Stomach Issues
While not IT related, it is something that I feel is important to get out there as it caused me years of missery that was easily fixed through a minor diet change.
If you have or know someone who as stomach or intestinal issues like constant nausea, dry heaving a feeling like someone has either punched you in the gut or someone is wringing out your intestines then please read this.
For those who don't have time for the full story, I removed nitrates from my diet. Switched any meat I ate to uncured and my water to purified water. That means its been treated via either reverse osmosis or distillation. This removes the nitrates. And I mean all water. Cooking, drinking, cleaning teeth, everything.
For those that have some time....
I was relatively healthy. I ran occasionally, I wasn't over or under weight. I could have done with a bit more muscle but health wise all was good.
I attended a children's birthday party at an unnamed children's focused entertainment venue where my son and I ate a couple of pizza slices and enjoyed the games that were on offer.
A few days later my son gets sick, very sick. Cant keep anything down. A day later and I follow suit. This was the worst illness I have ever had in my 30 odd years on the planet. I end up barely conscious on my bathroom floor while my wife has to take my son to the ER where he get fluids intravenously for severe dehydration.
I recover, as you do, but can never really shake it completely. I feel nauseous all the time. I try and force myself to throw up when the feeling goes from an annoyance to destroying my will to function but nothing comes up. I stop eating and drop 40lbs in about 5 weeks.
By this time I am worried enough to go see a Dr. With high hopes I make the appointment and pay a visit. They do the standard blood work and find nothing. This is when the guessing game begins. They do digestive emptying tests where I eat radioactive eggs and get x-rays every 30 mins. I have an endoscopy where they find a very mild Hiatal Hernia but nothing that would cause my issues. I am refereed to an allergist who test me and finds nothing wrong. I am on allergy shots at the time so I stop those. I am referred to another Dr who does a colonoscopy and while he does find a polyp, he doesn't find anything to explain my issues.
Its at this point the original Dr phones me and says "You have IBS" and ends the conversation. No treatment plan just a blanket diagnosis and move on. A little googling and you find that IBS is a nice way of Doctors saying we have no idea what you have so you have this laxly defined syndrome.
I am done with Dr's at this point. Fed up with getting to pay lots of money for someone with a stethoscope to throw test after test at me with out any actual idea of whats wrong has destroyed my faith in the medical profession. In fact it would be another 5 years before I see a Doctor again. I decide to give up.
Let me divert a little here and explain how soul destroying this giving up is. Just imagine, if you will, spending all day, every day with the constant feeling that you are about to vomit. The pressure pushing on your esophagus, the stomach aching and intestines cramping. It wears your will down to a point where all you want to do is curl up in bed and not leave. Your not eating so you have no energy either so no playing with your kids or date nights with your significant other. You drag yourself out the house every morning because you have to. You cant keep calling sick and someone has to pay the bills. All you want to do is be left alone. The thought of travel is paralyzing as is anything to do with large crowds. You fear getting stuck somewhere with no facilities in which to wretch into.
This is the life you resign yourself to by when the Dr tells you he can't do anything. This is the life I resigned myself to. I went to work, hating every minute of of it. I ate when I could and what I could. I tried diets which would sometimes give me some relief but it would always flair up again. Exercise made it worse.
3 years later and I'm told I have to head to Paris for work. They offer to fly me into London first so I can visit family for a day before heading under the channel. The panic sets in but I don't have a choice so off I go. I don't eat during my flight. I spend the day with family, then that night have one of the worst flair ups in a while. No sleep, just constant nausea with dry heaving and the feeling of my intestines being crushed.
The next day, Sunday, I am off to Paris. No eating, just water. I check into the hotel and relax. Just some bread for dinner that night. Monday comes around and off to the office I go. A day of small cramped meeting rooms didn't make for a fun time but the day was over and I went back to the hotel for some dinner.
That night another flair up. Bad enough that I called in sick for the next day. Now I have a certain level of professional pride so calling in sick on day 2 of a 5 day event at my head office did not sit well. I dialed into the meetings I could and spent the rest of the day obsessing over what could have cause this flair up. It wasn't like I had eaten much in a 24hr period.
I went over everything I had eaten, trying to match up anything I could have eaten two nights previous that could be the same. I came up blank.
I sat in my chair and stared at the water bottles sitting on my desk. Two I had purchased in the UK on my way to Paris and hadn't had problems that night. Another couple were two different brands I had picked up at the office the previous day. I checked the labels and compared the ingredients. You would be surprised the amount of stuff in water. I made a spreadsheet and listed each brand their ingredients, matching them line by line. Using the Nestle Pure water as my baseline, this was the water from the UK which hadn't made me sick on the Sunday night, I eliminated the ingredients from the other brands that matched until I was left with 3 ingredients. I forget the 3rd but 2 of them were Nitrates and Nitrites.
Some googling later and I discover that these ingredients come from farming. Fertilizers seep through the soil and into the water table adding these to the water. Filtration does not remove them but purification does. I relay my findings to my wife and she does her own research and came up with changes on the cooking side. She purchased purified water on my return and we only used that for everything.
The change was almost immediate. With in a few days the nausea subsided, as did the stomach and intestinal pain. 4 years later and I am fine. I still have to avoid the nitrates. Any cross contamination usually comes in the form of cured meats as they contain nitrates but as long as I avoid anything with Nitrates in I am fine.
To summarize. Nitrates made me sick. They are found in most water and in most meats. I now only drink juice or purified water and only eat none cured meats.
Now please remember I am not a Doctor so none of the above is intended as medical advice. It is only what worked for me. Please do your own research and if you have a decent Doctor talk to them about it. I can honestly say it changed my life.
