So I know, as I'm sure you know, several people who are attracted to the idea of going vegan, or at least learning to cook vegan food. I see nothing wrong with that. Even though so many vegetables are still contaminated by glyphosate or other chemical residues, it's possible even for glyphosate-sensitive me to find enough different veg that are "clean enough" for days of delicious, naturally vegan meals.
For some people, however, combinations of rice, beans, corn, peas, tomatoes, and wild veg from a safe site aren't enough. Never were. While competing products have come and gone, often generating bad reviews, the Seventh-Day Adventist food packers at Loma Linda and Worthington have been marketing their "Protose" products--have generated mostly good reviews and sold well to a varied audience for over a hundred years. The only problem is that the textured vegetable protein base for all of their products is a mix of wheat and soybeans, and Adventists have long struggled with the question of whether they can feed people who don't digest one or the other of those vegetable proteins. Since the 1980s, as wheat raisers have sought higher crop yields by basically marinating wheat fields in glyphosate from pre-planting to harvest, and soybean plants have been bioengineered to survive the same abuse, the incidence of inability to digest wheat and soy has exploded.
As regular readers know, genuine wheat intolerance is a minority gene. All true celiacs probably share a common ancestor, back in the mists of Irish prehistory. The incidence of celiac disease (though some people who share the gene don't show the disease) used to be about 1 in 10,000 among people who live in Ireland or identify as Irish, 1 in 100,000 among other Western Europeans, and unknown in the rest of the world. The fact that a majority of humankind now feel better when they avoid eating wheat does not indicate that the human genome has changed radically during our lifeitmes. It means that most of those people are reacting to glyphosate. When they visit places where glyphosate is not used--European countries that have been able to enforce good tight bans, or the rare isolated True Green farm that specializes in the heirloom hard wheats called spelt and einkorn--they can digest wheat as well as our ancestors did for hundreds of years. Soy, likewise. Nature intended that all people should be able to get by for years on the proiteins and nutrients found in grains and beans, because primitive human hunters did not bring home a kill every day, but since the 1980s certain members of my generation, some of whom are in fact brilliant men, have suffered from a delusion that they were cleverer than God, and the direct result is that millions of people now suffer from chronic disease conditions our ancestors never had. And may Bill Gates live a lifetime with each and every one of them in Purgatory.
Anyway the cirremt century has seen new Textured Vegetable Protein products that many people claim to prefer to Protose. For one thing they can be described as gluten-free! "Just for you!" some friends have said gleefully when offering those new TVP products. Up until last week I just said no. Pure soy protein gets a truly meaty texture by being genetically modified. I didn't want to be the first by whom the new is tried.
Ah, but Jane Doe wanted to be. This person I'm calling Jane Doe is not a native of my town, or related to me through any common ancestors during the last 250 years, but is another best-case example of what the mix of Irish, Cherokee, and English genes produce. Lots of long livers in the family, the facial bone structure that's considered "good" because it tends to appear in families with long healthy lives worldwide, slightly top-heavy figure, lots of energy and interests, fun to know although my family tend to see her family as irresponsible rich brats. Jane Doe has been raving about the "Incredible" soy-protein-only vegan products for years. Jane Doe is not a celiac, and has never admitted to noticing a glyphosate reaction, but since about age 70, when that strain of flu went around, she has had a hard time shaking off the vertigo that was the special feature of that strain of flu. She says it's been chronic, but I observe that, if other people see her wobble when walking, she's been exposed to glyphosate.
She does not wobble after eating Incredible Burgers.
"Maybe the soybeans they use aren't full of glyphosate any more?"
"Right. Maybe they're full of paraquat."
"Maybe they are just modified for flavor and texture, because Incredible Burgers sell so well!"
I have a reason for mentioning vertigo. It is not to gloat that Jane Doe is in fact over 70. In neither of our families is there any question about competence before age 90, anyway. It is because, although most celiacs don't complain of vertigo and most people who have the polio-survivor gene, who do notice vertigo, don't associate it with food or glyphosate reactions, as a sensation vertigo is closely related to nausea. So it can be part of a celiac reaction, too. I knew this, theoretically, before last week. I've noticed vertigo as a perceptual reaction to looking either up or down a steep height, and as a short-lived symptom of that strain of flu, during which I used to wake up thinking "On a boat...how nice, where's my old boat buddy...oh wait!"
I liked boats, of course. Serious boats, with sails and room for a person to stretch out and sleep, on the Eastern Shore, and cute little kayaks I used to like to paddle around the Anacostia River. I still do like kayaks, btw, if anyone's interested.
Anyway last week I was offered some TVP-enhanced canned tuna, and I thought, "Jane Doe eats that and doesn't seem to react to it. I think I will, finally, try it myself before I share it with the cats." So I mixed it with some tomato sauce, corn, and beans, and ate it.
The first thing I noticed was that it was not the best, freshest tuna I've ever had. It did not even smell the way I expect a can of mackerel to smell. It smelled more like beans that are past their prime, though not toxic--at the stage that gave people the idea of mixing beans, fish, and boiled eggs in a salad because they all have just a slight whiff of sulphur.
