Routines'R'us

On my recent Asia trip, I had to participate in a business dinner at a Japanese restaurant. In case you don't know my food habits, here is a short summary of what I don't or can't eat:

1. I am Vegetarian (so no meat)

2. Allergic to Peanuts and Sesame seeds (so that rules out certain places like Thai restaurants, select Chinese restaurants that use Sesame oil, etc.)

3. Allergic to shellfish (not that I eat fish, but if they cook using the same utensils or some of that gets transferred, I still get a reaction

4. Allergic to eggplants (that rules out a few dishes in middle eastern , Italian restaurants)

5. Allergic to select fruits/vegetables (simple check is, if it has fine hair on the skin, I can get rashes just by touching them, if I eat them there will be othe side effects)

Usually when I eat things on the allergy list the symptoms are skin eruption, wheezing followed by a throbbing pain in the base of my head behind my left ear followed by extreme light and sound sensitivity which is immediately followed by violent throwing up till my stomach is empty. Then I sleep out of sheer exhaustion and after two or three hours wake up like the world is a rosy place and feel on top of the world. 

This happens periodically. With a lot of food restrictions, I have managed to make these "food poisoning" episodes (as my parents and wife call it) less frequent. The problem though is that when they hit me these days, the magnitude of the episodes is increasing on a Logarithmic scale. It is like I exchanged frequent mild tremors for a Banda Aceh type quake! 

Now given all this, I do NOT carry Epi pens with me because my allergies are not the deadly kind. On the Immunologist scale, most of them are a level 4 or 3 reaction. Severe enough to end up immobilized for the short term. Then again, I have not tempted fate by deliberately exposing myself to high levels of these "toxins".

Recently I am hearing that the reasons for this are :

- that kids who are not exposed to lot of different foods as babies are more prone to getting food allergies (eating street food as kids can help was one idea that was talked about)

- some of these are genetically transmitted triggers (my had had excema as a child)

- some of these are environmentally acquired (dust allergies etc.)

I am also told by friends who read the "news" that :

- reintroduction of these allergens in small quantities helps overcome this as long as it is done at a young age

- one can naturally outgrow allergies to certain foods and develop allergies to new ones, if one is prone to such allergies and that one has to periodically "test" for such changes (a colleague of mine has developed an allergy to almonds close to the age of 50! )

- allergy to peanuts could be allergy only to dry roasted american peanuts vs. boiled Indian peanuts (this I can actually vouch for.. I can eat a few Indian peanuts without getting a severe reaction but the large US peanut gives me rashes within a few hours)

- There are "eastern treatments" that can work for this ranging from :

   - oil pulling (gargling sesame oil in your mouth for 10 minutes and spitting it out for 30 days)

   - going to some place in Andhra where they take a small live fish and push it down your throat 

   - going to kerala where they put a flour dough boundary on your stomach and fill the surface of the stomach with some herbal liquid which absorbs the poison from your insides 

etc. etc. It may not be fair for me to clump all of them under same bucket as some come with more evidence, recommendations, different thumbs up/down ratio on Youtube comments, and other metrics which are equally helpful in evaluating cures. In spite of having a lot of respect of eastern medicine (our elders were wise) but being a product of western HEROS thinking (Hypothesis, Experiment, Result, Original Schedule, Status .. for those who are wondering), have not tried any of the pulling, fish shoving or toxin absorbing stomach swimming pool treatments. 

Instead I have always :

- Watched what I eat

- Mostly eat only home cooked food (take my lunch with me to work every day)

- eat the same thing on trips (after doing trial and error in different restaurants, different dishes, and taking my own food with me for the most part of the trip)

I am also not fun at business dinners because of my abstinence from alcohol, sodas and coffee. So it is either sipping water without ice, orange / apple juice or apple cider or tea!

On this recent dinner, the chef was challenged to know of my Vegetarian status and allergy status. So he got "creative".  I get the "poor guy" looks from people which baffles me. Even if I am allergic to a subset of food, there is still plenty I can eat! 

