Food is such an important part of life. I know that sounds a bit trite, but hear me out.
Not only does it sustain life, but it forms so many social functions. What happens at a wedding? Two people pledge their lives to one another, then everyone shares a meal of some form. A birthday – that might be at a restaurant, it might be a BBQ or it might be afternoon tea in the park. A date with a potential lover? Dinner. Someone is sick or has a family member in hospital? Make them food. Funeral or wake? – again, there is food.
I love to feed people. I am a compulsive feeder. Turn up at my house and I will try my hardest to make sure you eat something before you leave. Feeding people was one of the best bits of our recent family holiday. I really think it should be a love language all of its own.
Somehow in today’s society food has decreased in importance. Convenience is valued over quality. Even a lot of medical practitioners fail to see the connection between food and health. Many of my fellow fibro-warriors are quite sure that the food and drink they consume has no baring whatsoever on their symptoms. Maybe for them this is true. But I doubt it.
Every function of the body requires energy to work. Even breathing requires the movement of your diaphragm and intercostal muscles. The energy required for this is manufactured by the body generally in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). That ATP doesn’t just appear in your body, it has to be made. It is produced from fats, carbohydrates or proteins via different methods which essentially all end up in the Krebs cycle. If you want to know more about this, I recommend getting a hold of a good physiology textbook.
But the short version is, the body needs fuel. Hormones like insulin, glucagon, thyroxine and others help your body to convert food to fuel. Those hormones also have to be made by many organs in the body and they also use the food you eat to do this.
Plenty of people say detoxing is crap. That your body does this naturally. That alkaline foods are useless, because your kidneys and your lungs will compensate for any changes in body pH. This is true. But again, this needs energy. Your kidneys and lungs will use up your precious reserves of ATP in regulating your bicarbonate stores and altering your respiratory rate.
People with Fibromyalgia and other chronic illnesses like Myalgic Encephalitis (ME/CFS) and related illnesses are usually running on low ATP. For reasons that are so far unknown, we Fibro sufferers simply don’t produce enough of it. We only have so much in reserve, and when it is gone, it can take days to build it back up. Most of the time, we cannot simply lie down and wait for the ATP levels to build up, so we keep going, using up every single molecule as soon as it is produced. Because even walking to the toilet needs ATP.
The more processed, chemical laden, sugary, transfatty food you put into your body the harder it is for your body to use that food. The more alcohol and caffeine and other stimulants that your liver has to process, then more energy it uses to do this.
If you feed your body good food. A variety of good fats, healthy carbohydrates in the form of lots of vegetables and fruit – and whole grains if your body can cope with them, and healthy proteins then it will make it easier for your body to produce ATP. You also will not be wasting as much ATP on regulatory functions.
Whether you believe in evolution or intelligent design – the result is that our bodies have a relatively small stomach, that produces hydrochloric acid and pepsin – these are things designed to breakdown animal products. My personal opinion is that meat and animal products can form a part of a healthy balanced diet. Out gut microbiome (the bacteria in our gut) digests our carbohydrates – so we need to be looking at this too.
Now, this is just my opinion. I’m not a medical researcher – I have a scientific background in the form of a Veterinary Degree, not human medicine. I am continually reading anything I can find that might relate to my fibro. I have experimented on myself and I KNOW that diet has a direct effect on MY symptoms. I stick to an organic or pesticide free diet, make everything from scratch and consume lots of bone broths and fermented vegetables. If I deviate from this too much, my symptoms are worse, so I stick with it. The FibroTroll wants his organic hippy food, so I have to comply.
I am not saying that diet alone will cure Fibromyalgia. But I do think that it can help, if you find the right one for YOUR body. I have tried many different diets, some helped a little – helped me to identify certain triggers. Some made me worse, like the low salicylate diet. Some made no appreciable difference. So far the one that has helped me the most has been GAPS. This is an intensive gut healing diet and it has allowed me to introduce foods back into my diet that I haven’t been able to eat for years.
There are many teams of researchers around the world who are researching the cause and potential treatments for Fibromyalgia and many other chronic illnesses. Some of these are looking at the intestinal microbiome and my gut feeling (pun intended) is that the answers will stem from here.
