recovering

WP summary

recovering

going to doctor

universal edibility test

It's been 24 hours since I ate the marrow and had the reaction to it. I haven't tried eating solid food, but I have been drinking sugar water. I don't have any juice or anything in the house, but I needed some kind of energy so that I wouldn't be starving, so I just scooped ordinary sugar into a cup of water. I tried coffee this afternoon and had no problems. I actually didn't react this badly the first time I tried it months ago, when I ate the tiny piece raw - I felt better soon enough to eat more food that same day. Maybe I ate more marrow this time. Also, it's harder to digest when it's cooked (according to various things I've read about raw meat versus cooked meat, raw being faster and easier to digest) so it would be in there longer.

More comments about troubleshooting the diet:

1. This book is still relatively new, and in that way, it is kind of a 'fad,' even though it's actually a study of primitive diets that have existed for thousands of years. It's new to us in the modern USA and we don't know enough details about it yet. The Weston Price Foundation was started in 1999, which means that his book was sitting around for a couple of decades and nobody really knew it existed, but all of a sudden, it's been made more popular and people are becoming aware of it. I found out about it by picking up a leaflet at a natural foods store.

2. Other people are writing books that are associated with the WP book, but weren't actually written by him. There's a cookbook called Nourishing Traditions, which I am reading, and that's one of the books that talks about bone marrow and bone broth. As more people are getting into this movement, there will be conflicts between the things they say, and it won't all be totally consistent.

3. There is a real need for something like this, which makes people get very excited about the book, and I feel that way too. But you can jump into something new and not know how dangerous it can be. For instance, they're talking about eating raw meat. This is something that people really do, but you have to be extremely careful and you have to know what you're doing. You don't just go buy some raw chicken off the shelf at the grocery store and eat it raw. I don't know enough about this yet to even think about trying it. I just don't want people to think they can rush out and do something without knowing how, especially after my own experience with the soup bones.

4. The Universal Edibility Test: There is a description that I found once on a wilderness survival website. It talked about how to try out a new, unfamiliar plant if you were in the wilderness and had to eat something. In that test, it even says you should begin by simply touching the plant against your skin. He says to look for an external skin reaction, though - you'd be expecting to see something like a poison ivy rash - but even so, that would still be a good thing to do, because you'd have a chance to feel symptoms from transdermal poisoning. He might not have known about transdermal absorption of plant poisons, but that test still looks like a really good thing to know how to do.

However, some molecules are too large to go through the skin. The soup bones probably won't cause a bad reaction if you only touch them. I handled them with bare hands and didn't feel anything. You can also try inhaling it - there is a vapor that rises off the broth that I cooked, and that vapor is full of fear and adrenaline, a bad feeling. If you don't react to something you put on your skin, and if you're not sure that the vapor from it is bad, the next thing to do is just try the tiniest amount possible, and wait several minutes for a reaction. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's a tiny dot the size of the period at the end of the sentence. It has to be an extremely small amount.

5. I'm assuming that all internal organs are medicinal and can't just be eaten casually as food. Now, I'm also going to be cautious about all bones and other body parts as well - for instance, I was thinking of trying to make a broth or stock using crayfish, but now I'm not sure if I'll be able to eat that either. I am going to be cautious about everything new that I haven't tried before. Anyway, the bodies of animals produce hormones which are actually used in mainstream medicine, or they used to be in the past - you can get insulin for diabetics from the pancreas of a pig, for instance. So if you just went out and casually ate some pancreas, you might have a life-threatening insulin poisoning attack with extremely low blood sugar, the same way a diabetic does if they do a large dose of insulin. This will cause you to lose energy, pass out, go into convulsions, and you will need an ambulance. (I've seen this happen several times with my diabetic friend.) They then have to give you a shot with some kind of sugar in it - I think it's dextrose but I'm not sure - that doesn't really sound right. I don't think it's glucose, though. So that could happen if you just casually tried to eat pancreas as a 'food' instead of a medicine, in a large amount, without knowing what to expect. But even so, various sources say that some people eat pancreas as a 'food' in other parts of the world.

6. What's the general overall idea of the Weston Price book that I am using as guidance or a 'vision?' It's a couple of things. The most important idea is that facial deformities and crooked, misplaced teeth are NOT hereditary. They're a deformity caused by an unknown something in the modern lifestyle. It might be the diet, or it might be poisons, or it might be something else, but whatever it is, it doesn't happen in primitive societies.

I didn't know this, and nobody else knew it either. Nobody ever tried to explain why my teeth all grew in the wrong place and I had lots of teeth removed and got braces when I was a child. Nobody tried to explain why my jaw and mouth are unusually small - you can see it really clearly in a photo that I put on my MySpace page, where I took a picture of my head from an angle up above, outdoors by the woods, when I first got my camera. Nobody knew that this small jaw was something preventable. That's the main idea: you can prevent these things somehow.

The other main idea is something which lots of other mainstream writers are already saying: it's good to eat lots of seafood. The healthiest cultures he found were eating seafood.

