"Are You Sure It Isn't...?" Yadda Yadda...

Today's non-book post is brought to you by some of America's most photogenic and adoptable cats. Today we consider Manx cats. Because these cats' distinctive look comes from a lethal gene, and I've advocated breeding it out of the population, I've been accused of not appreciating the Manx cats who are already here. Not true. I don't like to encourage anyone to breed more of them, but they can be excellent pets. 

What is a Manx cat, anyway? The genetic mutation occurred on two islands: the Isle of Man off the British coast, and Japan. Two apparently different breeds of cats were developed from ancestors who shared a relatively chunky build, thick soft coat, and varying degrees of spinal deformity producing extra-long hind legs and short or missing tails. Some people claim that there's a secret formula for identifying the individual cats who can produce viable kittens. I'm not convinced. However, the cats who posed for these pictures aren't going to produce kittens. But whether they are "real" Manx or Japanese Bobtails, or crossbreeds, or just unfortunate individuals with a similar look, nobody really knows. 

What people cherish their Manx cats for is a breed personality that many, not all, of these cats share (and the cats pictured below seem to have). The stereotypical Manx is calm, mellow, mostly a couch potato but willing to play games, likely to choose one human and bond with that person for life, and capable of figuring out that, if it brings a ball back to you, you'll throw the ball for it to chase again. They're not stereotypically either "talkers" or "listeners," but I knew one Manx-mix cat who did seem to understand words (meaning the other Manx-mixes I've known did not). They can be great visitors in care homes because, if Their Human tells them a troubled child or geriatric patient is a friend, they'll treat the person like a friend and enjoy all the petting and snuggling. 

1. Zipcode 10101: Bunny from New Jersey 

Although Bunny is thought to be a mix of Manx and Maine Coon, she's described as a stereotypical Manx: "Friendly, Loyal, Gentle, Smart, Curious, Independent, Quiet, Dignified, Couch potato." She travels with a daughter called Mouse. If you visit their web page you can click through their photo gallery and see them together. Despite the tendency in both ancestral breeds to revert to the natural size of undomesticated cats (think American bobcats or Scottish wild cats), the web page doesn't mention Mouse or Bunny being all that large--just big fluffy cats. Their $100 adoption fee covers veterinary care, including spaying, that's already been provided. Their web page is https://www.petfinder.com/cat/bunny-bonded-with-mouse-in-foster-54194706/nj/edison/edison-municipal-animal-shelter-nj593/ .

2. Zipcode 20202: Rudder from Herndon 

Unfortunately Rudder's web page at https://www.petfinder.com/cat/rudder-reece-55063362/va/herndon/fancy-cats-rescue-team-va145/ doesn't have a picture or even a link for his adoptive bro-fur Reece. The two neutered males are said to be great friends with an occasional fight just to practice their moves. Their web page positively recommends getting to know them as "foster" pets before you commit to adopting them, which strikes this web site as a good idea where two male cats are concerned. 

3. Zipcode 30303: Bunny 1 & 2

Left with the vet when somebody heard the news, these two little snugglebunnies--sisters--come as a package deal because the one who's not showing you those bright baby-dark eyes is blind, and has other disabilities that are part of Manx Syndrome. I suspect they've been given the same name, not only because the blind one follows the sighted one everywhere anyway, but because the blind one won't live long. There are all kinds of issues involved in adopting even healthy Manx kittens. You can't tell by looking at them or their parents whether they'll stop growing at the size with which we're familiar, or keep on until even reasonable people mistake them for bobcats. You can't let the large ones go outdoors alone, either, for that reason, and they take up a lot of space. You may be able to get by with a normal-sized carrier and litter box, or not. While watching them grow up you learn to like and trust them, but visitors will always and forever say things like "How can you live with that monster?" as they edge toward the door...you'd think they'd at least keep the Jehovah's Witnesses away, but our Graybelle failed to do that. However, if they're going to bond with you, as distinct from just being friendly and polite to everyone, it's likely to happen before they've met and bonded with other humans.  If you're willing to put up with the sick kitten (who is not expected to develop bladder control, if she lives to grow up) for the sake of the healthy one, visit https://www.petfinder.com/cat/bunny-52373439/ga/watkinsville/magi-cat-adoption-network-piedmont-animal-clinic-ga314/ .

(I all but literally heard someone say "That's not fair!" Well, it's not. Three out of six Manx-mix cat pages at https://www.petfinder.com/search/cats-for-adoption/us/ga/30303/?breed%5B0%5D=Manx mention medical problems, and the other three do not positively say the cats are healthy or have survived outdoors. Life is not fair to Manx cats. However, some of them are healthy and have reasonably long lives. Our Founding Queen Black Magic found and adopted Manx One, Two, and Three when they were left with the vet. Three grew up chunky but not oversized, One and Two grew up enormous, and they needed only routine veterinary care for the rest of their lives.)