The restaurant came up with mountain yam cooked and extruded to look like pasta, a funnel of asparagus, cucumbers, and other greens in a yogurt sauce, something called dragons beard leaf, some other stuff that folks had difficulty translating into English.. 

Ate or tasted stuff that was translateable and found it to be tasty after mentally preparing myself for the worst. Then they gave a sauce which had some green wasabi stuff, white stuff and a powder that had to be mixed in the sauce.. (could clearly smell sesame seeds on that powder and avoided it) for the yam to be dipped in and it had a sambar flavor! 

There were some dishes that were simply shutting down my nose with the smell and those I passed on to my fellow diners. The tea was great as was the conversation and I loved the fact that everyone in the table at least respected my "sensitivities" in a literal sense. Everyone else in that table had a penchant for fine wine, high proof alcohol, exotic dishes of every kind from everywhere in the world. In short, I was feeling like Buddha dining with the Anthony Bourdain family! 

After that dinner, I did not go through the usual throw up routine. There was mild rashes and a stomach upset for 48 hours, but the rashes are gone now and the stomach is well set after a day of dieting only on bananas, oranges, grapes, almonds and coconut water. 

This weekend, I plan to start eating one sesame seed and one peanut on saturday, increase it to two each two days later, four four days later and see how far it goes. I have to see what the breaking point is. Worse case I will drink salt water and throw up.  Was inspired by one person at the table who drank like a fish who could not handle alcohol at all as a young man but he told me he conditioned himself to it over time as his job involved a lot of wining and dining! 

Will post the results HEROS table style and let you know if shocking the system on a non linear scale helps condition it better. Somehow my initial "gut feel" is that a linear increase my condition it less. While my experiement is still not as agressive when it comes to the max, it is still a lot less than eating a full ellu urundai! 

Routines may be good for me, but I think those periodic throw up sessions after "food poisoning" were actually doing me some good in a self regulating way. 

Yoga has definitely helped with getting back to normal post such attacks, but even doing yoga 200 times a year for more than six years has not eliminated the food related triggers. There are other triggers like dust, old library books, certain incense sticks, perfumes etc. that I have improved with respect to tolerance levels.

(these topics have all been broached before in various forms.. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here..   but going for the experiment this time).

Will come back with data!

From Madras to Monsanto...

When we were young, the tradition in South Indian brahmin families was to give newborn kids something called "Urai Marundhu". Urai is grinding and Marundhu is medicine. The recipe for this medicine was handed down from generation to generation and it was not something that was written down as far as I know. 

Pretty sure that with the modern generation of "all knowing" women who simply dismiss tradition thanks to their Westernization and belief that Google has all the answers you need to raise a child, these recipes will be gone. Even if the recipes survive, the select roots and seeds that one needs to make this medicine will disappear from the planet. 

Now coming to the details of said medicine, it is a combination of 7-8 seeds, dried fruit pods and rhizomes that are ground into a paste, then put in a bath of cow dung (that is the best way to describe it and the Tamil term they use is "padam pannaradhu"), and finally a small part of this paste is given to newborns along with mothers milk.

Grandmas will say "this will help the babies with digestion for the rest of their life". They also have another quick fix recipe for babies with gas problems using "Omam sorasam" which is an extract of a seed that is similar to Thyme called Ajwain or Omam.

Modern mothers will prefer to give drops of Mylecon or Woodwards gripe water. I am reasonably sure that the mechanism for instant gas relief is similar in the store bought medicine and the natural remedy if you study it using the typical western scientific method. 

Now if you pop quiz grandma on the details of why the medicine has to be kept surrounded by cow dung, they will tell you that the cow dung imparts certain digestive qualities that come from the cow's intestines to the babies and it is essential for the kid to help digest food, in this case mostly plant food!

