'Balanced Diet' is about not dying due to malnutrition.
What is a 'vegan' diet? What is a dietitian? and memes. Apparently, I have only one reader, or maybe two. But she really could relate to the connective tissue concerns in my last post. So could I.
How much white space to leave? Call to action button? Affirming nudge to buy?
This post is also too long for email, but is shorter than the last post in which I learned astounding news about what might be wrong in my body and vegan eating is likely a factor - simply too much phosphorus compared to calcium and magnesium.
Summary of my last post & reason I had to stop eating animal products.
Nutshell of my last post - I had to stop eating animal products due to what seemed to be a new onset autoimmune reaction against albumin protein in egg white. Albumin is in every animal product practically because it is part of plasma. Autoimmune antibodies form which include Memory B cells. Any time into the future if I have leaky gut and food albumin enters my body, the Memory cells would be ready to form a new onslaught of antibodies against my own albumin. Without albumin, it seems that skin is more at risk for calcification and necrotizing wounds.
When those are located in your armpits, then it hurts to walk and you have to hold your arms out to the sides to avoid friction. I was like that for a couple weeks while figuring out what new thing had gone wrong in my body and whether it might be diet-based in addition to extreme stress. It turned out to be due to a large increase in my use of hard-boiled eggs compared to my former routine. Mega stress causes gut problems and then undigested proteins can get into the blood stream and immune cells can set up antibodies against a protein that is similar to a human protein.
Molecular mimicry autoimmune antibodies are seen more commonly with gluten and its similarity to thyroid tissue which can lead to autoimmune thyroid conditions when the gut membranes are ‘leaky’. Gluten or a protein in corn can increase open areas between intestinal cells, and stress and inflammation can increase membrane breakdown. Removing gluten and corn from the diet can reduce the problem with Tight Junctions between cells becoming more open to undigested proteins. Picture a brick wall and the gluten or corn protein (the food proteins effect our zonulin) loosens up the mortar between the bricks so there are open holes between the bricks instead of a neat line of mortar.
Removing gluten from the diet, or albumin in my situation, helps by reducing a constant retriggering of the memory B cells leading to even more antibody formation against the self-protein and dietary similar protein. It takes six months of strict avoidance to reduce the flare up in autoimmune antibodies in the case of gluten and Celiac autoimmune disease. It seems to take a similar amount of time for CoV injection antibodies to fade away. Strict avoidance of the toxin or foreign chemical is needed to keep the memory B cells from making more.
Boron deficiency (*tip from a comment, thanks! ref) and low calcium intake also had caused hyperparathyroidism which seems to be part of the risk of calciphylaxis - necrotizing skin wounds due to calcium. Excess calcium within a cell can overactivate it to the point of cell death. With autoimmune disease, your own immune system is attacking self-proteins which can lead to damaged cells and cell death or other symptoms depending on what type of protein is being targeted by the autoimmune antibodies and white blood cells.
Why is my story pertinent now? There has been a recent (post CoV era) large increase in women with calcinosis symptoms and autoimmune connective tissue disorders. (Kouranloo, et al., 2023) And the women are younger than typically seen with the symptoms. Estrogen is likely protective and older women tend to have calcinosis more often than males or younger women in previous history of the condition.
Does sex/gender matter for who is heard? for who is allowed to speak-up? It seems so.
Women Speak Up Less at Grand Rounds, Even in a Virtual Setting — Long-standing sex differences in who gets heard persist, despite equal presence, study finds,
““Scholarship continues to document disparities in our field, including now in post-grand rounds discourse," Haller noted. She referenced the 2015 New York Times opinion piece opens in a new tab or window in which Cheryl Sandburg, then the chief operating officer of Facebook, and Adam Grant, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, wrote that "when a woman speaks in a professional setting, she walks a tightrope. Either she's barely heard or she's judged as too aggressive.”” by Kate Kneisel, July 31, 2023
I find there is very little point in trying to speak up, to be heard, in our modern society of tolerance and acceptance - of cancel culture - but if one person is helped, then that is good. And I am helping myself with my findings. My offering info is too frequently taken negatively, unwanted intrusion or “You are not my doctor, or not my mother…”
Disrespect of women hurts families and society.