Now the post itself...

Recently a Children’s Health Defense Newsletter article (https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/chemical-additives-processed-foods-gut-health/) discussed chemical additives in food as a possible factor contributing to celiac sprue.

For some people this information may be very valuable, just as, for some people, the information that mold is a possible factor contributing to respiratory allergies is very valuable, and, for some, the information that vertigo can be aggravated by dental problems is very valuable...but it ticks me off, just the same.

To understand this it helps to be a celiac. Typical celiacs have tried a lot of ways to relieve the symptoms of acute dietary deficiencies caused by the fact that our bodies don’t absorb nutrients during reactions to wheat gluten, which, if we eat a typical American diet, we’ve been having continually for years. No treatment, or personal health practice, works for us the way it’s said to work for other people. Things that do help, a little, are likely to be the simple personal choices nobody has invested heavily in marketing. One piece of bad advice we all know well—“For regularity, eat more whole wheat, wheat germ, and wheat bran!” Even basics like “Eat more food closer to its natural state, drink plenty of water, and get enough rest and exercise” do for the profoundly messed-up celiac body only a small part of what they do for us after we’ve got the wheat out of our systems. Once we’ve achieved gluten-freedom we might say that all the other healthy choices we’ve made, together, accomplished less for us than going gluten-free did.

We may have thought—mistakenly—that specific triggers were what was making us ill, even when we had to strain to absurdity. The bleached-white wheat-based flour used in most American baked goods today is a denatured source of junk calories. If you go on the basic “health food blitz” as recommended by popular magazines like Prevention (I’m thinking of an article I read in 1974), eliminating all the “white” breads and pastries, as an undiagnosed celiac you will immediately feel better. Because you're eliminating a lot of wheat and a lot of chemical junk, you'll be better but not well. 

Then you can start trying to believe that the way you feel is healthy. (Doesn’t everybody spend the first hour or two of every morning coughing and sneezing? Doesn’t everybody feel pain when they stand up on their feet, every morning, and the little bones in their feet go out of joint? Doesn’t everybody have to choke down breakfast against a feeling of mild nausea?) When your celiac disease flares, you can blame some refined food product you ate some time during the past year. It’s not the good wholesome brown bread you ate this morning that’s making you sick. It couldn’t be! It has to have been the slice of birthday cake you ate at a party two weeks ago. The refined sugar and flour, artificial flavoring and coloring, and saturated fat in the frosting are junk, but...contrary to all the advice that’s out there for non-celiacs—for you the culprit really was that wholesome whole-grain bread.

I developed a sort of mental allergy to blather about what’s “good for you” and what’s not. Most people can use wheat; some cannot. Most people can tolerate simple carbs; some cannot. Most of the things humans eat have some food value and serve some purpose for most of those who eat them. Most of the things humans eat are also harmful to some people.

Chemical pollution has more influence than most people want to admit on how much a certain food item helps us or hurts us. Even when a doctor like John McDougall is disinterestedly telling people what’s helped his patients avoid expensive treatments that seem more profitable to the medical industry than they are beneficial to patients, his emotional attachment to this wonderful breakthrough idea may be blinding him to important aspects of the situation that some people prefer to make it very hard to evaluate anyway. Meat is loaded with toxins. A vegan diet is an excellent way to eliminate those toxins. But chemical contamination may still make a vegan diet fail to work as advertised. Some chemical pollutants cause otherwise healthy food not to stay down, or, even worse, do so much damage to the digestive system that it can’t absorb nutrition from the contaminated food item or from any other source either.

Historically, when many people are complaining of reactions to chemical pollution, the polluters have had a vested interest in calling attention to something else, anything else, relevant or not, as a possible factor in the problems that are actually being caused by their product.

About ten years ago, just as glyphosate levels in the food supply became dangerous, remember the panic about mold? Part of the problem appeared to be the increase in mold growth in the late twentieth century. Many people’s symptoms seemed related to mold exposure. Glyphosate, not coincidentally, happens to promote fungus growth.

So, buildings were remodelled to eliminate Stachybotrys atra, a stubborn fungus that grows deep into vegetable matter and can reappear even after application of enough fungicides to damage fabric—or even wood. Stachybotrys, the “toxic” black mold (it forms toxic chemicals in reaction to some bio­chemicals in some, not all, human bodies), is an allergy trigger but suddenly both the fungus and the reactions reached unimagined heights. Fear of mold caused many schools to be closed temporarily in order to remove mold-infested building materials.

