What the heck is a FODMAP?

I just learned that FODMAP is an acronym that describes a group of carbohydrates that are not well absorbed in the small intestine. If you eat too much of them, they cause all kinds of trouble once they get to your colon. The acronym stands for Fermentable Oligosaccharides Disaccharides Monosaccharides And Polyols. While you may have never heard of a FODMAP, you may have discovered the effects of one or more of these foods through trial and error.

The list of such foods is long. The oligosaccharides include wheat, onions, garlic, legumes, and artichokes; the disaccharides are milk products, including yogurt and ice cream; the monosaccharides include watermelon, honey, apples, high-fructose corn syrup; the polyols are sugar-free sweeteners, such as sorbitol, maltitol, and xyltol, although sorbitol is also found in a wide variety of fruits.

In addition to being poorly absorbed during the digestive process, these foods are rapidly fermented by bacteria that live in your gut and are capable of pulling fluid into the gut. The fluid load plus the gas produced by the bacteria are what usually cause the discomfort.

As I said, the list of FODMAP foods is long. You can find them on the internet, of course. Here’s a link to one list—a paleo diet one. For my part, I can only be certain about one of these foods causing me problems: maltitol. I discovered this while trying sugar-free candy, such as chocolate. There may be plenty more. I can’t tell because my gut problems are chronic and I choose to ignore them. I just figure my gut microbiome is out of whack.  

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Fear of food

According to the CDC, as reported in recent article in the New York Times, “acute gastrointestinal events” (vomiting, diarrhea, cramping, etc.) are commonly caused by bacteria and viruses hanging about on food. Apparently some foods are more problematic than others: “leafy greens, culinary herbs, melons with textured surfaces, tomatoes, cucumbers, jalapeno peppers, nut butters, shellfish, frozen peas, cheese and ice cream.”

The article might make you afraid to eat. For example, in discussing juices and smoothies: “Just one speck of contaminated dirt in your detox drink could upend your gut. And think of all the hands that necessarily touched the produce from the time it was picked in the field to when it was chopped and crammed into the Vitamix.”  Also, “restaurant food tends to be riskier in general.”

Even though I’ve had a few “acute gastrointestinal events," I’m still not about organize my eating life based on fear of pathogens. I don’t want to live like some of the germophobe readers who made online comments about the article. For example:

My local Starbucks staff knows me as the nutty guy who reminds them to please use tissue from the pastry case or a glove to put the lid on my coffee. 

At the least all ground beef in the US should be irradiated.

…alcohol strips the mucosa of the stomach, making for good sites for organisms to get a party of their own.

…we do not eat while swiping the phone that we held while on the toilet.

NEVER get a salad while dining out. Let me repeat that, NEVER.

As always, I say, don’t worry about it! Bad stuff might happen, but you can't insulate yourself from the microscopic universe. I did learn about a group of foods with the acronym FODMAPs that commonly cause intestinal trouble. It’s worth looking into, which I’ll do next week.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Bunions

We got to talking about bunions in Jazzercise the other day and realized we didn’t know much about them. I have bunions on both feet, similar to the illustration below. Rather ugly, but they don’t hurt, so I’ve never paid much attention to them. I just figured they were another consequence of old age, which is why I knew nothing about them until I started doing a little research for this blog post. In case you don’t know, here is what a bunion looks like:

A bunion is the result of a condition called hallux valgus—and it’s more than just a bump on the side of your big toe. It’s a progressive, biomechanical deformity. The bump reflects changes in the bony framework of the front part of the foot, as you can see in the diagram on the right. It’s actually quite a complicated condition that’s not easy to fix. (No need to fix it unless it hurts.)

In the progression, your big toe starts to lean in and over the years it gradually changes the angle of the bones. It’s caused by a faulty mechanical structure of your foot—one that you inherit, which can include excessive pronation and an imbalance of the foot muscles and ligaments. The problematic foot structures vary from person to person.

Bunions occur in about 23% of adults, 35% of people over 65, and mostly in women (30% females compared to 13% males). Wearing pointy, high-heeled shoes exacerbate but do not cause the condition.

There’s not a lot you can do about bunions. Shoes with a wide toe box and orthotic inserts can help (I use both). Exercises that strengthen the ankle and lower leg muscles might also help. Here is one I'm trying, but with an imagined towel.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

The even newer cholesterol-lowering drug

You may have read about a new injectable cholesterol-lowering drug that’s got everybody all excited because, in a large trial, it lowered LDL (so-called “bad” cholesterol) by 59 percent. Plus it lowered the number of various types of heart attacks by 1.5 percent. Here is what my trusted source, Uffe Ravnskov, M.D., PhD, has to say about this.

• Based on the trial’s statistics, to prevent one heart attack per year it is necessary to treat 140 patients.
• Most heart attacks heal with no or few aftereffects.
• The cost for one year’s treatment is about $14,000, meaning that the cost for preventing one heart attack per year is more than two million dollars.
• The number of deaths from heart disease and other causes actually increased! Of the 30,000 patients in the trial, 444 of those who were treated with the drug died. Of those who were not treated, 426 died (if the trial had gone on longer, that number may have increased). In other words, the number of heart attacks may have been reduced a bit, but the number of deaths increased.
• The three main authors of the research paper are employees of Amgen, the drug manufacturer.

Besides, as shown by a systematic study of 69,000 elderly people (over 60), a high level of LDL-cholesterol is beneficial.

As I’ve said many times, our bodies make cholesterol for a reason. I don’t think you should mess with it.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

The benefits of fasting

I have always dismissed the idea of fasting as kind of faddish and new agey. Plus self-denial doesn’t appeal to me. As far as I know, people mostly choose to fast for weight control. (One 456-pound man fasted for more than a year and lost 276 pounds.) But I’ve just found some interesting research that shows other health benefits of withholding food.

Because we probably evolved to endure periodic bouts of starvation, our organ systems may be programmed to function optimally in intermittent fasting-type conditions. At the very least, our early ancestors’ eating patterns were probably restricted to the daylight hours. Now we eat all the time—night and day, probably throwing off some delicate mechanisms. (One of the mechanisms has to do killing damaged cells and replacing the dead cells with newly regenerated cells.)

Here are the benefits, way over-simplified here (the mechanisms that cause these effects are wildly complicated, some having to do with gene expression and altering metabolic pathways):

• Liver: increases insulin sensitivity, decreases insulin resistance, lowers blood glucose levels. Also, the liver’s glycogen stores become depleted and our bodies start burning visceral fat.
• Immune system: reprograms T-cell populations, tamping down autoimmunity; also reduces pro-inflammatory substances.
• Heart: lowers blood lipid levels and blood pressure.
• Brain: improves memory, learning, and neuron repair.

Fasting regimens vary, such as every other day, two days a week, or periodic, such as once a month or once a year. But there’s also one called “time-restricted feeding”: you confine eating to a window of 8, 10, or 12 hours a day. How hard is that? At our house we do that all the time: we eat dinner at 5:30 (we’re old) and break our fast at 7:00 in the morning. That’s easily 12 hours of fasting. It counts!

So wait a minute. Most of us fast every day without thinking about it. Forget I said anything (although it's nice to know that our bodies put our fasting periods to good use; also that you don't have to go to any extremes to get the benefits).

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.