Suppression an exploitation of women is a common step in dictator takeover of a society. Break up traditional partnerships and the strength of families is reduced. Children are less protected and more vulnerable to manipulation or abuse.
Women are being disrespected and mothers also, and it has rippled out into nutrition being disrespected and usurped by male doctors or health coaches of some sort promoting various diets that are restrictive and can be easily out of balance or may not be ideal for female or prenatal health if not outright dangerous for the baby.
What is a ‘diet’? Who is a specialist on the topic of a ‘balanced diet’?
The word ‘diet’ means restricting calories to lose weight for many people. Too restrictive can lead to loss of health and loss of life.
For a dietitian, a diet plan, means a rough guideline for a balanced day’s or week’s food that will provide a mix of protein, fats and carbohydrates and essential nutrients. It isn’t that easy. Old school mothers did a pretty good job at getting the veggies in there with the other foods too.
Discarding respect for women, is discarding respect for caregiving which is about nurturing ongoing health. Instilling good habits in children which will stick with them, simply because they learned what eating good food feels like, compared to the short-term pleasure of junk food that doesn’t leave the ongoing good feeling of wellness.
Other online “influencers” label themselves healthy diet advisors and may have restrictive and dangerous diets of another type. A raw food/fruit eater, Zhanna D’Art, recently died of malnutrition and the New York Post article kept calling the woman a vegan and never mentioned the obvious flaw in a fruit-only diet - no protein, or very little. That is not really a ‘vegan diet’, but sadly it is fairly common to see a ‘vegan’ meal that has no protein foods, just vegetables, even in vegan restaurants.
Humans are omnivores based on our teeth and we need protein, starches and fats in addition to fiber and water and trace nutrients. The common refrain among ‘Carnivore Diet’ fans is that the body can create glucose with gluconeogenesis - that is assuming the body is healthy and has plenty of protein and trace nutrients for the enzymes needed to convert chemicals from one form to another. It is also wrongly assuming that humans only need glucose for health.
Carnivore Diet and our immune system’s need for varied monosaccharides, not just glucose.
Our immune system uses many other monosaccharides (except fructose) within complex surface marker glycoproteins which are a communication system used by immune cells. The surface of a cell looks like a mini forest. The glycoproteins can branch in many directions, fractally, like a tree or shrub and the pattern of branches informs the immune cell about what is going on within the cell.
Are the tree/shrubs the correct shape for normal health are some a foreign shape, like a chimeric coronavirus spike protein? Then immune cells might recognize and leave alone the cell with familiar surface glycoproteins and attack the one that has foreign surface markers. Some of these special monosaccharides are found in super foods like seaweed and mushrooms. Including a little variety in a mostly carnivore diet would be more balanced and fall into the ‘omnivore’ category which humans are.
You can identify as a lion or vulture but that doesn’t make you one.
‘Raw Food’ diet, ‘Vegan’ diet, and ‘Fruitarian’ diet.
An article out of Australia has more background information about Zhanna D’Art. The woman had been eating sprouted sunflower seeds and avocado which would have helped. More recently she had switched to just fruit and that is inadequate in many, many, many ways.
The phrase ‘vegan diet’ in dietitian terms means someone who eats a balanced intake of beans, nuts, seeds, vegetables, grains, fruits and fats. Eating only fruit would not fit within that definition. It might be called a ‘fruitarian diet’ but no dietitian resource would describe ‘Fruitarian’ as a balanced diet suitable for maintaining human health for an extended amount of time.
World Economic Forum and promotion of vegan diets and insects for approximately everyone. It is not easy and likely not safe for children or pregnancy (for the fetus).