Fear of “peanut allergy” reactions associated with Aspergillus flavus, the “black rot” fungus that grows most easily in peanuts, caused peanut-based snacks and even homemade lunches to be banned at some schools.

When Prevention magazine staff even suggested that allergy sufferers eliminate books from their homes or lock books away in glass cases, cynical readers thought they were marketing electronic data storage devices. Nevertheless, Stachybotrys atra and other molds grow easily in books and were found in most of the books in many libraries. In the early years of the twenty-first centuries many public libraries rushed to discard as many older books as possible. Librarians tried to refill the shelves with tapes and disks. A corresponding effort was made to re-brand libraries as updated versions of the 1950s’ “community centers” that many communities had abandoned, not places that stored potentially moldy books. 

While municipalities found it possible to control mold in buses and train cars by cleaning and, in a few cases, replacing seat material, underground train tunnels naturally harbor large amounts of mold. Subway ridership decreased as commuters learned that the characteristic odor of the tunnels came from Stachybotrys atra. The Washington Post noted the use of “Stachybotrys” in topical verse submitted by readers. So far, no way to keep soil fungi from growing through concrete tunnels has been found.

And what happened after all this fear of mold? Mold hasn’t gone away. We knew mold looked dirty and was eating the objects on which it grew, before the 1990s. We had been cleaning and disinfecting moldy surfaces before then, and most of us still are.  Fear of mold subsided in the 2010s as people recognized that their symptoms were correlated with foods and airborne vapors more strongly than with mold exposure. Mold allergies still exist, but the incidence of mold allergy complaints declined as the incidence of food and chemical sensitivity complaints increased after 2009.

The fact that I’ve been studying glyphosate-related issues, and the fact that today most if not all health issues seem to be at least glyphosate-influenced, in no way means that glyphosate is the only chemical pollutant involved in illness. It means that diseases that are primarily caused by other things are being aggravated by glyphosate. Mold is something we can control without the difficulty involved in rejecting all the commercially available food that’s full of glyphosate. Our awareness of mold as a health hazard has been raised to a point where it’s very unlikely that cleaning mold out of the house is going to do more good for someone than cleaning glyphosate out of the environment will do. I know of no human who likes the pungent odor of Stachybotrys enough that they don’t clean or replace things infested with it. Not every body even has the reactions that make Stachybotrys mold “toxic.” Most of us aren’t exposed to enough of this fungus or long enough to make reactions to it our primary health concern. But it could be possible, at least theoretically, that somebody Out There is primarily reacting to mold and will benefit from a total ban on glyphosate primarily as glyphosate stops promoting the growth of mold.

Funnily enough, we’ve seen something similar to the mold allergy hysteria that peaked around 2010, not too long ago. Then, too, one natural component after another was blamed for an “epidemic” that ended when a popular pesticide was banned.  In the 1960s and 1970s, it was fashionable to blame pollen allergies for hayfever, asthma, and all kinds of things. If extensive tests revealed that a child who had asthma was not reacting to pollen more than other forms of dust, maybe the child had food allergies. Maybe the child was allergic to dust. In fact ordinary household dust is full of microscopic dust mites that eat and excrete tiny particles of various irritating substances; everyone sneezes if they inhale a lot of dust or pollen, and everyone breathes better in a clean house, and anyone who is having an asthma or hayfever reaction is likely to react with greater intensity of symptoms if dust and pollen are in the air. But childhood asthma, with which many of my generation grew up, became almost unknown in the years between the late 1970s’ ban on chlordane (an insecticide that was supposed to control roaches) and the 1990s’ increasing use of glyphosate. Children’s exposure to dust and pollen didn’t change.

So now, as doctors and scientists are urged to generate alternative explanations for the glyphosate reactions people have, and blaming everything on mold is going out of style, again the second attempt to blame something God made for the effect of something hubristic men made is pointing to food. Certain fats may contribute to celiac sprue...

Well, no points for guessing, they can. Celiacs metabolize fats in a different way than most people do, in any case. Fatty foods make some celiacs sick; some specific fatty foods are what other celiacs use as really efficient laxatives. Our intolerance of wheat gluten is genetic and does not change, but some other specific fatty foods may aggravate our reactions to wheat gluten. Certainly it’s harmful for anyone to ingest too much fat; certainly some fats are more harmful than others, and tolerance of different fats is probably as individual as tolerance of different proteins or sugars. I'm not familiar with the effect of carboxymethylcellulose, if it has one for me, because it's the sort of thing I was brought up not to eat.

