Spinach and sunflower seeds - part 4

Kiss520

Are you no longer taking any rectal meds?

Kiss520, spinach wont deplete the calcium that is already in your body. It will just cause calcium that is being digested a long with the spinach to not be absorbed as well because spinach has Oxalic acid and it binds with the calcium that you have in the digestive system and causes it to not be absorbed into your body as well. If you ate spinach at night and had calcium containing foods in the morning it would not have any effect on absorption. But either way  once your colon is pretty much healed you should be able to switch the spinach for carrots for your beta carotene as long as you continue to eat other foods high in magnesium  because I rarely eat spinach now but eat a few baby carrots every few days and eat sunflower seeds and peanuts pretty often and continue to be in remission. Spinach also contains a fair amount of magnesium and carrots don't have much at all so if you stop eating the spinach you may have to increase your mag intake a little from other foods.

DanthaMan, Its not so much that I can tell when a flare is coming because I don't even get near to having a flare any more now that I know that beta carotene and magnesium foods heals me. When I was experimenting to see if it was really these foods that heals me I had a few small self induced flares but quickly resolved them by upping my intake of the proper foods(spinach, sunflower seeds etc) but that's about it as far as flares go for me anymore and I don't even experiment with that now so its been smooth sailing for me as far as digestion goes. But I can tell when I get low on mag and Beta C by the way I feel physically and mentally. When I get low on beta carotene I get depressed and have no energy and just feel like I am dragging ass real bad. when I get low on magnesium I also get depressed in kind of a different way and my muscles feel crampy and tight and I get tension in my head and feel uptight. Its hard to explain but these are some of the symptoms I get when they get low. And these symptoms appear to me before any UC symptoms do.

Isn't there a topical way to absorb magnesium as well- epsom salt baths or something? There was a time when I used to take Cal-mag supplements, and they gave me D and tended to flare me due to the laxative efefct of magnesium. I am wondering if perhaps topical absorption of magnesium avoids the laxative effect altogether. I just ordered some pure Sunflower seed butter and will soon give it plus canned and/or frozen spinach a trial run myself.

Katie - I also just made your recipe FINALLY! Is that all the spinach you ate was 2 quesidillas?

Thanks, WishfulMA! I'm still not 100% in remission, but its extremely close. Just a few gurgles and gas issues, but not much else.

The spinach mixture from the recipe feeds me for 3-4 days. Basically I put a little under a 1/2 cup of the mixture on each quesadilla (2 quesadillas total each day).

I did that every day and just recently (within the past two weeks) started trying a different recipe. Hang in there and make sure to give it a full month to see if you have progress. You should write down your number of BMs and symptoms each day, because the change can be very gradual.

WishfulMA, I think you need to eat more nuts and seeds or sunbutter and maybe more spinach too. When I was flaring and then went into remission from the diet I was eating several handfuls of nuts and seeds daily. I don't know if only one tablespoon of sunbutter will cut it. I would add pumpkin seeds to your diet if I was you because they are loaded with magnesium, almonds are also very high in magnesium and peanuts have a fair amount.

Have I said that pumpkin seeds have a lot of magnesium yet?:) sorry to everybody if I sound like a broken record on this forum but I dont know who has read what of things that I have previously wrote

 

Post Edited (Cfromutah) : 11/26/2008 8:01:34 PM (GMT-7)

Katie, if in the next few weeks you still can not reach 100% remission I would ad more high magnesium foods to your diet too and I think that will get you to remission. Even the two tablespoons of sunbutter that you are eating only gives you 25% of the recommended daily allowance of magnesium.

that's possible and that's why I usually recommend other high magnesium foods in addition to the spinach and sunflower seeds, instead of recommending to completely substitute this or that for the sunflower seeds because this or that has more magnesium. Nevertheless, with my experimentation and experience with this diet I am nearly certain it is magnesium and beta carotene that makes this diet work, but there could be more to it. Also I have researched the nutritional content of nuts and seeds and the only thing that I could find exceptionally high in the sunflower seeds that the other nuts and seeds don't have much of is pantothenic acid. I wish somebody would try the diet with just spinach and pumpkin seeds and see if that works. if it does then we could rule out the pantothenic acid and rule out that its just something that's only in the sunflower seeds.

