Open Future Health Blog

The Faulty Ideas in our Heads

For many years, I've eaten more than 5 fruit and vegetable servings a day. Often eight or more. I've always enjoyed fruit. Eating a large serving of fruit with muesli and low-fat milk for breakfast, was my routine for 20+ years. This was the diet that made me fat, because I relied on carbohydrates for energy.

We all have faulty ideas in our heads that stop us adopting a better diet. We are all indoctrinated, full of food propaganda, from family, the education system and the food industry. The most common of those faulty ideas, is, that fat in your diet is bad. (See "Basic Metabolism" in the website, for more about that.) For myself, the "fruit is good for you" idea became a problem.

Some you will know that 30 months ago my research into diet, began with a rash that my doctor and I decided to call, hives, medically called Urticaria. It was certainly some sort of autoimmune problem, causing inflammation. My doctor said I'd never discover what caused it, and that in it's own time it would go away. The problem lasted for more than 12 months.

My Old Fruit Breakfast

During that time, I kept cutting foods out of my diet. Reluctantly, after many months I went gluten free, and then wheat free. That seemed to help, then I discovered the ketogenic diet with a cooked breakfast. There were several health benefits, and the rash went away very slowly. (I was thinking, leaky gut problems; therefore grains were the issue.)

The one food I was sure was "safe" was the fruit I was eating. (The photo shows what was a typical fruit breakfast, after I stopped having meusli with it. Note the bottle of cream. ) The ketogenic diet stopped me eating so much fruit. The rash slowly went away. I was still eating some fruit every day, having not yet connected my "healthy fruit" with my rash.

After many months in ketosis and after losing a lot of weight, at the end of March and through April, this year (2016) there were pears and peaches galore, all from our own trees or the close neighbours. I began to eat large fruit and cream meals for lunch every day. Sometimes, a fruit desert as well in the evening. The sugar in the fruit took me out of ketosis, but I thought that eating seasonal foods, for a short time, would be OK.

After six weeks, I began to develop some itchy skin problems. Then I cooked up some quinces. The bitterness of the quince and the sweetness of the pears and peaches were delicious together. But over three days itchiness increased, and then suddenly, the hives were back. This wasn't just a little patch of hives, it was full blown, over my whole body. I stopped eating fruit. In 24 hours, the hives was hardly visible. In three days later it was gone, although some tendency to have itchy skin remained.

My belief that fruit was healthy to eat, has caused me quite a bit of grief. I suffered for a over a year with chronic hives. Recently, it was only the fact that I was on a restricted diet, that I learned how excess fruit can upset my normal good health. That was a lesson I needed to learn.

I'm still not entirely on top of this problem. It may be that either green tea of coffee influence the development of itchy skin too. Perhaps that only occurs when I've been eating too much fruit. There is another story too. The story about fructose in our diet. That's an area where the science is either unknown or in dispute. I will write about that in the website at some future time.

We all have faulty ideas that undermine out efforts to be healthy. Often the idea that's causing the problem, is the one we are most sure, is no problem at all. That's a rediscovery for me, in my life. And I've seen it repeated several times in science too. For instance Crick and Watson struggled for several years to prove what RNA "did." What they "knew" stopped them from finding the answer. RNA didn't do anything, it was just a messenger.

John Stephen Veitch