Your daily Hedghog.

This was at the bottom of an email I received from Takepart.com .

Actually, I wanted to write about diet, from the main article mentioned in the email.

On my Sjogren's support Facebook groups, everyone is claiming the benefits of their particular diet. Many have gone gluten free or dairy free. Some have gone into the AIP (Autoimmune protocol) or the less restrictive Paleo diet. There are so many 'eat this, not that' posts that many of the people following these groups get confused as to which is the Right diet to follow.

I played around with the "smoothie" diet, as I call it. Replace one meal with a nutritious green smoothie. It was very nice for a while, but I could not stick with it for one reason. Having Sjogrens and having already lost most of my molars, my emotional self wants to be able to chew foods for as long as I am able. I will be restricted to smoothies soon enough.

I then looked into the various forms of the AIP and Paleo diets, which are widely varied. Again, one plan will encourage eating a particular food that another one says to never eat. My belief is they ALL work, but none of them are 'one size fits all.'  There are so many factors in finding out which diet is right for an individual person. Some people are allergic to peanuts but not tree nuts, others are allergic to tree nuts but not peanuts. I knew of one person who was allergic to just Brazil nuts but could eat any other nut without a problem. Thus, a diet that is a perfect fit for one person could be all wrong for another.

With all this in mind I started playing games with my own diet and through trial and error discovered that I can no longer eat raw tomatoes. It was almost by accident that I discovered that almond milk was exasperating my symptoms much more than dairy milk. Walnuts also had to go.

I asked my rheumy about all of this and he said that his only dietary recommendation was to have a plant-based diet, which follows through to the reason I wrote this today. The arguments over the new dietary guidelines seem to hit a lot of points, but no-one seems to argue with the fact that the new guideline promote a plant based diet. Having not read the actual guideline, I don''t know if this means a step away from the grain based guidelines that are currently in place, which I don't follow as I have had a problem with grains for over 20 years now, or if they consider grains to be plant based.

In any event, here is the article that began my rant:

To Meat or Not to Meat