Wine to Water: Lyme Diet

We joke in our household about there being a time called "Beer:30" that is, half past good time for a beer. None of us are complete lushes, but we do like a good glass of wine or beer... or two. Alas, lyme has a way of disrupting many a happy family ritual, and this is one of them.

One of the best things you can do for your body when you have lyme is to start thinking of all time as "Water:30"-- that is, replace your alcohol and soda consumption with increased water intake. So sayeth the patients on today's focus question about dietary changes: what you eat is important, but what you drink actually tops the list of helpful changes.

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As much as any other blog I've written, this one made it painfully clear to me that I started this project leading a little too much with my own curiosity and impatience. I now look at the list of what I surveyed about and it seems woefully inadequate, and a little quirky.

I've learned a lot more in the past couple months about dietary changes people make, and feel like the list I surveyed on could have been at least twice the length it was. I can also see that my curiosity got the better of me: having tried mangosteen juice myself, for instance, I wanted to know if others liked it! Never mind that it hardly ever comes in in our dietary conversations. And my friend Halliday loves aloe juice, so it made the list.

But dairy is missing, as is soy (hmmm... two things I would personally struggle to let go of... interesting, eh? Sigh... humans are so predictable, aren't we?)

So lesson learned: craft the next survey more carefully and with more input from others... and take this one with another grain of salt. (Which fortunately, many of us think is a good idea, according to the second chart, below.)

So here's our charts! First the chart of surveyed items that we've tried eliminating, and then the chart of things we've added or increased our intake of.

So it seems like eliminating alcohol, fast foods and sugar are the core dietary changes to start with. (And while alcohol has occasionally been cited as medically helpful, surely fast foods and sugar are not good for anyone: see Supersize Me if in doubt about this.)

It is interesting to me that eliminating all grains comes out with a higher rating among those who have tried it than either of the subsets (gluten and wheat). This is a pretty radical dietary shift--more so than just eliminating wheat for sure, since it means no baked goods at all--and yet a lot of folks so it has been very helpful to them. Food for thought...

So this looks like: drink a lot of water, eat organic veggies and experiment with having them raw, fermented and juiced. Learn to really love vegetables. While even this advice is not winning universal approval, it seems like a fine place to start if you are new to figuring out what to eat on your diet. (Put more baldly and including advice from above: no Big Macs, yes carrot juice!)

I asked about both adding and removing two items that have fans in either direction: meat and fermented foods. Meat bottoms out both lists, though a few more people said it was helpful to eliminate it than to add it. 

One interesting new piece of research has found a new tick borne meat allergy. This be a symptom of a strain of lyme itself, or simply another tick borne condition ala our coinfections, or a symptom of one of our already known coinfections. I offer those possibilities, because it is clearly not universal to all of us with lyme. Folks who have this emerging condition are surely going to end up in the "eliminate meat" camp. 

It would be interesting to know if folks with lyme but not this allergy benefit more from meat being added (or increased) in their diets. I don't have a way of discerning that from the data collected here, though (in fact wasn't even aware of the meat allergy at the time I put this survey together a mere 2 1/2 months ago). So another question for later.

I'm one of the folks who believe that adding meat helped me a lot in my early days of healing, and we eat some a couple times a week now. Meat is an interesting one since some people start out their lyme journey as vegans and some as 2X/day meat consumers, and everything in between. 

I find myself curious if (again for non-allergic folks) a "meat in moderation" diet might be a good thing, and wish I'd framed these questions a bit differently. What we have here is probably confused data: a former vegetarian would have talked about adding meat and then offered their assessment of whether that helped or not, while someone else might have reduced their consumption and assessed that, but we are talking about a very similar actual consumption level of meat.

Fermented foods were interesting as well because they had an almost identical rating on the eliminate list and the add list. While this is true for everything here to some degree, it seems especially true with these numbers that you'll need to try it out for yourself and see what happens.

I'm imagining it would be important to have the fermented foods be "live" (as opposed to, say,  canned saurkraut, which will have had it's life snuffed in the canning process). Live fermented foods can provide a lot of happy probiotics and also act as a digestive aid for some folks; however, just like we don't let our probiotics sit in the sun and expect them to still work, canning our ferments is going to axe a lot of benefits.

So, obviously a lot more to ask about in the future... in the meantime, bon apetite!