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Anosmia
Interesting post @wavygravygadzooks. Perhaps you've posted about your ancestry? I'm just curious if you've ever thought about what info that brings to the table.
I used to know a young man, he looked so very, I dunno, Celtic or Scandinavian. A blue eyed ginger, tall and muscular. He HATED fruit, which I thought was so strange. I don't think he was much for vegetables either. He also had a lot of trouble with indoor temperatures, LOL, he was always blasting hot. He seemed to be perfectly adapted to northern life. He liked dairy.
Once when I was on a foodie site like this one a person said something interesting and that was: when you take a cuisine, you should probably take the entire cuisine. There may be some odd aspect of a cuisine that is almost invisible that makes it all fit together like a puzzle. Does the red wine in France make it easier to digest all those baguettes? Did the fermented whey in a Scandinavian diet help reindeer farmers in Scandinavia? Is the tradeoff in hot humid climates smart when you eat spicy food but have to fight off a lot of parasites?
Interesting about your thoughts on taste buds, and Beata's too. I think one of the problems with special diets is that they may close your mind to a call from within. Your body might think, we really need cranberries today to fight a UTI. But your brain will say: OXALATES! No WAY!
If we were living in the ancestral environment in which most of our evolution took place, then we would be better able to rely on our instincts and not have to think so hard about all our food decisions. In that environment, if fruit was available, and it was ripe, and our body desired it, and it tasted good, then I certainly would not argue against eating it!
But we’re not in our ancestral environment, our bodies are taxed by pollutants, our crops are mutants that contain more sucrose, more fructose, and more starch than the wild versions our distant ancestors might have eaten sparingly, and we therefore have to learn to override some of our instincts that are maladaptive in our new environment (other examples: pretty much every phobia used to be advantageous but has now become a maladaptive fear with an inappropriate stress response; religion used to be an adaptive mechanism to maintain tribalism, compliance, and group cohesion necessary for survival, but it is arguably now maladaptive by spawning unnecessary conflict and keeping people from accepting a more objective explanation of reality that better enables us to respond appropriately to that reality).
As I’ve said before, I’m sure our more recent ancestry does play a role in our tolerance to certain foods. I may have gotten away with the level of wheat and dairy consumption I previously had due to more northern European ancestry. But tolerating something is different from thriving on it, and our recent localized adaptations seem to be a response to an increased dependence on carbohydrates from plants for survival, which would not be necessary with access to sufficient fat.
There is definitely reason to consider “taking the entire cuisine”, because it is often a cultural adaptation for survival. Cultures that became increasingly reliant on plants had to learn to get the right amounts of nutrients that couldn’t be acquired from just one or two plants alone, so they learned through trial and error the combinations that led to more complete nutrition. They also learned through trial and error how best to minimize harmful plant compounds. Example: Soybeans can be extremely harmful, but if they’re eaten the way they were traditionally prepared, they can clearly be a component of a reasonably healthy diet. I think this is part of the reason that Americans in particular are so unhealthy…we mix and match from so many different cultural backgrounds without understanding why they were the way they were to begin with, and we also usually fail to prepare those foods in the traditional fashion.
I'll probably recommend something that no one has advised yet. I had the same problems (not for a long) and it helped me to seal the window and the wall (facing the street) with aluminum foil. I live in Moscow and I have a lot of electric equipment near my house, including 5G. I can't sleep in other rooms. Yeah, I'm crazy.
Quote from Beata on April 18, 2022, 6:35 am@daniil, if it works for you, who is to say it’s wrong? “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”as Krishnamurti observed. So whatever work: meat, beans or aluminium foil!
