An Apple A Day... by Annabel Howarth

 

It’s the run up to Christmas and the shops are filled again with an abundance of chocolate, biscuits, cakes and booze, and I wonder whether this year I will fill my shopping trolley in quite the same way.   

Like many other people, and as had been my ritual for years before, I over indulged last Christmas.  I drank more alcohol than usual and ate a lot of chocolate.  I couldn’t leave the large tin of Roses and Quality Street or the cakes or prettily boxed biscuits to waste, could I?  The more chocolate, cakes and biscuits I ate, the more I wanted to eat. I knew it was bad for me, but I craved it and enjoyed it.   I cannot only blame the Christmas period either.  Since giving birth, I had swapped the odd glass of wine after a stressful day at work for a new vice.  Chocolate, biscuits or cake would be my quick fix when I felt tired - hot chocolates with marshmallows and whipped cream too.  What better way to give yourself a boost when you just feel like lying down?  I also craved a little fruit or a little fruit juice, which is good isn’t it?  What’s that old saying?  “An apple a day keeps the Doctor away.”  Well apparently for me, at that time, it was not the case at all.

For some years I had had various niggling symptoms, which I would generally choose not to divulge in one visit to a glazed eyed GP: wind, bloating, frequent mild headaches, blocked nose in the mornings and at night, itchy throat, sore throat, itchy ear.  For so long, I had put those things down to a touch of irritable bowel syndrome or hayfever (as diagnosed by doctors previously), but my hayfever had become all year round and all day round, and my symptoms on the whole had increased.  

The constant itching throat was so bad in October (therefore not hayfever) that I visited my very nice GP, who told me it was likely to be allergies, probably dust mite allergy, which was driving me to distraction and prescribed me with a steroid nasal spray.  A dust mite allergy might have explained why I had symptoms at night or in the morning, but all day?  And I knew from having used nasal sprays in the past that they are not a long term solution, and in this case could possibly exacerbate the problem.  

Feeling quite low, irritable, insane even, I started to investigate further and read about such things as sick building syndrome and multi-chemical sensitivities, which might have explained away the reactions I was having when entering any of the bedrooms in the house.  

I became paranoid about the MDF furniture in the main bedrooms silently poisoning us with their chemical formula coatings or the Peppa Pig and boat design stick-on decals which look fantastic on the walls of the children’s bedrooms?  Could I have been slowly killing my babies by washing their delicate little sleepsuits with the special fabric conditioner which is “soft and gentle against babies’ skin”?  In fact, as I have been lead to believe, it is full of toxic chemicals, the smell of which are masked by additional perfume chemicals, also in themselves potentially toxic.  

Initially convinced that the problems mainly related to the dreaded dust mite, I invested in a super mattress hoover with ultra violet light, special anti-allergy bedding for the children and I started dusting the ceilings on a regular basis. The symptoms persisted so I stopped using fabric softener and started to look into environmentally friendly and therefore human friendly alternatives to the more popular cleaning materials I tended to use.

Nothing seemed to make a difference, so I bemoaned my lot to my husband, my mother, and anyone else who would care to listen.  They suggested that it might be something else, that was now affecting me everywhere I went.  It couldn’t be dust mites in the car, when walking in the street, or when taking a shower!  So, I was persuaded to also read about certain food intolerances and found that some of my symptoms seemed to fit common symptoms of yeast intolerance.  It then occurred to me that it could be my shampoo (which I discovered was full of parabens, as was, to my complete horror, the baby wipes I had been using to clean babies’ bottoms for the past four years!) or the very expensive cleanser, toner and moisturiser which I had been using daily since October.  Lo and behold, the cleanser contained yeast.  Could this be the culprit?