"People take sulphur as a supplement," I reminded myself, and took a bite. As usual with food odors, after the first bite it didn't bother me so much, so I finished my share of the dish.Then I sat up reading an e-book for a few more hours. I remember noticing just a faint sensation of vertigo before I lay down, with the laptop on my knees, for the night.
Then I woke up and immediately wished I hadn't. Waking up felt like a mistake. It did not feel like waking up on a friend's yacht tied up near a house on the Eastern Shore. It felt like waking up on a ship that was sinking because all the sailors had eaten some of the old dead fish of which the ship stank, and were all lying in puddles of partially digested dead fish, adding to the stench.
But I forced my eyes open, just to reassure myself that the sick sailors were only a dream, and regretted that, too, as it made me feel even sicker.
"From a chest cold to a head cold to a stomach virus," I thought. "Coronavirus meets our old friend the sore-throat flu," and I reached for my cold and flu remedy, a garlic clove and a couple of Vitamin C.
Then I looked for an empty bowl or bottle. The only thing handy was the dish of fish I had somehow forgotten to take out to the cats, the night before. I reached for it and immediately ruined it for the cats. The Vitamin C tablets came up intact, along with the water I'd drunk after dinner. The garlic stayed down. I stayed down, after setting down the dish of fish. I think, if the house had been a boat and had drifted out to sea, as it felt as if it were doing, I would have stayed in bed.
The cats tried scratching at the door. They tried knocking at the door. They tried meowing piteously. I stayed in that bed.
The odd-jobs man tooted his horn, down on the road, asking whether I needed a lift into town or anything picked up in town. I remembered that some publisher was supposed to have mailed me a payment that would probably be at the post office. I remembered that I was runnnng low on everything I had not already run out of. I remembered that, if I could squeeze a few extra dollars out of the payment for him, the odd-jobs man likes to drive all the way to the Wal-Mart that has the best selection of yarn, and I'm out of cotton yarn and low on knitted cotton dish rags for sale. Those are fairly powerful motivating influences, for me. And I stayed right there in that bed!
I think I was holding on to the bed, because, although the driver's tooting the horn sounded as if he was on a solid road, it felt as if the house was out on a rather choppy sea. If the bed were to become separated from the house the metal frame would probably sink, but holding on to the board under the sheet might keep me afloat, I think was the idea. The conscious, rational part of my brain was asleep after all.
Yes. Vertigo is not normally part of my celiac reactions, but it was part of that one.
When my celiac reactions are produced by food, there's always a bit of a race between two conflicting internal mechanisms, the one that empties the colon and the one that locks it down. Fortunately the colon wasn't too full, so the emptying mechanism one, which is always a good sign for the next couple of days. Some of the GMO-soy-enhanced tuna was in the toilet, along with some of the corn and beans. And tomatoes? No, not tomatoes, or not only tomatoes. I could feel the little blisters on one side of my swollen tongue, see the complete absence of a waistline where one had been the night before. Those soybeans are still full of glyphosate all right,. No points for guessing., Jane Doe has a higher genetic threshold of tolerance for glyphosate than I have. Most non-celiacs do. I was losing blood.
If it hadn't been for the blood, I might have blamed the nausea and vertigo on the virus. Virus-es. I grew up saying "one virus, two virus," but other people are saying that distinct kinds of virus are circulating this winter and may attack people in combinations. Other people are also typing "viruses," and presumably saying it, though it doesn't look like a word to me. I'm not sure whether my vocabulary could benefit from the idea of "one virus, two virus" when we're talking about virus organisms as seen under a very high-powered microscope, and "virus-es" when we're talking about some unholy alliance between coronavirus, adenovirus, norovirus, and maybe Epstein-Barr and hantavirus coming along for the ride. I'll see whether that makes sense to people in the real world.
But the internal bleeding and inflammation are specific. They are my reaction to gluten and/or glyphosate, as distinct from any virus infection, as distinct even from salmonella infections, which are occasionally known to cause bleeding in the bowels in very bad cases. Salmonella, in my experience, makes itself noticeable--green slime in the toilet, and yeasty-smelling gas, if it's the non-problem it usually is in my family--at levels of exposure far below the tarry-looking-blood-in-the-toilet level, or even the acute diarrhea level. And this was not tarry blood, or green slime. No distinct odor of norovirus, either. It was a glyphosate reaction, but an unusually bad one, whether because I'd been ill or because some other poisonous "pesticide" was also in the soybeans, or both.
I still enjoy cooking--and eating--real Mary McDougall vegan meals, no "plant-based protein" fake-outs, just that endless variety of combinations of veg, grains, nuts, and for additional variety spices. I used to like to do geography with some of The Nephews by mixing veg, grains, and spices that came from different countries for meals that could have been eaten in a different place every night. ("Potatoes aren't really native to Germany, but German people eat a lot of them," which is fortunate because the other complex carbs found in Germany and further north come from the grains celiacs don't digest: wheat, rye, barley.)
But. No. GMO soy protein. Not for me. Not ever again. Stuff is poison.
(Obviously I got out of bed to type this...I was sick on Saturday morning, got up long enough to feed the cats and use the bathroom about 1 p.m., and was sitting up and sipping soda pop by 2 p.m. on Saturday.)
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