Maybe the term for bacteria didn't exist in their vocabulary! You can go ask your doctor and it is a fact that folks who are vegetarian all their life will have issues when they suddenly try eating meat as they might not have the bacteria to digest meat in their gut.  It is also true ( I don't need to publish a study to prove this) that antibiotics do a number on vegetarian stomachs as they kill good and bad bacteria in the process. My family doctor used to prescribe a "only thachi mammu" (rice with home made yogurt.. read bacteria!) diet when we were on antibiotics to bring our digestion back to normal. I am not sure how much these antibiotics affect folks who eat a predominantly meat based diet or how their sensitivity to a bacterial imbalance is different from vegetarians. If you know of studies, do let me know. If you are a predominant meat eater and you get a loose stomach when you take antibiotics, that is enough of  a study!

Why bring this all up and why drag Monsanto into this? I do not hate Monsanto, but don't love them either. Now, I don't hate Monsanto because they did come up with many new technologies that help feed more people in a planet where the resource distribution is screwed up (a man made problem that was not Monsanto's creation).

However, with the amount of money and influence they have, they do get away with experiments that affect the entire planet, with little or no oversight. This is not just Monsanto.

Take Novartis for example. They came up with Dichlofenac. There are eagles and vultures that are considered holy (as scavengers for dead bodies in certain communities) and as gods representatives in other communities and they are all now on the endangered species list because dichlofenac which goes from dead cow carcases to these birds causes renal failure in the birds. Would they have predicted this? would they have been required to study the effect of dichlofenac containing meat on scavenging birds? Probably not. Should they? 

Monsanto is now synonymous with "Genetically modified" crops. This whole modification seems to be a loose term. The devil is in the details. What exactly is the modification? How does that affect the end product? How do these modifications impact things downstream? On who in which way? Will the "studies" that are required to make these products available to the public be required to test these and to what level of detail? You have to be fair to the Monsanto guys as well. You cannot say "test this on every human genotype and only then we will approve". The world is supposed to work with the greatest good for the greatest many principle. 

That said, just like all crops are not created equal, all people are not created equal either! Our genes are different. A big part of what makes our body is millions of bacteria that have a symbiotic relationship with us. So while it is not possible to test the effect of a Genetically modified crop on "all humans" one has to do enough work to understand what goes downstream. 

Will specifically bring up corn, which is a topic close to my heart. When I came to this country 20 years ago (yes it has been that long in the US), corn was a new thing to me. We did not have corn as a staple food in India. It was something we ate as a treat when we visited the beach in the form of roasted corn. Later we got introduced to "popcorn" which again was not that popular compared to sandwitches, samosas, vada pavs and chai when we went to the movies!  Over the years have seen a proliferation of corn here that we can call it corniferation!

Twenty years ago when you got a cup of Hot Cocoa or Hot chocolate you would assume it contained Milk (or milk powder) and chocolate, and you would be right! Today open up any brand of Hot chocolate and it will have a label which goes something like "As much calcium as a glass of milk" or some such thing to mislead you into thinking that it is comparable to milk. Most of these packets will not list ingredients. If you do get your hands on the big carton itself, the ingredients will show "Corn Syrup, Sugar, etc. etc. and as the fifth or sixth ingredient Whey Protein(some will say from Milk, others won't say from where)! In other words, the hot chocolate of today is nothing but flavored corn syrup. The issue is that over time the messaging and the obfuscation get you to let your guard down in a very systematic way. 

Take Yogurt. Go read the ingredients. Corn starch is now a major part of Yogurt. Why bother feeding corn to the cows, let them convert that to milk, take the time to make cultured yogurt out of it when you can just take corn starch and make that more than 50% of the yogurt?! Now the thing that upsets me is that if this is the logic for economics of scale, then why feed a lot more corn to the cows to get meat! Make corn taste like meat and have it as 50% of sausages or hot dogs. I will bet you money that there will be a revolution in this country if that happens. 

In my opinion, next to guns, the second thing that Americans in general defend as part of their way of life to the outside world, is their right to eat meat and lots of it! Used to think that it is probably part of the amendments because getting veggie food on the highways was a lot more difficult than getting meat of some kind in my early days here.

