Breaking up with rice (and probably corn)

draperygoddess · Post by **draperygoddess** » Tue Jun 19, 2012 8:48 am

Sad, sad day. After taking myself off grains completely for about 2 weeks, I decided to be daring and had a few handfuls of GF rice cereal (Enjoy Life), as well as making some GF pancakes (sorghum and rice flour and tapioca, no corn starch because I'm beginning to suspect corn). Even before I ate the pancakes, I felt like that cereal had rolled itself into a huge ball and settled in my stomach. Felt the same way all day yesterday--like something was sitting in my stomach, refusing to be digested. Then this morning the D started. Oh, I'm feeling sorry for myself! I need some help from Gloria and Polly and others who have had to go grain-free, because I'm honestly a bit at a loss as to what I should eat now. I have been avoiding fruit as well--whether it's citric acid or fructose, something there isn't right for me. So now I'm down to meat, veggies (not tomatoes), coffee and tea. I've effectively eliminated half of the food pyramid! How do I get proper nutrition out of this? I'm taking a supplement, but I'm very concerned because I can't tolerate any of the milk substitutes (soy, rice, almond or coconut). I haven't tried quinoa in awhile--may give that a shot.

JFR · Post by **JFR** » Tue Jun 19, 2012 9:24 am

That's what I eat, meat and veggies, no grains. The only fruit I eat is a few blueberries. I do eat nut butters,macadamia, walnut and almond, about 2 tablespoons a day. I put coconut oil on my veggies, which are mostly greens, kale, chard, collard. It will take your body a while to get used to being so low carb. You do have to be sure you get enough fat in your diet for it provides the ketones for energy, replacing glucose from carbs. It is this switchover from glucose to fat as the primary supplier of energy that the body must adjust to and that can make you feel a little weak at first but if you give it time and eat enough calories, you'll do ok. I kind of like eating this way.

Jean

Post by **tex** » Tue Jun 19, 2012 9:40 am

Cynthia,

What are the ingredients in that rice cereal?

Regarding the pancakes, some of us react to tapioca, and while I was recovering, I was never sure about sorghum, but I always seemed to react to any product that contained sorghum flour -- of course, it's closely related to maize (corn). All of the cereal grains (including wheat, barley, rye, oats, spelts, corn, sorghum, rice and a few others) are members of the grass family.

Tex

MBombardier · Post by **MBombardier** » Tue Jun 19, 2012 9:59 am

Meat, veggies, and fruit. It's a major bummer that you can't do coconut. Since I've knocked out nuts (which I keep trying to add back in--just can't seem to get it through my head that I can't eat them--major denial) coconut is the only one I can eat. About the only coconut product I eat, though, is coconut oil.

I wonder if you go to meat and veggies, if in a few weeks you can add some low-histamine fruit.

You can get perfectly adequate nutrition just from eating meat, frankly. There is quite a bit of research out there about it. If you do a search (my continual frustration is my weird search disability), you will find at least one thread from Dec. 2010 or so about Eskimos and arctic explorers who were stranded and had to adopt an all-meat diet.

And Jean's caution about getting used to low-carb is wise. Some people even experience what is called the "low-carb flu" when their bodies must start gleaning carbohydrates from meat instead of the easy ones in grains and fruit. I didn't have that, thankfully.

JFR · Post by **JFR** » Tue Jun 19, 2012 10:08 am

MBombardier wrote:
You can get perfectly adequate nutrition just from eating meat, frankly. There is quite a bit of research out there about it. If you do a search (my continual frustration is my weird search disability), you will find at least one thread from Dec. 2010 or so about Eskimos and arctic explorers who were stranded and had to adopt an all-meat diet.

And Jean's caution about getting used to low-carb is wise. Some people even experience what is called the "low-carb flu" when their bodies must start gleaning carbohydrates from meat instead of the easy ones in grains and fruit. I didn't have that, thankfully.

From Wikipedia about Vilhajalmur Stefanson, an arctic explorer who lived with the Inuit and ate what they ate.