But the non-mainstream or counter-mainstream idea is, if you can't eat seafood, then supposedly, you would benefit from eating more meat, more fat, and more internal organs of the animal, although we'd have to find out how to eat them safely and which ones will cause the fewest 'medicinal' experiences. This is just a general idea and all the details need worked out. Eating more animal fat, not less, is the idea that goes against mainstream beliefs, and avoiding vegetable oils.

I myself won't be using cod liver oil. It goes rancid too easily and will probably go rancid even if you try very hard to take precautions. Also, a few years ago, when I started trying over-the-counter alternative herbal medicine pills (I don't use pills anymore, but I tried them for a while), I also tried some nutrient supplements. One day, I tried a fish oil pill along with a vitamin E pill. The next day, my skin was covered in bruises, and one side of my body was weak as though I had had a stroke. I was walking with a limp on the weak leg. The symptoms were temporary and they disappeared quickly, but I never took another fish oil pill or vitamin E pill ever again.

Anyway, even if people disagree about the details of how to use WP's information, or the details of the particular diets we choose, the overall ideas will still be there.

7. Weston Price might have gotten hoaxed a couple of times by some of the people he talked to. Margaret Mead got hoaxed by the primitive culture she studied. They told her that they didn't know that sex caused pregnancy, so they just had sex as much as they wanted without worrying about it. They told her lots of other things as a joke and she took it all seriously and wrote a big, famous book about it, which made lots of people believe, for a long time, that primitive cultures are full of really stupid, ignorant people who need to be 'saved' by the superior knowledge of the modern world.

However, most of what WP wrote was about the foods he actually saw people eating. I was thinking he might have gotten hoaxed, or lied to, by the one guy who said they prevented scurvy by eating the adrenal glands of the moose. The adrenal glands produce adrenaline, the fight-or-flight hormone, which would make you terrified and full of fear and energy and it would cause a lot of other bad things to happen if you just went and ate a bunch of it. So this just sounds too unbelievable, based on my own experiences of what happens when you eat hormone-producing parts of the body. But I think the majority of the things he wrote came from people who were telling the truth, especially since he watched them eating these foods.

***

I made an appointment to go see a doctor about my strange chest pains. I have to make an appointment just to 'play along' with the expected things to do for my employer. They wanted me to get a doctor's excuse. (Not at McD, but Weis. At McD, your schedule is a lot more flexible and it's much easier for them to cover your shift with somebody else if you're gone. At Weis, we don't have enough people right now, so it is a big deal if I'm gone. So McD didn't react as badly when I said I needed to drastically cut my hours because of a strange heart problem.) I see the doctor as somebody potentially dangerous who is more likely to make my situation much worse, so I am going to be on my guard.

***

I have to mention something else I thought of. I've written about how there is a need to build shielded boxes and shielded rooms that will block out sonic and electromagnetic attacks. This is relevant to the topic of 'unexpected dangers from doing something new.' I've read about how some places are covered with copper sheet metal to protect against electromagnetic interference. My dad visited the satellite dish in Greenbank, West Virginia, where they study outer space, and it's all shielded with copper.

This is one of those unknown dangers where you try to fix one problem, and you cause another problem. Touching and handling copper will probably cause copper poisoning. It goes through the skin like many of the herbs and drugs that I have experiences. I've touched wet copper pennies and tried to use copper hairpins on wet hair, and had bad reactions to it. Large amounts of copper metal will give you strange feelings in your head and you become unable to think properly. It can cause convulsions and vomiting and other symptoms. I can imagine people going out and buying copper sheet metal and trying to build their own shields with it, only to have unexplained problems after handling copper for a few weeks and touching it all the time.

I have a Google Book where I read something about using copper as ayurvedic medicine: Ṣoḍaśāṅgahr̥dayam: essentials of ayurveda
By Priya Vrat Sharma. In that book it mentions "The eight defects of copper." They are: loss of consciousness, giddiness, burning sensation, sweating, nausea, vomiting, anorexia, and restlessness. I experienced those things (a little bit) by touching and handling wet copper.

***

I just saw a black person in the library and this suddenly reminded me of a 'Politically Incorrect Warning' that I have to give about the Weston Price book.  I love the book for showing lots of beautiful pictures of healthy people of all races.  However, in one part of the book, he has a picture of a chimpanzee next to some pictures of black people with facial deformities and he said that there was a resemblance between them.  He also described some African babies running around on all fours as 'behaving like chimpanzees,' or something like that.

When you're visiting Africa, the place where most of the great apes live, when you think about how closely related we are to them, then of course you look at them and see similarities between them and us.  But it will be offensive that he only made the comparisons with some black people in Africa, and not ALL people with facial deformities.

***

I like the Aquatic Apes theory.  There is a theory that humans developed long ago by living a partially aquatic lifestyle where they spent a lot of time in either the ocean or large lake areas, hunting and gathering seafood.  This makes us similar to other mammals that lost their body hair, such as the hippopotamus, the whales, dolphins, and some types of seals or walruses - I know some seals still have fur but not all of them do.

I should disconnect now - there's some stuff I still have to do today and I'm starting to feel better.  It's actually a good thing that I can't get online at home, and have to use the limited-time login at the library.