What better way to celebrate turkey day than to read about someone else's gut health! Yeah, I know, nor did I ever think I'd be blogging about such a subject, but in this strange journey through chronic inflammatory disease, I've come across a few things that someone else might actually find useful or interesting that I've not found anywhere else on the internet (not that anybody will find this blog either!). There seems to be a consensus on food sensitivity causing problems in your gut but how about food consistency or how it is processed? I'm not talking about store bought, commercial processing here but rather stuff you can do at home. Lately I've had two different examples in my own limited existence but I can't find any other examples on the all knowing interweb, though it is mostly because I don't know exactly what to search for, this not being a topic I've encountered in my own medical training or personal health before.
There's no doubt when feeding cows that processing makes a huge difference, especially with the size of the grain particles and the length of the forage, but lacking a rumen, I figured people might be a little different, but apparently I am part ruminant or at least my gut thinks I should be! I've had trouble with things like pudding, ice cream, etc. for a long time, but I thought it was simply the sugar causing an osmotic diarrhea or something or maybe the dairy before I had to go off it, but it doesn't matter how much sugar is in it or if it is coconut or almond milk, I still have trouble. I even made a smoothie the other day out of peanut butter, oatmeal, and cocoa powder with only a tablespoon of sugar in the entire thing (of which I only sampled about 1/3) and had issues, though I can eat the same exact stuff in bundt cake form and do just fine.
Then there was the hotdog incident. I thought about making hotdogs at home, since I can't eat the store bought ones for various reasons, and saw a technique for adding water to your ground meat and processing it in your high speed blender, so I tried it just for fun. I made my usual meatball recipe and made half into meatballs and emulsified the other half to make hotdogs, exact same ingredients, one just went through the blender and had some water added. The meatballs were fine but the 'hotdogs' were bad news. All I can conclude is that it is the consistency of the product and not just the ingredients. Apparently, like the cow, I must ingest things that are as minimally processed as possible, hopefully I don't have to switch to a mostly forage diet however, hay is rather scarce this year, to say nothing of trying to consume enough of the stuff, but then I have trouble with raw carrots, lettuce, and even whole oats, so minimally processed isn't the cure either. On that note, how do you feed a centaur? How can a human mouth possibly consume enough forage to sate an equine stomach?
So that is my thoroughly researched case study, it isn't just the what but the how in dealing with gut issues, some food for thought (please forgive the pun, I couldn't not do it!), and I can't wait to see your paper on centaur nutrition!
