Ivy, I am not fully up to date, but I know that a decade ago banana plantations were a leading source of organophosphate poisoning in the Third World ! And yes, waay off track, the bananas absorb the pesticides right through the skin, like most fruit peels it is really not nearly as impermeable as most people think. Nowadays the bunches on the trees are covered by a perforated plastic bag impregnated with organophosphates which gradually release but allow the bananas to sweat. I believe, but don't quote me on this, that these are often removed by unprotected workers, who would of course be exposed to large amounts of residue. Very teratogenic, the WHO has released some shocking figures. I have seen those bags on them in the supermarket once in a blue moon - wouldn't go near them. I would never eat a non-organic banana, it is one fruit where if it doesn't say organic, it most assuredly is not; fungicides are in constant on some plantations, because there are fungal diseases that are threatening to wipe out the banana as a species. I'm not found of Alar, but what I have read of the stuff they put on bananas is pretty horrendous - typical of all organophosphates, which (even allowing for scaremongering) I am convinced are marketed by truly insane people.
Yes, the porridge thing was a real eye
opener to me. It was so obviously a case of only one single variable being changed; and it couldn't be the placebo effect, it was something I ate just exactly as before.
Going organic as a cost - well, how much is good health worth ? Back before I saw the nutritional therapist I used to visit a friend on overnight stays to do gardening (where I learned my organic veggie gardening). I used to go away really exhausted, but would oddly enough be more energetic in the days following, which was the reverse of when I did things at home, where I would be exhausted for several days. Eventually the penny dropped....I was eating beautifully cooked organic food - it was all my friend and his wife bought or grew. Yes, it has definitely been worth it for me, I would be in the same shoes as many on this forum I think were it not for my diet; but with rising prices here, some things are going off the menu unless I grow them myself. Pumpkin seeds are now £5.30 a kilo, quinoa flakes are up to £5.37 for 500g. Quinoa of course is a complete food - has all the amino acids used in the body - has the likes of calcium and magnesium in it, and I use it to stabilise my blood sugar by baking bread with it; but at £1 extra per loaf, three loaves a week at least...
I am going to miss it badly, unless I can grow some here. I can see me turning into a farmer. I am just about
to start growing my own sunflowers, and they ain't for the cute li'l birdies !
Fitzy, I had not seen the spinach and sunflower thread, but I will be sure to look, thanks for mentioning it. My nutritional therapist was adamant that 90% of the women she saw, and many of the male patients, were magnesium deficient, and that this was particularly bad in relation to migraine sufferers. Apparently, if you don't have enough magnesium in your nervous system, it gets scavenged from your gut, and you lose the ability to digest; so one of the supplements she prescribed for me was magnesium. Right enough, in many intensively farmed soils, magnesium levels are way down, it is considered too unimportant to bother replenishing in standard commercial fertilisers I believe.
When I was a child I used to visit my uncle, drinking unpasteurised milk from his cow Daisy. Daisy stayed down the road once, being cared for with the cattle of a man who had severe stomach problems. Daisy then got ill, like his cattle, and on a later visit was gone. I never heard anything more about
her....you can see where this is going, can't you ? I won't tell you what happened to him, but it wasn't a happy ending.
Both myself and my wee sister, who stayed there on a couple of holidays, ended up with stomach problems. In retrospect, that was about
the time I started to have repeat bouts of "appendicitis", feeling fatigued and having to eat large quantities of food just to stay skinny. In time, I also lost my eidetic memory, and I would say have suffered chronically low levels of B12.
I reckon that the cows had Johne's Disease, and having done a fair bit of anorak-site surfing, I am persuaded that MAP is the cause of Crohn's (not necessarily the only bacterial pathogen that can cause it, I am willing to accept there may be more) just as it is in Johne's Disease, and that eliminating MAP can cure Crohn's Disease. That is assuming that MAP causes Johne's (it fulfills all Koch's postulates there) and that Johne's Disease and Crohn's Disease are actually the same disease in different species. MAP has been found in 90% of a sampleof CD patients, so there is a known link there. But the reason that I am so willing to accept a pathogenic cause for my disease is simple, and totally subjective. I know that when I am flaring, with fevers and sweats and chills, after a while I will suddenly get better. It feels no different to having chickenpox as a child, and getting over that, or mumps, or any one of the viruses I used to go down with about
once a year. I am having a totally normal immune system response to a pathogen, and when my immune system gets back in control, there is a very charcteristic phase where I feel washed out but lucid and much healthier. Crohn's to me just seems so totally like a bug, for once I have gone with Occam's Razor. I don't pretend this is the whole story, knowing bacteriology there is likely to be co-infection and clades and who knows what, but if I had to bet my life on it....I would. I'm certain, I wouldn't say I can
know.
If you want to know more about
MAP, I suggest you go to YouTube and search for it there, there are some good presentations given by researchers on there. There are also some very good but technical papers detailing the effects of biologics like Humira and Remicade and antibiotics like Cipro, which basically suggest that they cause genetic mutation that makes the infection worse long term; I found them on an extremely quiet, if not totally nerdish, forum that was a gold mine of bacteriology papers. (Which suggested cinnamon and turmeric as alternative treatments.) I think it was Canadian, it might even have been professional, and I got there via Googling "RMAT" and other "anti-MAP" terms, but unfortunately I can't remember names. (It was a long night, I was falling asleep, I just kept surfing because it was all adding up so well for once, it's not often a shaft of illuminating light happens like that, not in my mind anyway
)
And so to bed. I hope it isn't as late with you as it is here, Fitzy, or you are going to need matchsticks to keep your eyes
open at work tomorrow.