It's funny, but, yes, modern life makes its own adjustments
When we started our vitamin A detox almost three years ago, I immediately got sick. I proceeded to get sick another seven times in that first year, the most illnesses I've had in a very long time. I was seeing incredible gains on low-A, and my children were especially feeling so much better as well - but the fact remained that something about this detox has taxed my immune system hugely. I think I had covid around the 9-month-on-low-A mark; I had just gotten over two bouts of the flu, and this third Sickness just knocked me out - it was the sickest I've ever been, pounding headache for days, dizziness, weakness, sore throat, shortness of breath (and I never have that symptom usually), blue hands and feet, and complete and total loss of taste and smell for about a week. I was also just pregnant, and I totally freaked out (somewhere on this forum is a post!). Everyone in the family eventually got sick, but most got only a sniffle or two; I was definitely sickest.
Pregnancy ended with an awesome baby, so that was fine. 🙂
We had covid for sure-as-noted-by-an-antigen-test last October, and once again I was sickest. I now regret taking a giant dose of vitamin D at the beginning, and next time I would just not do that, and let things run their course. Even so, I was flat out of it for 8 days with severe flu symptoms, and once again I lost my taste and smell. This time it did not come back quickly. After a month I still could not smell or taste much at all; then, one night in the middle of dinner literally, there was a moment when I could suddenly smell and taste more acutely - about 60% of normal, I'd say. Just recently, about the six month mark after having had covid, I finally estimate that my sense of smell is pretty much back to normal.
I wish I understood more about why this detox process seems to be problematic for some people's immunity, and also why it seems terrible for my gum health (this is SO bad and painful, and not improving, and i want it to very much!!).
I think that there is something about CHANGING ones diet that is pretty profound. We saw it when we first started GAPS for our very ill then-six-year old. His gut flora changed rapidly and dramatically in those first few days. And yet those changes have yet to solidify into something solid, even twelve years later, and even though he's much healthier now overall than he was back then. Despite experimenting every which way with diet, I sometimes wonder if he'll always be somewhat fragile, because we had to radically change his homeostasis.
I sometime think this is the blessing and the curse of our human guts - they have allowed us to be adaptable and colonize the globe, and evolve all sorts of different cuisines - but it's very difficult to change any one individual's particular incredible "organ" full of trillions of microbes to do our bidding, or to force it to thrive on foods that aren't what it's used to. And the main trouble is, we don't KNOW what "it's used to"! Should we eat what our recent ancestors ate? What people in our current climate used to eat? What our long-ago ancestors ate?? We don't know, nor is it even clear what people used to eat at all.
Through my family's 12+ years of experimentation, everything from extremely low-carb GAPS to super-high-protein carnivore, from high-starch paleo to an experiment with keto, plus everything in between....I have noted that for better and for worse, some people seem to require plant food. More women than men seem to find this to be true. Of course, this is a problematic thing when plant food tends to be either high in toxins, or deficient in nutrients, or both. But our microbes, at least the microbes inside some of us, seem to require plants in order to allow us to feel good. I pushed myself to the brink of health crisis by forcing myself to "detox" on a high-fat, high-protein, low plants diet, until after three years, I had to admit that this wasn't working. The challenge, of course, is finding which plants/which diets can sustain us, keep our guts happy, be digestible by a compromised system, and not create more problems than they solve!! I unfortunately began to pound the sweet potatoes once I allowed myself to eat more starch...and five years (plus many zillions of sweet potatoes, plantains, mangos, and liver pate) later, I was at another precipice.
I spent the first 30 years of my life, plus two pregnancies, as a staunch vegetarian. I spent 9 years plus another two pregnancies eating a very meat-heavy omnivorous diet.
Low A has brought me to a healthier place than I've ever been before, while eating a moderate carb, moderate fat, high protein diet. My pregnancy with #5, plus the postpartum period, was truly amazing. I feel better now than I did at any time in my twenties, apart from my very painful gums. I wish for more improvements, but I definitely relate to not knowing what else to try. There is no real low-hanging fruit in terms of easy things to attempt next, if you know what i mean!!
I hope that your anosmia clears up as your body cleans up the post-illness damages. xoxoxo