When super foods become kryptonite
For many years now I have taken some interest in trying to put good stuff into my body during the day mainly to ease the guilt of all the alcohol I was putting in it at night. As a result I am always interested in new "super" foods from some far off land with mythical nutritional powers that can replace half of your dietary needs with a single scoop. My latest discovery was a little seed from the Andes known as Quinoa (Keen-Wah). But more about that later in the story.
It all started at about 2am on Monday morning, when I woke up to find myself in what seemed like an arctic winter. I then spent about 20min in that state where you are uncomfortable but not enough to cause you to leave your bed, often experienced when you wake up needing to pee but you'd rather suffer and snooze than get up and do something about it. However by this point I was shivering so violently that I had managed to injure my shoulder so I decided to take some decisive action before I suffered any further injuries and ran around collecting any blanket, towel or dishcloth I could get my hands on and piled back into my bed under a few tons of fabric. Even lying under half of china's yearly blanket production it took me another hour to become warm enough to reduce the shivering from a spastic fit like level down to a mild buzz so I could fall asleep.
The next day when I recanted my experience to friends of the coldest night in Cape Town ever, I found very few could relate. In fact most people told me they had found it to be quite a warm evening. Despite these glaring anomalies in my data I wrote it off to having tiled floors in my room as I had no reason to assume there was anything else afoot as other than a sore shoulder I was feeling no ill effects from the night before.
Jump forward three days and shortly after lunch I realized that something familiar was happening. It was a beautiful sunny day, I was sitting outside soaking up the rays and yet I was shivering like a runway model in the frozen foods section. It was at this point that I realised something was wrong so, preparing for the artic tundra that I knew was rolling in, I suited up in my finest winter wares including an industrial strength hooded jersey and thermal socks and took myself to bed. Ok wait that's not entirely true, I first googled the symptoms for as long as I could muster which was just long enough to get a short list including a massive thyroid malfunction. So now as I lay in bed with things getting appreciably worse, I can really only describe it as catching death, with symptoms such as uncontrollable shaking, a headache straight from the end of Thors hammer, breathing like I'm free-climbing the east face of Everest, Houdini stomach cramps and a general body pain like I had completed a heavy weight MMA fight. All this time I was running through the number of possible Google verified conditions wondering if I can tough this one out or if it was one where I am more likely to die unassisted and should probably go to hospital.
At this point my sister came home. She asked what was wrong, I said I was dying, she said "Ok, I'm going for coffee, see you later". It's always nice to know that during your hour of need you can always count on your family.......to treat you like they always do. Sometime after this I passed out, I think at around 3pm. My sister returned at 5pm, saw me now still in a borderline vegetative state peering out of swollen puffs of skin where my eyelids used to be and kindly diagnosed me as suffering an allergic food reaction with anaphylactic shock symptoms, which she said was very dangerous and that I should have said something as I probably should have gone to hospital, to which I responded "I said I was dying", to which she responded "I thought you were talking shit as always". Fair enough, she has a point. At least with the new diagnosis and all the semi lucid thinking time I had on my hands I started slotting things in to place and thinking back two hours from both of my reactions there was one common factor, I had eaten something with Quinoa. Upon reaching this realisation I passed out, only to wake briefly to eat something for dinner, I have no memory of what it was.
You may be asking how are you eating when you have just had an allergic reaction to food but here's the weird thing, allergies have found some sort of sneaky loophole through the bodies defenses. Unlike with food poisoning where you are guaranteed to evacuate the toxin while looking like a human revolving door in front of the toilet bowl for a few hours, allergens don't necessarily leave, in fact they prefer to stay put and play havoc with your incidental organs such as the heart, the lungs and the central nervous system. Needless to say my last day or two have been a struggle at best and I am really only feeling my chipper self today again with just a massive sinus problem as a reminder of the ordeal.
The moral of the story children is that one man's super food is another man's kryptonite. So let my suffering serve as a cautionary tale and don't make the same mistakes. On a serious note and to add the hint of usefulness to this article I have been eating Quinoa on and off for a year or so and never had a problem until now. All the anecdotal evidence I found suggested the same thing, that it builds up over time but once you show the slightest allergic reaction it becomes exponentially worse each time you consume it. While Quinoa has been considered a low risk allergen until now its usage has also been fairly untested in the western world as its sales are not quite on a par with white bread for example but with its popularity growing I am sure more cases like mine and the others I read about will be found and that classification will change. Speaking of white bread I think I may be introducing it back in to my diet to replace quinoa, I know its crap but rather the devil you know than the devil you don't, right?
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