Gluten

Recently, I heard about something called the Paleo diet.  The basic idea is that people didn't evolve to eat grain or dairy, so we should just not eat those things.  You can eat all the meat, eggs, fruits, and veggies you want, but not grain or dairy.  At first, I thought it was a real crock, but with a huge percentage of the people I know going Paleo every day, I became curious about it.  I could see how well it was working out for a lot of people, so I decided to try it out.  I knew Thak would never go for it, so I just started phasing grains out gradually, without telling anyone what I was doing.  We don't use much dairy anyway, so I left that part alone.  Plus, a lot of people do Paleo + raw dairy, and that sounded better to me.

After about a month, we were consuming extremely minimal amounts of grain, and about that time, Thak found what he considered the deal of the century.  Loaves of bread, a type he thought we would actually eat (100% whole wheat, no high fructose corn syrup) on sale, buy one, get one free.  He bought 8 loaves, and boy was he ever pleased with himself.  I think I went 50 shades of pale when he walked through the door with all these loaves of bread.  I just went with it, though, and figured that once it was gone, it was gone, and we wouldn't have to worry about it anymore.  I didn't mention that I had been phasing out grain and that he had basically sabotaged my efforts enormously, because I didn't think it was that big a deal.

With all this bread in the house, it was toast for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, sandwiches for snacks, you name it.  I didn't let them gorge on it unrestricted, but I did let them eat the stuff up because I wanted it gone.  Then it happened.  Erin lost her mind.  She was running from one end of the apartment to the other, just destroying everything in her path.  We'd tell her to stop, and she wouldn't.  She was totally out of control.  The final straw was when she pulled Orren off the couch by his feet, and made him hit his head so hard on the floor that we thought he might have a concussion.  I locked her outside for 15 minutes at that point, just because we needed to get Orren calmed down, and I couldn't do that with her tearing through every room like a tornado.

After we finally got the kids to bed for the night, I realized what had happened.  It was the gluten in the wheat.  She had been receiving very minimal amounts of it for the past month, and then when she got this massive overdose of gluten, it literally made her crazy.  After that, I told Thak what I had been doing, with minimizing grain consumption, and why I was doing it, and that the huge dose of grain that Erin had received in the form of all that bread is probably what caused her to go nuts.

Luckily, he understood my point, and we put Erin on a gluten-free diet for the next week.  She didn't understand why she couldn't have any biscuits when he brothers did, but she did enjoy the extra bacon she got.  She did not understand why she couldn't have a sandwich for lunch, but she did enjoy the extra fruit she got along with her meat and cheese. After a relatively short time of gluten-free diet, she was totally fine. 

We kept her gluten-free for a few more days just so that she could have that much time to sort of reset her system after having that much grain in it, but now we have her on what I call a "gluten-minimal" diet.  We do allow her to have a little bit of grain sometimes, just not much.  She can't handle it.  Some people can, some people can't.  Grain, like any other substance known to man, affects everybody differently.  Erin is sensitive to it.  It's no different than how some people can drink five beers and be fine, but other people are tipsy after one.  Some people can eat all the gluten they want, and not go nuts.  Some people have a very low tolerance for it.  Erin falls into the latter category. 

The main reason we don't go completely gluten-free for her is because a lot of gluten-free foods are full of soy, which is really not a good thing to eat.  I think the healthiest thing we can do for her at this point is to make sure her diet stays low in gluten, through natural means, just focusing on foods that naturally do not contain gluten (basically everything that isn't made of wheat).   I suppose this is one good thing about not qualifying for free or reduced lunch.  It is actually cheaper to pack her lunch, so if she is up here for school next year, we'll have no excuse for allowing her to be exposed to all the gluten in school lunches. 

It's actually really good to know that gluten was affecting her that way.  It's easier to fix things when you know what's wrong.  We'll be explaining to her, little by little, why she can't have much grain, so that she learns to avoid it on her own as she gets older, but for now, we have pretty solid control of what she's eating, so it works pretty well for now.