The World Economic Forum seems to be pushing a vegan diet as healthy for everyone at all stages of growth. And that is being supported by various nutrition organizations including my own Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (Wikipedia); and that is really not fair to a developing fetus or a growing child. It is not an easy diet to get balanced and needs supplementation even when done well. The fiber content is too high for a tiny child’s appetite and mineral content is reduced by phytonutrients in the plant foods. Bone and tooth mineralization is likely to be compromised in a child raised on a vegan diet. Short stature - failure to grow as tall, and failure to develop as well muscularly may also occur in a child or teen on a vegan diet.
And media headlines that suggest a fruit only diet is ‘vegan’ do even more disservice. A ‘standard vegan’ diet if there is such a thing, would include a wide range of plant foods as depicted in the graphic above, not just fruit. ‘Veg’an → implies vegetables, NOT just fruit. Only the liver can use fructose for energy so any diet with a greater proportion of fruit sugar is a risk for Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease - a problem that has skyrocketed since the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup in beverages and many other processed foods.
Malnourishment, leading to zinc deficiency, leads to an anorexic appetite - no appetite - which is different than anorexia nervosa.
What can happen on a restricted diet, is a lack of zinc occurs which leads to an extremely anorexic appetite - anorexic as in the definition that means ‘no appetite’. Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder involving a mental issue about control of food intake and/or exercise and body shape (body dysmorphia may be present - visually seeing something different in the mirror than a camera image would show). This can lead to severe malnourishment and then a zinc deficiency induced loss of appetite might also be present instead of the person avoiding food out of willpower and choice. A zinc deficiency anorexic appetite is simply ‘not hungry’ - no interest in food rather than using will power to say ‘No thank you’ to food that the body does want to eat.
I have been that severely zinc deficient due to a genetic difference. I learned that I need to take high dose zinc for life, as I seem to waste far too much in urinary loss (pyroluria, I take B6 too). At the time I remember feeling like I was being pressured by family to eat too much. Swallowing just one or two bites felt like a lot of work. My throat literally seemed too dry from no saliva and the food would be like swallowing sawdust. One or two bites of sawdust is plenty of sawdust… I was eating about one protein meal bar a day at that stage (not all of it at once) and was so malnourished that I did get deficient in B1 also, which can then add disoriented thinking to the mess.
Zhanna D’Art, the woman who died of malnutrition, likely became zinc and B vitamin deficient with the sprouted sunflower seed raw diet and then the mental and appetite effects of deficiencies could have led to having an even worse appetite and more unclear thinking. The article mentions that her legs were oozing lymph near the end and friends were begging her to get help. An image shows reddened discoloration of her ankles - she was niacin deficient in other words and likely low in albumin. If you get too deficient in niacin, then you will die. That is just the way that works, nothing surprising about it.
You can ‘identify’ as fruitarian but that doesn’t make you a monkey and monkeys eat insects in addition to fruit. You can ‘identify’ as a vegan and pay $14 for an entree sized plate of kale with a tablespoon of hemp kernels sprinkled on it, but that is not going to support quality of life or prevent death from nutrient deficiencies if that sort of meal balance continues too often in your daily and weekly routine. As a nutrition counselor I worked with more than a few young adults who claimed to be ‘vegetarian’ due to deciding to not eat meat, but they didn’t eat beans either - just ate cheese and dairy products for protein. That is going to be less risky than a vegan diet with too little beans, nuts and seeds, but it will still lead to lack of some nutrients.
We don’t need ‘Meatless Mondays’ as a health message as much as we need “Bean-full Brunches” or “Legume Lunches” as a prompt to eat more beans, not just less meat.
Lack of protein causes illness and causes nutrient deficiencies or reduction in availability of vitamin A and D and trace minerals.
I learned some over-eating habits from my mother, but I also learned how to prepare and enjoy fresh foods. And we had stuff like hot dogs so rarely that I never really got used to them as ‘food’ to eat very often. Bologna was something I only ever saw in other kid’s school lunches and it looked so gross I was never curious enough to seek out trying it. I ate a Twinkie or two in my life and they are kind of yummy but compared to my mother’s fresh baked sponge cake with fluffy Seven-minute icing - a Twinkie is just bizarre and wrong comparatively, and even my childhood sweet tooth could tell.