That meant french fries and milk shakes at McDonalds or Burger King when traveling.  Guess what? Go to the fast food places today and you will see a "subtle" change in the menu board. The Milk Shake with Vanilla, chocolate or strawberry has quietly been replaced with Shakes. I am guessing that these shakes are not milk based anymore and my second guess is that it is also more than 50% corn syrup. There is no ingredient list for this that I can get my hands on, so if you know I am right or way off base, do drop in a note.

Being a vegetarian, my main source of protein is Milk, lentils, the vegetable(singular by intent) that is part of lunch and dinner and the occasional fruit and fruit juice from the local Jamba. The milk that was part of the diet at places outside the house has been replaced by corn. As long as that corn does not have any side effects and the product folks come out and are honest about what is there in the ingredients, then one gets to control the intake. 

Too much of anything is not good for the body. They say in Tamil "Alavukku minjinaal amirthamum visham!" which translates to "When taken in excess, even the nectar of the gods becomes poison!". It is one thing to have corn as part of your diet. It is another thing altogether to have it as almost all of your diet. 

It is just a question of time before my wine drinking friends will find out that their wine is now replaced slowly with 80% corn syrup, 15% paint thinner, 3% grape extract and 2% of other unmentionables! Then you will be buying Organic wine at $2,999 a bottle!

Going back to the topic of Urai Marundhus, not sure how many other communities do something like that. For the record, we did give both our kids the marundhu. Chances are they are more immune to "overcorning" (I should copyright that term) as they were born and raised here but one never knows.

What is more interesting is that western research is slowly catching up to some of this stuff..

Here are some recent links..

a. oral bacteria

b. Dicholfenac causing vulture extinction and why watching the birds at Thirukazhugukundram might be history (My grandpa took me and my brother to see the pair of birds come feed when I was about 9 and still remember it! the photo in wiki is from 1906.. guess it is true that they have been coming for 100's of years. It is always 2 birds and that still makes me think how. there, I have digressed on a reference thread. No wonder I get lost on freeways!)

b. Pacifiers that transfer bacteria from parents to children

c. a study on gut bacteria to which I am ready to go become a specimen

d. Trillions of bacteria that make up human bodies and more on them

e. want to know about "fecal transplants" that might save your life? Well, looks like these guys don't know about Urai Marundhu and Padam parthufying! 

My grandmother would be worth many Ph.D.'s if one tenth of the stuff she knew that was passed on from generation to generation was translated in western scientific jargon! 

I do not expect Monsanto to do a study on the effect of Genetically modified corn( don't know which of those modifications passes on a natural herbicide to the corn itself) on a south Indian vegetarian gut. Even if this thing is extremely hazardous to a very small population, don't think the world would care. It will be collateral damage because that is how the world works these days. For now, if they at least say they have done something drastically different, can at least reduce the intake of the new stuff, see how the body reacts and make a decision to avoid it.

As a person who is allergic to peanuts and sesame seeds and who watches the ingredient list on anything and everything, the new corn variants could have an impact. I do not know for sure, but the only way to protect myself is to do a controlled study (on myself) and then decide!

On yet another side note, Omam (mentioned earlier in this post) contains 50% Thymol, which is a bacteria killer! Apparently european scientists started talking to Egyptian, Iranian and desi grandmas in the late 1700's and finally isolated Thymol as a chemical compound in 1800's and promptly patented it, and found applications to use it as a cure for gum disease, preserve paper, be added to cigarettes for a great flavor and even make shit smell nicer!

Sarcasm apart, the regulatory bodies that allow these modifications can only go so far. The rest is left to the users as a buyer beware. This buyer wants more information to be aware! That is all...

All in a day..

Conversation 1 with Little one just before bedtime

Me : please eat fast and eat more! Only then you will grow big.

LO : I want to be a "mouse kutty"! (and makes a small rat face by pouting her lips. She wants to be a baby mouse)

Me : No. be serious. you have to eat fast. tomorrow morning I want you to eat fast so that we will be on time for school.

LO : Daddy, you know something.. I am not eating because if I don't eat, then I won't become bigger.. if I don't become bigger, then I don't have to get married and go away. I want to stay with you always!