If you have or know someone who as stomach or intestinal issues like constant nausea, dry heaving a feeling like someone has either punched you in the gut or someone is wringing out your intestines then please read this.
For those who don't have time for the full story, I removed nitrates from my diet. Switched any meat I ate to uncured and my water to purified water. That means its been treated via either reverse osmosis or distillation. This removes the nitrates. And I mean all water. Cooking, drinking, cleaning teeth, everything.
For those that have some time....
I was relatively healthy. I ran occasionally, I wasn't over or under weight. I could have done with a bit more muscle but health wise all was good.
I attended a children's birthday party at an unnamed children's focused entertainment venue where my son and I ate a couple of pizza slices and enjoyed the games that were on offer.
A few days later my son gets sick, very sick. Cant keep anything down. A day later and I follow suit. This was the worst illness I have ever had in my 30 odd years on the planet. I end up barely conscious on my bathroom floor while my wife has to take my son to the ER where he get fluids intravenously for severe dehydration.
I recover, as you do, but can never really shake it completely. I feel nauseous all the time. I try and force myself to throw up when the feeling goes from an annoyance to destroying my will to function but nothing comes up. I stop eating and drop 40lbs in about 5 weeks.
By this time I am worried enough to go see a Dr. With high hopes I make the appointment and pay a visit. They do the standard blood work and find nothing. This is when the guessing game begins. They do digestive emptying tests where I eat radioactive eggs and get x-rays every 30 mins. I have an endoscopy where they find a very mild Hiatal Hernia but nothing that would cause my issues. I am refereed to an allergist who test me and finds nothing wrong. I am on allergy shots at the time so I stop those. I am referred to another Dr who does a colonoscopy and while he does find a polyp, he doesn't find anything to explain my issues.
Its at this point the original Dr phones me and says "You have IBS" and ends the conversation. No treatment plan just a blanket diagnosis and move on. A little googling and you find that IBS is a nice way of Doctors saying we have no idea what you have so you have this laxly defined syndrome.
I am done with Dr's at this point. Fed up with getting to pay lots of money for someone with a stethoscope to throw test after test at me with out any actual idea of whats wrong has destroyed my faith in the medical profession. In fact it would be another 5 years before I see a Doctor again. I decide to give up.
Let me divert a little here and explain how soul destroying this giving up is. Just imagine, if you will, spending all day, every day with the constant feeling that you are about to vomit. The pressure pushing on your esophagus, the stomach aching and intestines cramping. It wears your will down to a point where all you want to do is curl up in bed and not leave. Your not eating so you have no energy either so no playing with your kids or date nights with your significant other. You drag yourself out the house every morning because you have to. You cant keep calling sick and someone has to pay the bills. All you want to do is be left alone. The thought of travel is paralyzing as is anything to do with large crowds. You fear getting stuck somewhere with no facilities in which to wretch into.
This is the life you resign yourself to by when the Dr tells you he can't do anything. This is the life I resigned myself to. I went to work, hating every minute of of it. I ate when I could and what I could. I tried diets which would sometimes give me some relief but it would always flair up again. Exercise made it worse.
3 years later and I'm told I have to head to Paris for work. They offer to fly me into London first so I can visit family for a day before heading under the channel. The panic sets in but I don't have a choice so off I go. I don't eat during my flight. I spend the day with family, then that night have one of the worst flair ups in a while. No sleep, just constant nausea with dry heaving and the feeling of my intestines being crushed.
The next day, Sunday, I am off to Paris. No eating, just water. I check into the hotel and relax. Just some bread for dinner that night. Monday comes around and off to the office I go. A day of small cramped meeting rooms didn't make for a fun time but the day was over and I went back to the hotel for some dinner.
That night another flair up. Bad enough that I called in sick for the next day. Now I have a certain level of professional pride so calling in sick on day 2 of a 5 day event at my head office did not sit well. I dialed into the meetings I could and spent the rest of the day obsessing over what could have cause this flair up. It wasn't like I had eaten much in a 24hr period.
I went over everything I had eaten, trying to match up anything I could have eaten two nights previous that could be the same. I came up blank.
I sat in my chair and stared at the water bottles sitting on my desk. Two I had purchased in the UK on my way to Paris and hadn't had problems that night. Another couple were two different brands I had picked up at the office the previous day. I checked the labels and compared the ingredients. You would be surprised the amount of stuff in water. I made a spreadsheet and listed each brand their ingredients, matching them line by line. Using the Nestle Pure water as my baseline, this was the water from the UK which hadn't made me sick on the Sunday night, I eliminated the ingredients from the other brands that matched until I was left with 3 ingredients. I forget the 3rd but 2 of them were Nitrates and Nitrites.
Some googling later and I discover that these ingredients come from farming. Fertilizers seep through the soil and into the water table adding these to the water. Filtration does not remove them but purification does. I relay my findings to my wife and she does her own research and came up with changes on the cooking side. She purchased purified water on my return and we only used that for everything.
The change was almost immediate. With in a few days the nausea subsided, as did the stomach and intestinal pain. 4 years later and I am fine. I still have to avoid the nitrates. Any cross contamination usually comes in the form of cured meats as they contain nitrates but as long as I avoid anything with Nitrates in I am fine.
To summarize. Nitrates made me sick. They are found in most water and in most meats. I now only drink juice or purified water and only eat none cured meats.
Now please remember I am not a Doctor so none of the above is intended as medical advice. It is only what worked for me. Please do your own research and if you have a decent Doctor talk to them about it. I can honestly say it changed my life.
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