problems in my twenties, when my allergist delivered the bad news, meant that my health in innumerable ways has been horrible for a large portion of my life, and becoming more seriously horrible with each year of age. I'd urge you to handle this now, no matter how difficult and unpalatable it is. (I'm currently discovering for myself just how difficult it is.)
The Swanson vitamins could be the issue as well, seeing as the company refuses to officially confirm their products as gluten free. The ingredients show nothing that should be a problem, aside from cellulose - and apparently wheat cellulose doesn't even contain the gluten proteins.
Oh, dear. I'd suggest dropping the Swanson vitamins immediately. Just doing that single thing first might indicate that the problem you know you have for sure--gluten--hasn't been addressed completely. Did you, by any chance, start with the Swanson's around the time your symptoms returned? You can get problems from a product that isn't supposed to retain any proteins from its origins, but often in the practical processes of producing it actually does retain some protein. I know I recently read a homepage of an extreme sufferer of corn allergies who can't use corn oil at all.
I'd suggest dropping the Swanson's no matter what. Through a search on Glucosamine & Chondroitin Sulfate, I bumped into some information on Swanson's that was posted by a veterinarian, Wendy Blount:
http://wendyblount.c...Chondroitin.pdfScroll on down the page to the "Not Recommended" products. Swanson is a brand I've always considered and Nature's Plus is one I currently have several supplements from too. Never again on either one for me. Of course, this is just one snapshot of a company's multiple products and the others might be okay. But I figure it's my health I'm risking, and why take a chance?
If you want to replace an anti-oxident Swanson's with another anti-oxidant, NOW Foods makes one that looks exceptionally good to me: "Super Antioxidants." I am currently taking most of these same ingredients in separate pill form, and thinking now how much better it might be to go with this approach on most days.
This problem is made all the more puzzling by the fact that I had absolutely no intestinal issues for about a six month period after the initial hellish month of detoxing from gluten. Then they mysteriously started up again this past autumn and they're now debilitating. First I have constipation, then it turns into repeated severe diarrhea attacks for the first several hours of every single day. It's hard to live a normal life while dealing with problems like this.
Three guesses: 1) The Swanson's antioxidant. Something in there that you probably had no reaction to originally became a problem merely through its overexposure (daily intake). 2) You need to progress to cutting out some more broad categories of foods. 3) You have something new adding to the problem of cooling down your digestive inflammation, like H. Pylori, perhaps, or something like a new yeast problem. If this is happening every single day now, you're in the middle of a crisis. Been there, done that, lots of times. You could use a little sympathy now too, and you have it! I know what this feels like.
The daily intake thing is an important part of the process in becoming allergic to anything. Anything an allergy-prone person exposes herself/himself to on a daily basis hugely increases the chances that the body is going to eventually start to react to it, according to my allergist. (I know this is bad news, but you need as much as possible to take this into consideration. It's a necessary calculation that I personally find very, very difficult to do, and I don't do it well.)
I'm getting a PHD in school, but until then I won't have any disposable income whatsoever. Once I finally graduate and get a decent job, I intend to get a full battery of allergen tests done.
When I had my testing done, our (good) insurance policy paid most of it. But its original billing cost a fortune for those days: roughly $700. I guess you'd likely have to pay several times that now. But didn't you buy student health insurance? Check your policy; it might pay for most of it too. If it did, I'd guess that the doctor involved might let you take quite awhile to pay a little each month toward your fairly small share of the cost.
Regarding your upcoming degree, that's fantastic. One suggestion: it's never too early to begin a job search preliminary investigation. If you see certain specialities cropping up more than the one you're headed toward, see whether you might manage to incorporate some of those specialties in your research, even while remaining in your major focus.
I say that from a close knowledge of the difficulty many PhD's are running into now finding jobs. I helped a postdoc with fabulous credentials hunt out places where full regular positions were being advertised (in case something wasn't appearing in the professional sources where next to nothing was showing up). I went literally to all fifty states (online) to the human resources areas for a huge number of colleges and universities, all the way from Harvard down to Podunk college in Nowhere. This was in a hard science area, where ironically the politicians are encouraging our high schoolers to head. (They merely forgot to make some jobs to send the students to after the degree.) And I assume that NIH is in the process of losing positions now too, thanks to the current budgetary problems. Anyway, a few good offers did eventually appear, but there were so few jobs--next to nothing--to start with as possibilities. The only area I saw with plentiful school openings was psychology, I guess because that major is so popular with undergraduates.
Well that gives you plenty to think about. I hope you're able to see some improvements soon!
Best wishes, Mary
LongeCity