You can identify as a ‘Twinkarian’ and eat only Twinkies, but it will lead to malnutrition and your death. And you may become mentally unstable along the way. (The Twinkie Defense, legal history regarding the murder of Harvey Milk and a Mayor in San Francisco. Spoiler it is considered a myth, but sounds plausible, so it stuck. DingDongs were mentioned, not Twinkies in a defense that junk food had led to a depressed mood. DingDongs are also non-perishable non-food. sfgate.com)
'Dietitian' - a person trained to prevent death and illness by promoting a balanced nutrient intake over a daily, weekly, and annual basis.
So - the goal of a ‘balanced diet’ is to not die prematurely - and not go nuts from B vitamin and magnesium deficiency and kill other people either.
WEF and Bill Gates, insects, and Kwashiorkor / Edematous protein malnutrition with adequate calorie intake - causes bloating and poor gut health.
The WEF or Bill Gates are also promoting insects as a protein food and I have studied traditional human use - as a condiment, type portion, a side dish, insects add some important trace nutrients to a diet that is mostly vegetable protein based. Kwashikior malnutrition occurred with missionaries made local people stop using insects in their diet and for toddlers. It can cause severe edema and death.
Some insects can add to a diet, but that doesn’t mean I support factory made insect burgers as a large proportion of a diet. There are other anti-nutrients in insects that would not be good for health in excess. I also am not an advocate of ‘vegan’ diet for everyone, and especially not for pregnant women and children. I also think the trendy ‘Carnivore Diet’ is dangerous for pregnancy and fetal development as nitrogen waste could cause excess ammonia production which is a neurotoxin in excess. The fetal brain is tiny and needs to be cared for carefully.
Fake food is not the answer to better health or a healthier environment. Living more simply and returning to more traditional agricultural methods is what is needed.
You can identify as a baby cockroach, but that doesn’t mean that baby cockroaches drink cockroach milk. (*Cockroaches are not mammals and do not produce ‘milk’. The product is likely squished up cockroaches with added water - if it exists and is not a joke.)
There seems to be a global takeover of our freedom to grow our own crops. Storing traditional seeds is likely a good idea.
“6) There is a coordinated, global effort to destroy seed diversity and make crops unable to reproduce - To make sure that free people can't grow their own food, a global effort is also under way to control the seed supply and to collapse seed diversity while transitioning agriculture to toxic, genetically engineered seeds that grow crops which synthesize pesticide chemicals right into the crop itself (such as with GM corn). Seed giants like Monsanto (now Bayer) have bought up many smaller seed suppliers over the years, wiping out seed diversity and nearly monopolizing the agricultural supply chain for crop production. This centralization of food production into the hands of a few, powerful corporations is one of the necessary steps to weaponizing food scarcity and using engineered famine as a tool for social control and mass compliance with government demands.” - Mike Adams,
repost: Twelve Undeniable Signs Globalists Are Engineering the End of Humanity, "It's no longer taboo to publicly talk about depopulation...global efforts are under way to drastically reduce the human population on planet Earth."
Kindness counts.
Thanks to those of you who reply and interact with me. I like conversation about nutrition. It is my niche interest in an autistic/ADHD hyperfocus kind of way. My health needs the help and other people may benefit from the info too.
Bonus addition:
Disclaimer: This information is being provided for educational purposes within the guidelines of Fair Use and is not intended to provide individual health guidance.
"my mother’s fresh baked sponge cake with fluffy Seven-minute icing - did your mother have "the joy of cooking " I have my grandmother's copy! I'm pretty sure I made that 7 Minute Icing at some time in my life !
This was VERY informative for me. Your definitions for dietician and clarity about a proper vegan diet are things I needed to know. While I’m in no way vegan or vegetarian, I know several people who are and they do NOT eat balanced diets. Thank you!