Blog: Archive for April, 2003

After a dark evening last night, I'm feeling much better about my decision to not go on a gluten-free diet. This all started a few months ago when I mentioned to my new doctor that I'd had stomach problems for, essentially, my whole life. Being a bit of a go-getter, he thought about it for a while. At my next appointment, he suggested that I might have coeliac sprue. Coeliac sprue, or celiac disease (CD), as it's usually called in the States, is an immune-system disorder whereby gluten molecules trigger an immune response that's directed against the villi that line the small intestine. The villi are like tiny fingers, vastly increasing the surface area of the small intestine. Without them, the body's ability to absorb nutrients drops dramatically. Sufferers are malnourished, lose weight, become anemic, and may develop a nasty skin disease called dermatitis herpetiformis. So, wow. Scary. Turned out there was a blood test, which looks at the levels of antigliadin antibodies (that's IgA AGA and IgG AGA, if you care). I had the test. My levels were high.

So I was off to a specialist; a gastroenterologist. He did more tests—an EGD, a CCK HIDA scan (also called cholescintigraphy), and a colonoscopy.

The conclusions were that I don't have coeliac sprue, that I do have irritable bowel syndrome, and that I should have my gallbladder removed. He also recommended that I go on a gluten-free, high-fiber diet, despite not having coeliac sprue.

A gluten-free diet sounds pretty simple—just don't eat gluten, right?

But gluten turns out to be in almost every food you can imagine. Gluten is found in wheat, rye, or barley. It used to be thought that it was in oats, as well, but recent studies show that gluten in oats is generally the result of wheat contamination.

So wheat, rye, and barley—bread, donuts, cereal, cookies, sure, okay, you could live without those, and there are substitutes available, made from rice, potatoes, and corn, among others.

But, hey, barley's the main ingredient in beer! That's okay, too, I don't really like beer.

And most other alcohol is made from grains that may contain gluten. Well, okay, you could just not drink alcohol at all (even if the alcohol is prepared so that there is no gluten, it could be contaminated later).

But, hey, there's wheat in soy sauce! Not to mention , many salad dressings, and much, much more. Oh, yeah, and anything made with flour, which usually means wheat flour—count out most gravies, soups, and sauces. And almost all fried foods—most of which are breaded. Even tempura, which is usually mostly rice flour, often contains a bit of wheat flour.

Even foods like Rice Krispies turn out to be flavored with malt, which comes from barley.

Take a look at the ingredients list for any food or drink you come across. You'll be surprised just how many things contain gluten. At least you can look at the ingredients in a grocery store before you buy a product. How many restaurants give you a complete list of ingredients with your menu? And even if they did, how could you know that they didn't dust a pan with flour when they were preparing your ostensibly gluten-free meal? Or that they used different oil to fry french fries than they use for breaded chicken or fish? You can't. And if you have coeliac sprue, even tiny amounts of gluten can hurt you.

Hence the depression, relieved by the fact that I don't have (provable) coeliac sprue, along with a bunch of research leading me to conclude that going on the diet without real evidence could actually be a bad thing, as it would prevent real indications from ever appearing.

So I'm better now, although I still have painful stomach problems, and we're kind of back to square one on fixing them.

And now you know one of the big reasons I haven't had a lot to say here lately.

Seen on Slashdot, in an article about an Intel employee being held as a “material witness” to an alleged terrorist plot:

After 9/11, Bush made two statements:

1. “Terrorists hate America because America is a land of freedom and opportunity.”
2. “We intend to attack the root causes of terrorism.”

Sounds like everything is going according to plan.

sigh

Sheldon Pacotti has some interesting points to make about the futility of trying to suppress knowledge in a Salon article.

He points out what seems obvious to me—all the top-down, totalitarian control measures a particular government (for an individual state or for the whole planet) might choose to impose are pointless if there's an underground interested in pursuing and disseminating knowledge. In the Soviet Union, there was samizdat; here and now we have the Internet; tomorrow, who knows? VPNs, wireless networks, and plain old hacks will provide ways to route around the damage imposed by a zealous government. And much of today's most risky technology—biological, chemical, and software—can be done on the cheap, with homemade, duct-taped technology, in basement or attic labs, in abandoned buildings, caves, or maybe next door.

The genie is already out of the bottle. You'll never be safe again. But, then, you never really were. The risk hasn't changed at all since September 11, 2001, only people's perceptions of the risks. What's more likely, your being gunned down on the street, or a hijacked airplane crashing into your office building? Having a fatal car accident or being caught in a terrorist bomb explosion? Catching a fatal disease in general circulation (HIV, hepatitis, influenza) or being infected by a biological agent distributed by a terrorist plot?