But, are the wrong fats to blame for celiac sprue? Whatever fats a celiac ingests are likely to be conspicuous during celiac sprue. They’re obviously not being digested and they probably are contributing to the internal irritation. Are fats what tip an individual body over the edge from “irritable bowel syndrome” into “Crohn’s Disease” or “celiac sprue”?

Quick reality check: My mother, a fat celiac with very limited tolerance of fats, never “dressed” a salad or allowed “dressing” on the table; allowed just enough peanut butter to coat one slice of bread in a sandwich, just enough butter to melt into toast; mostly baked with oil not butter, and tried to limit it to a tablespoon of oil to a cup of flour; but she did eat cheese. She had celiac symptoms that responded dramatically when she finally dared to go gluten-free, but they never reached the point of visible blood in frothy diarrhea (sprue). 

My natural sister, a chubby carrier of the celiac gene, worked in a convenience store as a teenager and never outgrew a taste for convenience-store food, processed meat, processed cheese,  frozen pizza, what that poor child (age forty) still calls “normal” food. She’s never had sprue; she’s always had depression. 

I, a skinny celiac for whom peanuts, cashews, and cow’s milk are fast-acting mild laxatives, ate an almost fat-free, mostly vegan diet at the time when I developed sprue. I cook the way Mother cooked; since commercially sold vegetables are still likely to contain glyphosate I eat most of my veg raw and unseasoned, or boiled in water without added oil. Like Mother I don't think most things need to be "thickened," and if they do I reach for cornstarch or arrowroot, none of the weird stuff some people consider necessary to add the junk calories that turn natural pan juices into "gravy." 

I don’t think even the hamburgers or chicken pieces my dates bought for me, sometimes greasy but never tainted by cheese or mayonnaise, caused me to develop celiac sprue at the preposterous age of thirty. Especially not when three neighbors who weren’t celiacs went to three different doctors complaining of pseudo-celiac sprue in the same week, after glyphosate was sprayed along the road, and got three different diagnoses, of which at least one was pure garbage. (He was told it was stomach cancer and he had six months to live. That was in 1995. He was still working, the last time I saw him.) I think it was the glyphosate.

New reportage on the fact that some celiacs don’t digest certain fats is not going to be news to celiacs. Celiacs who take any conscious responsibility for their own health, at all, probably already avoid those fats. We know to buy peanuts, not peanut butter, if we want the nutrient value of peanuts. The news that it’s wise for celiacs to be mindful of the effects fats have for them, too, may be valuable for someone who’s just been told her child is a celiac and who hardly knows what that means...but where is this reportage coming from?

Anyone who paid attention to the Glyphosate Awareness live chat will remember how the chemical corporations’ goons used to scramble to defend glyphosate. “Oh noooes, it can’t be glyphosate that’s making youall ill! We neeeeed glyphosate! We’re not being selfish jerks who put our profits ahead of your health, of course not, how could anyone think that. We just know it can’t be the glyphosate! It has to be something else! Anything else! It haaaassss to be!”

I wish Twitter would do something about that robot shadowban mechanism, and about making sure that every tweet reaches everyone who follows a Twit or a hashtag all the time. It was so instructive to watch these people scramble and struggle to defend their inexcusable clinging to their vile product.

Celiacs are, by definition, people who need to eat mindfully according to their individual food tolerances. After a year or two of gluten-free life most of us could eat almost anything but wheat, Before Glyphosate. Today, the celiacs I know best find that the easiest way to explain what we can safely eat is that it has to be glyphosate-free, which still leaves most of us very little to eat. Mindful eating steers us away from most fatty foods when we have viable alternatives but, painful though this may be for chemical corporations’ employees and stockholders to accept: When I ate a snack-pack of baloney as “road food,” during that bad year when peanuts were being “ripened” with glyphosate, the fats and preservatives in that baloney may have blocked the absorption of whatever nutrients were left in the meat but I did not have a sprue reaction. When I ate the glyphosate-sprayed nuts I actually preferred to the baloney, I had the sprue reaction.

So I think the focus of Glyphosate Awareness needs to stick to the primary concern. Get glyphosate off the market, not manufactured or used or sold, and give it time to break down in the soil, first. Then we can talk about what will probably be, once again, the very rare problems of celiac disease, Crohn’s Disease, or irritable bowel syndrome.

Very likely those diseases will join autism and childhood asthma on the list of rare conditions the next generation of doctors will see only in a small percentage of increasingly old patients, something an individual doctor may or may not ever see a young patient develop. And I say the sooner the better.