Me : !!!!!!! thinking "We have a big big problem". You can stay with me forever.. even if you get bigger and get married. You can bring your husband and make him also live with us. no problem. just start eating okay?

Conversation 2 with MIL:

MIL : What are you taking a photo of now?

Me : a peppercorn!

MIL : I cannot even see it without my glasses from here...

Me : that is the beauty of this lens. The peppercorn looks like a small pockmarked planet when I zoom into it with this lens.. totally amazing. this makes small things look big!

MIL : Do you have a lens that makes big things look small? if you do, use that and get me a new facebook profile photo!

Me : !!!!!! (hmmm.. maybe I can get another lens for this?!)

Conversation 3 with Jr. earlier this evening:

Me : so tell me what happened in school today?

Jr.: there was an election and we all got to vote on a ballot for student council leaders, sports secretary etc.

Me : this is your first time voting?

Jr.: yes. 3rd graders to 5th graders vote. But you have to be in 4th or 5th grade to stand in an election.

Me : so how did it go

Jr.: the people who were in the election had to put signs out everywhere in the school. then they held the signs and shouted "I am responsible. vote for me.." and stuff like that. it was very noisy.

Me : so do you want to stand in the election next year? You aren't exactly responsible but we have one year to get you there! why don't you be sports secretary?

Jr. : well, we have to put way too many posters everywhere

Me : I will help you with it.

Jr.: if you are sports secretary, you get to go clean all the tropies, pump up all the balls and do more work. If you are president you get to announce things in the speaker and ring the bell everyday.

Me : in other words you are saying "why work to get elected and do more work?"

Jr. : exactly. I don't see why they want to shout all day, get elected and do more work.

Me : hmmm.. right now I am not exactly sure if I should coach you on leadership skills or commend you for staying on the sidelines. we will talk about this once amma comes back home. By the way, who did you vote for.

Jr. : I heard them do all the shouting and we had to pick 4 choices out of 5 for all positions. So I picked all the girls.

Me : thinking "great, so the vote pretty much got divvied up along gender lines!"
don't you think it is unfair to just vote for them because they are girls?

Jr. : No! they are also saying they are responsible!

Me : !!!!!!!

So much for democracy. God bless America.

.

The road to happiness

The road to happiness is paved with smiles. Cute little smiles that we get from the little ones.

Considering that San and me have birthday's just around thanksgiving break, we have spent many a celebration at a themepark, and the special ones are in what is supposed to be the happiest place on earth, aka Disneyland.

The irony of it is that as the number of kids went from 0 to 1 to 2, and the kids got older, the happiness somehow seems to be muted, or to be fair, lets say "has mutated"!

This post is a travel through time, to the very same place, over the last 8 years...

1999 : Newly marrieds, jointly celebrating birthdays for the first time, holding hands, walking through the special parade, staying in the park till till closing time, the fireworks, finding out that all it takes to make the Mrs. happy is to get her to toontown, that too after being married for 5 months! The adults could mark the Disneyland map with the best makeout places.

2003 : New parents, taking grandma to show some place outside San Jose before she went back to India.. it was our way of telling the first time grandma that we wanted her to have some fun before she went back with memories of sleepless nights, emergency C-sections and avent bottles! Daddy spent most of the day in the Baby Care room with a sleeping Jr., with two backup bottles of breast milk ready to be warmed up, while mom and grandma went to the various rides and attractions. Finally when all of us stood in the line to take a picture with Mickey, Jr. decided to grab the permed hair of the lady standing in the next section of the serpentine queue and created a little side attaction. By the time we managed to extract that lady's hair from Jr.'s grip, Mickey himself was ready to honor us with some extra photo time! We did not stay for fireworks as it was too cold. Daddy could mark the Disney map with the best Child care places, locations where you could warm a bottle of milk, where to store stuff in an icepack, etc.

2004 : A near miss as we go to Universal Studios and decide against Disney because my parents want to spend a day with my cousin. I told them that the mouse wins hands down, but they didn't listen! Now they have to wait for their turn...