"Stefansson is also a figure of considerable interest in dietary circles, especially those with an interest in very low-carbohydrate diets. Stefansson documented the fact that the Inuit diet consisted of about 90% meat and fish; Inuit would often go 6 to 9 months a year eating nothing but meat and fish—essentially, a no-carbohydrate diet. He found that he and his fellow European-descent explorers were also perfectly healthy on such a diet. When medical authorities questioned him on this, he and a fellow explorer agreed to undertake a study under the auspices of the Journal of the American Medical Association to demonstrate that they could eat a 100% meat diet in a closely observed laboratory setting for the first several weeks, with paid observers for the rest of an entire year. The results were published in the Journal, and both men were perfectly healthy on such a diet, without vitamin supplementation or anything else in their diet except meat and entrails."[12]

Jean

Post by **tex** » Tue Jun 19, 2012 10:08 am

Here's a link to information on an all-meat diet to prove that it can be safely done (meat is the only food that contains all the essential amino acids):

http://www.biblelife.org/stefansson2.htm

Tex

JFR · Post by **JFR** » Tue Jun 19, 2012 10:29 am

I forgot to add that I eat bone broth too. I used to make a big pot of chicken soup weekly but I am reactive to chicken (which I kinda knew and enterolab confirmed) so have just this week started making broth from pig bones and it came out really well, gelled up nicely, and provides a lot of minerals plus glutamine (the same amino acid that some people here take in supplement form).

Jean

draperygoddess · Post by **draperygoddess** » Tue Jun 19, 2012 10:52 am

Wow, I had no idea so many of us were already doing this! That sure is encouraging.

Tex, the ingredients in the cereal were rice flour, rice bran, raisin juice concentrate, honey, and salt. I do suspect that the tapioca and/or sorghum added to my discomfort, but I was feeling the effects of that cereal within half an hour--which was a couple of hours before I did the pancakes. I have had my suspicions about rice before, which is why I hadn't been eating it lately. I was having gurgling after eating chicken, veggies and rice stirfry, and when I cut out the rice I didn't have the gurgling. Also found that GF Rice Krispie treats didn't agree with me too well. All this comes back to my conclusion that it's not just one of the substitute flours, but several, and possibly all, of them. I have yet to find any combination that works for me. For now, it just seems safer to eliminate them all.

Thankfully, most meats seem to be okay with me. I have had some problems with pork in the past, but now I think it was not the pork itself, but what it was injected with (same thing with frozen chicken breasts--I've been getting the non-injected ones from GFS Marketplace and doing fine with them). I'm careful now to buy only fresh pork with no additives. I'm doing Boar's Head lunchmeat, but no one around me carries their "All Natural" products. Nuts are out at this point--I don't know if I'm truly reactive or if I just can't handle them yet, but they're not my friend.

What about calcium? How do you tackle that one?

Post by **tex** » Tue Jun 19, 2012 12:15 pm

Cynthia wrote:Tex, the ingredients in the cereal were rice flour, rice bran, raisin juice concentrate, honey, and salt. I do suspect that the tapioca and/or sorghum added to my discomfort, but I was feeling the effects of that cereal within half an hour--which was a couple of hours before I did the pancakes. I have had my suspicions about rice before, which is why I hadn't been eating it lately. I was having gurgling after eating chicken, veggies and rice stirfry, and when I cut out the rice I didn't have the gurgling. Also found that GF Rice Krispie treats didn't agree with me too well. All this comes back to my conclusion that it's not just one of the substitute flours, but several, and possibly all, of them. I have yet to find any combination that works for me. For now, it just seems safer to eliminate them all.

It's certainly possible to be sensitive to rice protein, but compared with wheat, it's a much weaker antigen (both by volume and by reactivity potential). Rice has two protein fractions that can cause reactions for some people (orzenin and orcenin). Similar to corn, rice has only about 7% crude protein, so if 5% of that is storage protein, then only 0.35% of rice is orzenin. Other than the hordenin in barley, rice is the only other grain besides wheat for which a glutelin fraction is commonly considered (remember gluten is the sum of the prolamine fraction of the total protein plus the glutelin fraction). The glutelin fraction in wheat is known as glutenin, and the glutelin fraction in rice is known as orycenin. I have no idea what the percentage of orcenin in rice protein might be, but it's probably much smaller than the orzenin fraction.

By comparison, almost 9% of a kernel of wheat is gluten, and slightly less than 6% is gliadin. So by a comparison of prolamin protein volume alone, wheat is roughly 18 times as potent as rice.

Cynthia wrote:What about calcium? How do you tackle that one?

http://www.ellenskitchen.com/faqs/calcium.html

Tex

brandy · Post by **brandy** » Tue Jun 19, 2012 3:02 pm

Hi Cynthia,

Have you read the Loren Cordain books? I found them to be helpful. Brandy

draperygoddess · Post by **draperygoddess** » Tue Jun 19, 2012 6:58 pm

Tex,

So, in your opinion, is it more likely I'm reacting to something other than the rice? There just wasn't much else in that cereal...

