being crude, sorry ... [burp]

Yesterday was our anniversary (proper) and my better half was out of town, which is why we had our celebratory dinner a week early.  Didn't stop me from opening a bottle of sparkling wine and being a bit nutritionally-wicked, anyway....  my dinner was mostly swiss cheese with a few rice-crackers, and i indulged in a dessert of decaf and a couple of sugar-free chocolates.

By 10:00 my stomach was screaming at me, and a betaine-HCl tablet hadn't helped.  Three glasses of champagne plus coffee are more than enough to foul up my stomach acidity, and that much cheese (probably 3 oz.) was unadvisable under the circumstances.  At 11:00 i had a few enzymes, and laid on my left side, waiting for my book to put me to sleep.  I was glad that nobody but the dog was there to hear the ... eructation.  This morning i have that low-acid/please-don't-eat feeling still.  I need to take some more betaine-HCl and see how it goes, before i even have any coffee.

I wonder what other people make of the situation when they have this feeling, who aren't as aware as i am of what it actually means.  It's distinctly possible that they'll translate it as hunger (there's a bit of gurgling going on), and go have themselves a nice bowl of high-fiber cereal.  I can't think of anything more likely to make them feel like hell.

When one has gotten one's nutritional education from television commercials, as so many have, one tends to believe that fiber is a GOOD thing, highly necessary for health.  I can't remember where i originally heard about gutsense.com, but what Konstantin Monastyrsky has to say about it (and what happens with the stomach) is a shock and a revelation.  Now, "Fiber Menace" kinda reminds me of the old adage, "if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail."  HOWEVER ... there's another adage that goes "there can't be a lot of smoke without SOME fire."

I think the truth lies more on KM's end of the continuum -- MY experience inclines me to that belief, as well as the experience of those close to me, and what Dr. Donaldson has to say in ... ahem ... that book i quote ad nauseum.  ;-)  I need to read Dr. Beaumont's book on digestion, too, to round out my education.

What we eat has not just a chemical affect on our physiology, but a "mechanical" one also, as demonstrated by what happens when you try to eat substances that "you" cannot digest.  The stomach's abilities are geared toward breaking down proteins, not the sawdust a lot of people try to feed it.  That sawdust, euphemistically known as FIBER, can only be handled WAAAAAY down the pipeline with the help of our gut-bugs -- which, in the antiseptic-loving, sugar-swilling, "normal" part of our citizenry, tend to be badly misrepresented.  Imagine being a hypothyroid veg*n with a cleanliness phobia, trying to be healthy the CW way....

Well, my rambling about digestion here, at such length, has had one good outcome -- my own feels significantly more normal and appropriate than it did when i began writing it.  It's too late for "the short version," but i'll leave you with a brief wrap-up, that should be instructive and useful:

Stomach acid is our FRIEND.  It not only does a lot of the donkey-work of digesting our appropriate FOOD, it does its best to protect us from nasty buggies who try to manipulate our systems for their own gain.  Buggies like heliobacter pylori, which have cleverly learned to manipulate stomach-acid levels themselves!  Oh, and btw, HP has also recently been identified as having an impact on blood glucose levels as well as its long-known connection with ulcers and cancers....  A lot of problems seem to cluster around bad digestion, don't they?  Last thing you want to do, most of the time, is LOWER your acid levels!