Rebuild from Depression Blog

Food allergies can at least aggravate depression. I some people they can be the primary cause. Increasingly, people are finding out that they are sensitive to gluten, a component of wheat and some other related grains. In fact, I find that my body gets a bit puffy from wheat. I do not have serious gluten allergy symptoms, but the puffiness is a reminder that the gluten is probably not doing me any favors.

So how do you know if you are allergic? It's actually pretty simple. Cut the food out for a month and then take a day to binge on the food. If the month was going well, the binge day will tell you if the reason was the food you cut out. Here's an excerpt from my book about my experience with cutting out corn. I had never heard of a "corn allergy" before and thought my chiropractor was nuts for suggesting it.

This approach would work if you suspect a food or two. Do it one food at a time.

~~~Excerpt from Chapter 5, "Corn allergies"

I am a lover of beef. It is rich in minerals and B vitamins. It is a depression buster food. However we haven’t even gotten through the first month of 2008 without a string of hamburger recalls due to the pathogenic bacteria E. coli 0157:H7. January is not even the peak month of E. coli. Look for that in late summer and early fall. All indications, then, are that E. coli 0157:H7 is on the rise and you may get a whole lot more than you bargained for in your burger.

So what in the heck do you do?

Some people reduce their risks by doing what I do – buying a steer from a small rancher and saving it from spending its final days on a feedlot. My steer continued to graze and eat a bit of grain in its last month. With less grain feeding, he would be less likely to have E. coli 0157:H7 in his gut, but he would not be immune to it. He might still have the pathogen in his system and when he was slaughtered and gutted, some of that bacteria may have made it to the carcass. Bacteria from another animal at the meat locker may have made it to my meat as well. You just never know.

I do shoulder some risk and eat medium-well burgers from this particular steer. My gut has withstood other food borne illnesses and my general strategy is to keep my digestion healthy enough to withstand the sorts of challenges it will inevitably face from beef, peanut butter, or spinach.

I’m on the road this week and have the opportunity to do what I almost never do: shop for food. We keep a freezer stocked with meat, a hen house full of layers, and a pantry stocked with food co-op items. When we are really on the ball, we even have produce in our garden. (When we are not on the ball, my husband shops for groceries to fill in where we need them.)

I know that makes us sound really hard core, but we do live in the absolute middle of nowhere actually in the Sequoia National Forest. We have friends here who pretty much hunt and forage all of their food. That is what I consider to be “hardcore.” Here, “hardcore” is pretty much the only way to live. If you're not "hardcore," you could run out of food or use a full tank of gas to get some.

Now I find myself on the road, all by myself and not knowing how to behave without a kindergartener with me. I visited Costco and called a friend.

“Have you seen these bake-your-own pizzas for ten bucks? That ten bucks would buy you and I two giant meals. That’s $2.50 a meal, we wouldn’t have to cook, AND we would get to eat pepperoni pizza!”