2006: Taking all the maternal great grand parents to see Mickey and Friends, along with grandparents, parents and the kids. An interesting trip where we had enough hands to distract the kids during feeding time, but started having wheelchair issues toward the end of the day. A trip where the parents felt relaxed because the kids were fed and nothing else seemed to matter. By now, daddy had also gotten used to the "we won't be seeing much if we spend all our time feeding the kids!' routine. In short, daddy lowered his expectation on the percentage theme park covered in one day metric. The single brother in law was given some tips from my previous trips, which might come in handy when he gets married! We actually stayed for fireworks and this time, Daddy and mommy know the wheelchair map of Disneyland.

2007: A trip with the cousins, aimed at making the little girls happy. Everything goes well till we go on a ride called "Mr. Toad" and then Jr. gets shocked. She stops eating, has a long drawn face and starts asking philosophical questions like "Why do I have to eat? Why do I have to do ANYTHING?" and freaks us out. We pull out of the park before the evening parade for the first time, with a protesing little one in tow. Jr. has suddenly lost interest in this world and refuses to go on any ride, eat anything, do anything at all, while the little one wants to go on every ride but is either too young or too short to go on anything! We hurried back home, but did manage to break her hunger strike in Legoland the following day. We are still at a loss to understand what happened to her in the park! Did she see something? Did she hear something? Why would a kid suddenly shut down like that? Was it related to the fifth year immunization shot she got earlier in the week? A million questions, none of which matter now, considering she is back to her usual self! We did have some fun when she started smiling again during the afternoon parade but the smiles were few and countable! Daddy and mommy can now show you the fastest way to exit the park!

Guess that shows how a Disney trip evolves with time. Next time (I am sure there will be one more trip, when the little one goes through HER princess phase), we are going to use all the learning from the previous trips and hope to have a great time!

One thing is true, irrespective of the theme park we are visiting. As long as the feedings are on schedule, the kids are okay, the moms are not stressed out and the dads don't have to take the brunt of the abuse for the kids not eating, the trip is a success and everyone comes out happy! If the kids stop cooperating in the eating department, even Disneyland becomes hell on earth!

On the bright side, the whirlwind LEGOLAND trip was good. The girl ate lunch, played, even started dancing again! At dinnertime, she started acting dull again and we just checked out a day ahead and started driving back in the night! Drove through I-5 last night knowing that we could always handle this better when we were home!

Will post pictures and videos of the trip tomorrow.

.

Those arduous few minutes

It is a daily ritual now.

We wake up early in the morning, brush our teeth and start praying to the god of Cheerios!

Swallow, chomp, bite, chew, fast, quickly, we are late, let's call her teacher on the phone, you are going to the street, please, vaayila kozhakaataiya irukku (do you have dumplings in your mouth), etc. etc. in every permutation and combination you can think of!

All to get a 100 or so honey nut cheerios into that little mouth and make sure they continue their one way trip to Jr.'s stomach. Sometimes, they get a free return ticket when Jr. feels double or triple or quadruple teamed (these days even the little one chimes in with "eat", "eat"!)

We are now switching to honey bunches of oats, idly's, dosai's.. etc.. But at the end of the day, the pushing food into the mouth routine continues..

A picture is worth a 1000 words. This one is worth about 73 cheerios!

Do you see the pain in her face? All that suffering! Oh, the humanity! We should be insane to put food into a little girl! What are we thinking?

After a 40-50 minute session of cheerios pushing, we all smile and she races to school with either Mommy or Daddy.

Maybe I should liquify the Cheerios and make her drink it with milk?

Maybe I should invent a system that lets her stomach absorb food through her skin. I could tie a cheerios pack around her stomach as soon as she wakes up, and it would slowly infuse the cheerios into her stomach by lunch break!

These days they are coming up with medicine patches that send medicine through the skin. So why not breakfast? I am hereby laying claim to the food patch for difficult kids!

If anyone actually succeeds at this, please send me a check.. or at least a few free samples!

.