Brandy,

I haven't read the books yet, but I'm going to check my library for them. I'm not sure if I could really do Paleo without being able to eat nuts or legumes, but the book might have some answers to the non-grain thing.

Thanks to both of you!

Post by **tex** » Tue Jun 19, 2012 7:52 pm

Cynthia,

No, it's certainly possible that you might be reacting to rice. I was just pointing out that rice gluten is not nearly as potent as wheat gluten, but that just means that it might take more of it to trigger a reaction. Once we're sensitive to a protein though, that's sort of a moot point because once we start producing antibodies, we can react to such tiny amounts.

Incidentally, legumes are not allowed on the paleo diet, because they did not exist in any significant numbers prior to the neolithic period.

Tex

MBombardier · Post by **MBombardier** » Tue Jun 19, 2012 10:48 pm

This is a great website and has a list of all the best Paleo books on the right side, including Cordain's. I use Everyday Paleo a lot. I also have the Primal Blueprint Cookbook and like it.

http://paleofood.com/

The PaleoFood Cookbook

1270 Recipes in 46 Chapters. Recipes are: gluten-free, grain-free, bean-free, potato-free, dairy-free, and sugar-free.
Ingredients used: meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, tree nuts, vegetables, roots, fruit, berries, mushrooms, herbs and spice seeds.
None of these recipes were taken from other paleo diet (or Crossfit) websites.

I can't do eggs or nuts at the moment, but there are still plenty of other recipes for safe, nourishing, and delicious food.

Also, if you are on Pinterest, you can search for boards to follow that are gluten, casein, soy, corn, sugar, egg, etc., etc., free, SCD, GAPS, vegan, or any combination thereof. Good people to follow are Karen Aldrich (The Gluten-Free Goddess) and Brittany Angel (Real Sustenance). And me.

Gloria · Post by **Gloria** » Tue Jun 19, 2012 11:09 pm

Hi Cindy,

I'm not grain-free. I eat corn flour, and it's a big part of my diet. I also eat almond flour. These two flours allow me to make muffins, pancakes, waffles and tortillas, preventing my weight from dropping to 91 lbs. again. If you can eat quinoa and almond, you have a good baking combination. Add potato starch for the "starch" ingredient.

I've eliminated quinoa, rice, sorghum, millet, buckwheat, and amaranth in addition to wheat flour. I've been at this for five years, but didn't start reacting to rice and quinoa until last year. It is possible to be intolerant to rice, unfortunately. Not many of us are, but there are a few here.

If you are concerned about nutrition, I'd suggest that you use a spreadsheet or an online nutritional program to analyze what you're getting from your diet. It's good feedback and will help you see where you're deficient and if your supplements are taking up the deficiencies. We'd all rather get our nutrients from food, but it's not always possible with this disease.

Good luck. It's never easy to realize we have to eliminate another food. I'm at the point where I've decided I can't and I'll just deal with the consequences and take meds to help reduce the symptoms.

Gloria

JFR · Post by **JFR** » Wed Jun 20, 2012 4:45 am

Gloria wrote:Hi Cindy,

It is possible to be intolerant to rice, unfortunately. Not many of us are, but there are a few here.

If you are concerned about nutrition, I'd suggest that you use a spreadsheet or an online nutritional program to analyze what you're getting from your diet. It's good feedback and will help you see where you're deficient and if your supplements are taking up the deficiencies. We'd all rather get our nutrients from food, but it's not always possible with this disease.

I use Fitday (www.Fitday.com) to figure out nutrients and supplement accordingly. There's also a site called Nutrition Data (http://nutritiondata.self.com/) that provides even more nutrition info. I also am reactive to rice. Dr Bernstein (low carb diabetes doctor) tells people that to gain weight add protein and to lower weight lower protein. His is a very low carb no grain diet for people with diabetes. We are used to thinking that carbs and especially grains are essential for us but in fact carbs are the only non-essential macro-nutrient. The other 2, protein and fat, must be ingested to stay alive but carbs are entirely optional. It is hard to change eating habits, especially when those eating habits go against the grain of our cultural beliefs. Even though I only joined this site a few months ago I have been eating primarily a paleo diet for about a decade. I wasn't being strict enough for my fussy system and I was eating dairy (distinctly non-paleo) and eggs and some other foods I react to so it didn't really solve my intestinal issues, but before coming here I was already used to grain-free and convinced that it was a healthy way to go, so it has been easier for me than it probably is for other people, less of a shock to mind and body. Somehow we each must find our own way through all this.

Another site I have found helpful is http://chriskresser.com/

Jean