Giving up your rights, and my rights, won't save you. The government can't protect you. It knows that. It probably doesn't even care.

But there is a way. If people aren't educated, they won't know they've lost something people used to have. They won't be able to frame questions that challenge the way things are. Chances are, it would never even occur to them. Imagine that future. Look around.
Via Slashdot.

Last night we watched an episode of Unwrapped, which was about people obsessed with different kinds of food. There was a guy with an amazing collection of root-beer memorabilia and equipment, a guy who runs a gourd museum, a guy trying to visit every Starbucks everywhere, and two guys who run a cereal review site. (Hmm. Notice they're all guys?)

Anyway, during the segment on The Empty Bowl (which, by the way, has lots of fun cereal reviews), someone claimed that you could still (or once again) buy Quisp and Kaboom, two cereals I remember from childhood.

A bit of searching turned up Quisp.com, which has some really cute stuff, especially in the “Where've I Been” section and a store where you can—sure enough!—buy the cereal. Unfortunately, you have to buy at least three boxes. I can't remember what Quisp tastes like, so I'm not sure I really want three boxes of it, especially as I'd feel like I had to eat it all, even if it was yucky. (Maybe even especially if it was yucky, as I'd feel guilty giving it away if I couldn't stand eating it myself.)

(There's also a SPUMCO cartoon, if you like that sort of thing.)

I had less luck with finding Kaboom, but given the opinion expressed on Empty Bowl about it, maybe that's a good thing.

I remember they would leave a greasy puddle of colors floating off the marshmallows, and it would just float there. Now I don't mean just a mixed blend of the colors, each individual color including turquoise and magenta would form its own globule in the bowl. And it had the distinct flavor of chemicals.

So says Yobucky

While I'm on cereal, let me just mention how annoyed I get when the cereal companies try to get one spokescreature to endorse a completely different product. The most recent example is some new chocolately cereal (probably with marshmallows) that I saw last week in the grocery store. With Tony the Tiger promoting it. You know—the Frosted Flakes mascot. I'm not even sure that cereal had corn in it (although I bet it has tons of sugar). It's just wrong.

A couple of weeks ago I bought myself a Rotring Initial. My brother had one and liked it a lot, and I wrote with his a bit while I was visiting. He has the “extra fine” nib, and I was surprised by how much ink the pen put out, especially given that I have a core (also Rotring), and its fine nib is very fine (about .5 mm). I also thought the Initial was a bit ugly.

So why'd I get it? Well, I was lusting after a new pen. The core is fun to look at and to write with, but it's kind of big and clunky. It also doesn't clip into things very easily (I noticed early on that the rubbery stuff on the cap was a bit abraded after being clipped into a bag and pulled out a couple of times). As I have to carry around a bunch of keys at work, and often want to take my watch off and put it somewhere safe, I'm out of pockets. So I thought about getting a pen that would be tough enough to survive being in the same pocket with other metal objects.

The Initial doesn't really do well there, either, of course. It's part shiny chrome (the cap and the end of the pen) and part brushed alumninum (the middle). It does, however, have a really clever clip that's hinged so that it moves easily, but still grips a bit.

I was also starting to lust after one of these Pelikan Cities limited edition pens, which go for around $300 each. That's a lot of money for something as easily lost or damaged as a pen, and compared with that, the Initial was a no brainer. [I liked the San Francisco at first, in part because it's the only city in the series I've lived in; but I was later attracted by the Chicago, a black, white, and grey pen that would be similar to the moonbeam laque Parker Sonnet I bought back when I was dumb enough to talk myself into saving a few bucks so I'd have a pen I could use to fill in multipart forms. The bright green Berlin and bright blue Stockholm are nice, too, and I seem to be collecting a variety of green things, especially at work.]

When I first got the Initial, I filled it up with some Purple Haze Private Reserve ink that I'd cleverly ordered. It had exactly the same flow rate as B's pen; maybe even a bit more. It was also surprisingly heavy (B has the half resin/half metal one). And kind of hard to balance, especially if I posted the cap.

But now that I've had it for a while, I find that it's grown on me. It's still pretty heavy, but I'm adjusting. I don't post the cap, and that helps a lot. I discovered that the paper in my Frankin Covey planner is pretty porous; presumably they expect people to be using ballpoints or rollerballs with gel ink or something. The Purple Haze ink (I admit, I was spending a lot of time listening to the Beautiful People's If 60s Were 90s) is also a factor, as it's clearly designed to spread out a bit to make it as light as it appears. But even that's gotten better—I wonder if the pen had some water or some other fluid in it from the factory. In any case, it's a reasonably nice pen, and I'm reasonably happy with it.