Back Again

So it's been about two years since I typed into the great void of the blogosphere.  I remember I was talking about the joys of oatmeal but I've found something to eclipse that - kippers, yes kippers.  I wouldn't eat them every day mind you and they're not for everybody but recently, while on vacation in Scotland the B and B owner-lady served up kippers.  They were sensational:

Notice there's no bread on the plate.  Well there's some toast on the right but I don't think I ate it.  Truth is I'm finished with bread, and wheat in general for that matter.  I think it was making me ill.  In general, now that  I think about it the less bread I ate the better I felt.  Don't get me wrong, I'm in quite good health, active and all and have been riding a bike to work and staying in reasonable shape but there have always been gremlins making thinks always a bit of a struggle.   And these gremlins are, or were I should say, stiff joints, sometimes painful, muscle pain, occasional mild rashes on my legs, and oh well I might as well admit it, flatulence, not terrible but more than seemed natural and a frequently upset stomach.  So I was a fairly consistent consumer of pain killer drugs and stomach medicine.  Now comes the interesting bit:

About six weeks ago I noticed that it had been about a week since I'd had any pain and I didn't feel as stiff as usual.  This has happened before so I didn't pay much attention to it even though it was rare that it should last for a week.  I also noticed my stomach hadn't been upset for a while.  I should explain: pain in my hips always was accompanied by an upset stomach - always, though not the other way round.

Then I got a cold, quite a severe one.  My colds for quite a lot of years have been accompanied by stiff  and painful joints which I believed was just part of having a cold and I'd take advil, cough suppressant and lots of other junk to feel comfortable.  Oddly though, this time I had no joint pain or upset stomach but the cold was about as bad as it gets.  The cold became 'flu, I had a fever, was off work and quite ill, but no joint pain or stiffness or upset stomach.  Something must have happened and I started racking my brain while I lay convalescing painlessly but feeble.

For a while I'd been buying bread, different kinds of canned fish and fruit to store at work for my lunches.  At the start of this six weeks I was either too busy or too lazy to stock up on bread so I took potatoes to work as a substitute and cooked them there in the microwave.  I also realized that during the same period I'd had no wheat products for breakfast or dinner either; it was purely accidental.  This has continued the whole time.  Six weeks now and no pain!  This hasn't happened before.

Then I tried another bizarre but admittedly not conclusive experiment.  Could I get an upset stomach without stiff hips?  I ate half a raw cabbage and did just that.  I had one recurrence of pain though, I drank a bottle of a fairly strong brand of dark beer when I got over my flu and the pain and upset stomach returned with a vengeance.  It turns out though, after hitting Wikipedia, (yes Jimmy Wales I will contribute to Wikipedia) beer contains wheat glutens.  But could it have been the alcohol?  Well one way to find out, drink some red wine.  Ah yes wine is good - no pain, no upset stomach.  I suppose I could move on to whiskey and gin and brandy just to make sure, all in good time.

I've done some research about the signs and symptoms of wheat & wheat gluten allergies and everything seems to fit with what I felt.