I do also know that beta carotene helps to draw nutrients into the body from the foods that we eat. I think that is one of the big reasons why beta Carotene is important in making this diet work. It sucks the magnesium and other nutrients right into the bloodstream so they can be used throughout the body.

 

Post Edited (Cfromutah) : 11/26/2008 9:10:15 PM (GMT-7)

Calcium and magnesium work hand in hand in the body and they need to be balanced. When you injest a lot of calcium your blood gets an influx of calcium and the body tries to balance the calcium magnesium ratio and draws magnesium from your body, then when your kidneys sense that there is too much of these minerals in your blood the kidneys filter them out, the calcium is often left in the body to be recycled but the magnesium is expelled in the urin. So continiously injesting too much calcium without enough magnesium causes magnesium deficiency. Also in the digestion of these two minerals they compete with each other for obsorbtion. if there is way more calcium being digested with the magnesium then the magnesium has much less of a chance of being obsorbed. Another thing is there are binding sites in the body that hold minerals and the minerals compete for each other for these binding sites, if magnesium is needed in the colon to function properly and the colons mineral binding sites are full of calcium and sodium but not much magnesium then thats not good.  So you need to injest plenty of magnesium in the diet to balance things out and the more calcium you ingest the more magnesium you need to injest.

Also do some research about calcium and magnesium and you will learn that calcium alone does nearly nothing for bone health, magnesium is needed for calcium to be assimulated for the bones.

Post Edited (Cfromutah) : 11/27/2008 7:15:47 AM (GMT-7)

i work out regularly and use the supplement ZMA (zinc magnesium aspartate). it's supposed to help raise testosterone levels and i don't know if it's a placebo effect but i've noticed increases in strength after hitting a plateau. anyways, if any of you workout perhaps you should give ZMA a try (maybe not for the ladies though). not only does it potentially help build muscle but perhaps the extra magnesium will be beneficial for this diet.

Thanks for the feedback, Cfromutah. I do have to be very, very careful with what I eat though... in my case, I have found that if I depart very much from the low carb version of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet that I follow (and I emphasize the low carb part more than I do the Specific Carb part of that diet), then I flare too. It's funny, I have to say, just how absurdly individual our body's reactions or non-reactions to food and supplements are. There are many on this forum who find no symptom correlation to anything they eat. Others, like me, would end up in the hospital if we had a pumpkin pie with ice cream today. Anyway, seeds and beans are out for me, and too much nutbutter would put me over the top. Speaking of oatmeal, a couple months back I decided to be "contrarian" and experiment with eating so-called healthy foods that are forbidden based on my past experience on the diet- starting with oatmeal of which i tried one nice bowl. Love it (it had been a looong time since I tried any cereal) but I did flare within 8 hours. If i used magnesium supplements, I'm sure I'd get nasty D and flare- that has happened to me before with cal-mag supplements, whereas calcium alone is tolerated. (And I really donlt see why magnesium supplements wouldn't do the trick, though I can accept the idea that it has something to do with the relative bioavailbility in food vs. in a caplet or capsule.) I did indulge today probably in 4 or 5 tablespoons of the sunflower butter rather than the 2-3 I had planned- tastes delicious(!), but I'd better stop there and wait and see if I tolerate that much.

I'm very curious, how did you come up with trying this diet, anyway? I've noticed a commonality to many "wonder cures" (not meant to belittle this one, either, since it obviously works for you and some, and who knows, perhaps me too, we'll see) is that for the person who publicizes them, they do indeed seem wondrous, and there follows a stampede of people on forums who get all excited about them, but after that you never hear more from it- it reaches an equilibrium, with it helping some and not helping many others, so it never takes off. As examples, Seth who discovered the value of Elaine Gottschall's SCD and started his own forum for exploring the edge of that diet further; Sheldon and his vit-E enemas; the list goes on and on. I'm going to keep trying the basics of this diet though for at least a month, since it seems quite harmless all in all. Thanks for posting your experience.