My Nutritional Assessment

[Gloria]

I have spent a few day entering my foods and recipes into Excel to see if I'm severely deficient in any area. I have a nutritional program, but since I make my own muffins, waffles, almond milk, etc. from scratch, using Excel seemed more logical. I used this nutritional database to collect most of the data:
http://nutritiondata.self.com/

The site also calculated the MDRs for my weight and age, which was helpful.

The results were not that surprising due to my limited diet of 10 foods, with no fruit and three vegetables. I would be deficient in several areas: vitamins A, E, C, B6, and calcium if I weren't taking supplements. My Freeda multivitamin and calcium supplements take care of the deficiencies.

I am low in potassium on the days that I eat lamb and turkey by about 230 mg. This supports a recent blood test which showed I was low in potassium. I have a potassium supplement which provides 99 mg. per pill. I will begin taking 2 pills a day and won't worry about it anymore, unless I have a reaction to the pills, of course.

My daily calories vary between 1600-1800 per day, thanks to muffins and pudding. Without them, I would be eating under 1000 calories a day.

The big surprise was how much potassium and overall nutrients are in corn. On my pork-corn day, my potassium is 1,000 mg. higher than it is on the lamb and turkey days, due to eating corn flour tortillas, corn noodles, and a corn muffin.

I have stopped eating all vegetables for three days to see if my symptoms improve. Unfortunately, they have. I'm at the point where I don't want to find out that another food, especially a vegetable, is a problem. I'm hoping that I just need to replace broccoli with Brussels sprouts. I had replaced Brussels sprouts with broccoli because I couldn't find them fresh in the stores. Plus, they were pretty unpalatible once I stopped using ghee, and my BMs smelled like dog poop the next day (sorry). I have suspected broccoli in the past and stopped eating them once before.

I am growing a bunch of Brussels sprouts in my garden, in addition to broccoli, and hope they start looking bigger than peas pretty soon. I hope I can continue to eat asparagus and cauliflower. I had bad days on Tuesday and Wednesday despite being off Simvastatin. Things have settled down now that I'm not eating vegetables.

Gloria

[nancyl]

You are diligent. Thank you for sharing the website, it's something I should probably take advantage of. I am sure I am not getting enough calories and have only gained one pound since my last doctor's in May. I went today and thought it would be more than a pound. He did think I looked better, not so drawn.

Does Simvastatin usually cause D? I am on 10 mg a day.

Nancy

[Gloria]

Hi Nancy,

I've been keeping track of my calories since I went on the MRT Leap diet because I lost 30 pounds. It's not hard to determine your calories when you're eating as little as we are.

I'm not sure whether Simvistatin has caused me problems. I'm off of it for the time being to see if it makes a difference. I was taking 20 mg/day. Things seemed to improve for a couple of days, but as happens to me frequently, the problems returned. Some reports say statins are associated with MC; another recent report (which Tex evaluated) say there isn't any association. As always, it depends on the individual.

My PCP said I could go off of Simvistatin for a while last year to see if I had controlled my cholesterol by diet alone. I don't think it would hurt to stop taking it for a few weeks to test and see if your symptoms improve. Mine didn't improve last year when I went off of it, but I was still eating other intolerances.

Gloria

[harma]

Very interesting Gloria what you are doing to calculate the nutrition value's of your food. I have to admit I am too lazy for that, I am taking a multi vitamin, calcium and vitamin D and think "this has to do it". I thought since you did the MRT testing you also had added more food items to your menu, but your are still on 10 a day. Everytime I read about your MC and food, I got the feeling we are so alike. Maybe not sensitive to the same things, but sensitive to a lot of things, we better name the things we can in eat instead of can't, since the can list is much shorter than the can't list.

But good that you're of medication, that's a huge step. I am still taking my entocort everyday.

[mbeezie]

Gloria,

I know you suspect that you have mast cell issues. Elevated cholesterol levels are common in mast cell activation. Here are some articles that talks about high cholesterol in mast cell patients.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18662284

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8131778


I have always had elevated cholesterol levels and now I know why.

Mary Beth