Michael Tue Aug 15 20:59:58 2006
Re: Greetings from Florida
> Don't get eaten by alligators or palmetto bugs.
Unless palmetto bugs are seasonal, I have to say that they seem to be just plain *not a problem* in Palm Beach County. And if I see an alligator, I'm going to eat the alligator, not vice versa -- we're on this elimination diet in solidarity with my son. We're all pretty hungry and I'm pretty sure he's not allergic to alligator meat. Chicken's OK and an alligator is essentially swamp chicken with teeth.
Unless you've tried to live for an extended time on a diet without, in rough order of allergic severity, bananas, honey, yeast, wheat, corn, tomatoes, carrots, soy, garlic, paprika, cane sugar, onions, dairy products, safflower oil, etc. ad infinitum -- well, you can't imagine what it's like. Fortunately, my wife is a culinary genius; the cultural superiority of the Hungarian when cuisine is involved has heterodyned with the sheer bull-headed intellect that allowed her to finish a doctorate in theoretical physics, resulting in some truly incredible feats of cooking. The most amazing is a credible, and quite delicious, pizza containing no wheat, tomato, or pork. Huh? And yet this amazing concoction of pumpkin pie filling, oat flour, and pureed squash tasted wonderful. (Did you know that pumpkin pie filling, oat flour, and baking powder make great cookies, breakfast bread, or pizza crust? Neither did anybody else on the planet, and yet they do.)
Anyway, the diet has been a great success -- the boy's proteinuria had been hovering in the 800's since returning to Indiana; the first week of the diet brought that to 571, the second gave us 473, and then it hovered in the 400's for three weeks.
Then an as-yet-unknown cause brought him back to 759 last week, at which point we figure it's the environmental allergens (primarily mold) of the Ohio Valley, hence the precipitous move to Fla. So far, he appears to be doing better in terms of visible allergic symptoms, but we haven't measured proteinuria yet. I'm confident it will have dropped, though. I hope that the healthy sea air in combination with the demonstrably good diet will allow us to push those values further down. If so, it will be a Good Thing, and entirely flying in the face of American medicine (but well in line with current research out of France and Japan.)
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