On 1st February I took a non-invasive food intolerance test, called the MORA test.  It revealed a number of things. I do have a house dust-mite allergy, but this was not the predominate problem.  The main issue for me was yeast intolerance and the presence of an overgrowth of candida.  The symptoms cover the digestive issues already described, hayfever, headaches, and severe chemical and food sensitivities, amongst other things, all of which I recognised as symptoms of my own.  I was surprised that some of the other symptoms include depression, confusion, irritability, memory lapses, inability to concentrate, lethargy and loss of confidence.  Hearing this was like describing traits I had been struggling with myself and putting them down to being the mother of two small children suffering from a lack of decent sleep.  The results also revealed a dairy intolerance and some vitamin deficiencies, likely to result from the candida overgrowth as candida releases a number of toxins into the body which affect the immune system.  Whilst the body is fighting the toxins produced by the candida overgrowth it then finds it difficult to cope with other toxins it would ordinarily be able to cope with, such as low levels of chemicals.

As candida occurs in the body naturally there is no actual cure, so the principal way to deal with the problem is to control the levels of yeast in the body and this means not only cutting yeast out of the diet but also ALL sugars, as the sugars help the yeast ferment.  All sugars includes anything sweet including all fruit, fresh, dried or otherwise.  Thinking I had been doing myself good by eating fruit and drinking fruit juices, I had actually been making my problem worse.  

At another time in my life, the prospect of not drinking alcohol might have put me off taking any of it seriously at all.  The solution sounded onerous, and surprisingly yeast is widely used as a food preservative or flavour, so removing yeast from your diet is not as simple as cutting out bread and beer, and to begin with I had to search hard for many pre-prepared food items that did not contain yeast.  Most ready meals, even the very expensive “home made” kind contain yeast, as do stock cubes, ketchup and many other staple items in the kitchen cupboard, unless you look very hard for the “yeast free” variety.

Once I became used to drinking black coffee, instead of my previously preferred sweet tea, and swapping yeast free soda bread or tortilla wraps for ordinary bread, the diet was not so onerous afterall.  Most meals had to be prepared from scratch, but unlike with a gluten intolerance, I could still eat pasta and rice without any concern.  It was really a case of going back to basics and eating more simply.  Eating out was difficult as our standard diet is full of bread and it is fashionable to cover food with elaborate sauces in restaurants, but after a while you get used to asking for sauces on the side.  To begin with I was good and took the “good bacteria” capsules and multi-vitamins I was a advised to take.  Cinammon, cloves, cumin and garlic are all good yeast fighting products, and I added these where I could.  I now have a huge collection of interesting herbal teas.  I used to shun crisps in favour of chocolate, but they became my new vice, but only the ready salted variety as, surprise surprise, flavoured crisps tend to include yeast amongst their ingredients.

I kept to my diet strictly for 3 months, save for the odd gin & slim-line tonic (white spirits being the least of all evils) and a very brief blast back to my youth of bacardi with “zero” coke.

It didn’t take long before I started to feel the results.  Suddenly I had more energy.  I hadn’t realised how bad it had been, dragging my body through the day.  I now had a new zing in my step.  I could run up the stairs, and remember why I had entered a room, and even though I was still tired from disrupted sleep, the sluggishness was gone.  Over the 3 months the constant bloated feeling I had, subsided. I stopped having a monthly cycle of mouth ulcers, I stopped feeling as though I was breathing in gravel when I walked to the top of the house, and although I was eating a lot of all the things that my diet allowed - vegetables, meat of any kind, potatoes, pasta, rice - I lost weight.  I went from struggling to keep to what I thought was my ideal weight of 9 1/2 stone, often creeping to 10 1/2, down to a steady 8 1/2 stone.  Not that my intention in embarking on the diet was ever to lose weight, but what a happy side effect for me - to feel generally lighter and healthier?

After the 3 months, I slowly started to reintroduce things into my diet, so I eat fruit again (thankfully my beloved apples - I did miss them); a little dairy, but keep it to a minimum, for example choosing to eat dark chocolate rather than milk chocolate; and I still avoid yeast as far as possible.  So, it will be an interesting shopping trolley this Christmas.  What sort of treats will I add to the trolley?  Will there be the obligatory large tin of Rose’s? One thing’s for certain - I won’t be the one polishing them off this year!