Tales from my fructose free life
Finally, we have arrived in Istanbul! The place we will be calling home for the next six months or longer, we’ll see. Right now, we don’t know what expects us, what experiences await us. But who wants to know everything in advance anyway? What we weren’t expecting: waterfall like rain showers. Thank you for this warm welcome Istanbul! But it’s exactly the excuse you need to withdraw into the cozy kitchen and cook something nice and heartwarming. …
I found a really interesting article about the consumption of fructose on theatlantic.com and didn’t want to deprive you of it. Seeing an article about this topic at The Atlantic gives me the impression that fructose has finally arrived in mass media and therefore in mass consciousness. Which is a good thing after all, don’t you think?
The article itself does not cover fructose malabsorption in particular, but research on fructose in general and is interesting nevertheless. And it makes me feel really good about keeping my fructose intake at a minimum. So why is that? …
Whew, last week was a hectic one, which explains the eight days without a new blog post. This being my third blog week I’m feeling pretty guilty. Blogger’s guilt, I guess.
At the same time I was kind of thankful for a little more thinking time to write this blog post. I knew I still owed you the follow up on my food dos and don’ts….
Last week was my last day at work here in Berlin. I gave up the comfort of being permanently employed to dive into a new adventure. In no less than 18 days we will move to Istanbul! “Yeah, woohoo or yippieh” doesn’t nearly describe how excited I am about this move. But that’s not what this post is about. In any case, I am sure this new adventure will find more than one mention in future posts as I will be sure to let you know about our plans and non-plans for our new life in Istanbul. …
I’d like to share a 15 minute radio report about fructose malabsorption with you today, which I found on Fructose Free Me. The piece aired on Radio National Australia in December and gives a nice introduction on fructose malabsorption. It talks about the hydrogen breath test, which you have to take to find out whether you are fructose intolerant or not and discusses the rise of the disease.
I was surprised that the directors of the show didn’t hold back on the problems and difficulties people with fructose malabsorption suffer from. I’m used to newspaper articles claiming that, for example, “the abandonment of fructose from the daily diet usually leads to full recovery” , while failing to mention how difficult impossible and burdening it is to exclude fructose from one’s daily diet. I could freak out when something of the sorts gets published. But this radio report is different. The directors don’t euphemize fructose malabsorption, but at the same time they manage to give hope that it is still possible to enjoy different foods without fructose.
On a side note, what I find remarkable is that English literature usually refers to fructose malabsorption instead of fructose intolerance, while in Germany it is the other way round. German literature refers to fructose intolerance to describe the disease. I wonder why these differences are made. Does anybody have a clue?
At the end of the show the hosts also talk to Dr. Sue Shepard, who is well known for her work on fructose malabsorption and celiac decease. She introduces the FODMAP diet. You may have heard about this diet, as it is often referred to in English speaking sources. FODMAP stands for “Fermentable, Oligo-, Di-, Mono-saccharides and Polyols” thus summarizing foods that should be avoided when suffering from fructose malabsorption. On a personal level, I figured that it doesn’t make sense to stick to this guide as it eliminates a lot of foods I actually handle pretty well like the mentioned cream or cottage cheese (of course they have to be plain in flavor, no funky ingredients like onion powder etc.) That is why I don’t use FODMAP as a guideline for my daily nutrition.
Enough said, here is the link to the radio show “Tummy troubles: The rise of fructose malabsorption”.
(Source: Radio National)
You should check out the other research articles on Fructose Free Me. If you are gluten-free, it offers some nice gluten-free recipes as well.
It’s one week post launch of Fructopia and the tingling hasn’t stopped yet. After turning the whole blog thing over and over in my mind and testing numerous two blogging platforms for months, I’m pretty surprised how fast everything happened the moment I finally settled for one service. Now I am out and about with a topic that on the one hand is quite intimate, on the other hand affects so many people and still lacks a lot of attention. Time to change that. …
It’s time for the first fructose free recipe!
Baking never aroused much enthusiasm in me. I do like cakes and cookies, but I could never get much out of the process itself. I always felt that a cake took ages to bake and that the funny smell of baking would spread through the entire flat, clinging to my clothes and hair for days. Yuck. And cleaning up the whole mess, the butter, the flour, the eggslime that seems to be in every single corner. No thank you. Cooking on the other hand, oh yeah! I love standing in front of numerous pots and pans and can’t wait for flavors and smells to unfold. So it wasn’t much of a tragedy for me when I found out about my fructose malabsorption. In terms of baking my diagnosis just served as another good reason not to bake. …
Before I knew about my fructose malabsorption, breakfast was something I only thought about after a long night out to sooth my stomach. I usually skipped breakfast and couldn’t wait for lunch time to indulge into hearty portions of pasta, pizza or whatever was on the lunch menu. If I bothered having breakfast I usually grabbed a sandwich at a bakery that was near my office or university. I’m not talking about the kind of mayonnaise dripping sandwiches topped with a half kilo of turkey like most of my American friends are used to. Nope. I’m talking about a simple “belegtes Brötchen”, that’s what we call our sandwiches in Germany. Nothing too unhealthy or heavy, just a bunch of useless carbohydrates. However, by lunch time I often felt hungrier than the times I hadn’t had any breakfast at all. Of course weekends were a different story, but that makes for only 2 out of 7 days a week, right? Either way, I just couldn’t get hold of a healthy breakfast routine. But since I had to throw everything I’ve learned about nutrition (including my personal preferences and eating habits) over board after getting my test results, breakfast was one thing I had to tackle as well….
My first post! Finally! Even though I was desperate to start this blog and also to start helping and getting to know others suffering from fructose malabsorption, it just didn’t happen earlier. You’re probably asking yourselves, what took me so long? Let me tell you: It’s pretty intimidating to finally get the word out on the interwebz. I guess I just wanted to be prepared.
So here we are. Happy birthday Fructopia!
I’m not necessarily better prepared than I was a few months ago, but I just wanted, no, I needed to start. I was tired of only thinking about this blog. I guess that’s the secret to getting anything done that you are planning to do: You just need to start.
Fructopia.
I still remember the day leaving the doctor’s office with an aching stomach, having undergone a two-hour long hydrogen breath test and finally receiving an unfamiliar diagnosis by the name of fructose malabsorption. I left the doctor’s office with more questions than answers, having no idea, what this diagnosis meant. No idea at all. Even a later search on google proved to be tedious and only resulted in tiny bits and pieces of information spread over countless different webpages. Three years have passed and that’s the way things still are. I was lost back then and I was lost for a long time. I had no money to consult a dietician, no one in my community had heard of this deficiency before, even one of my friends who is a doctor hardly had any useful advice to offer me. However, today, I feel much more confident talking about the whole fructose thing. Over time I gathered more and more information and of course experience. The picture is by far not complete, but now I know that fructose malabsorption is not only a 100 piece puzzle, but rather a more elaborate and challenging 1000 piece puzzle.
Fructopia is my playground to report about the daily ups and downs, when suffering from fructose malabsorption. I want to share with you my all time favourite recipes (which I hope will work for you too), product reviews and latest research findings. To some extent I want to become your trusted guide on the daily dos and donts. But above all I want to be positive about fructose malabsorption. I don’t want to whine about not being able to have this food or that food. There is no point wallowing in self-pity, it just makes you feel worse. Instead, I want to tell you about how I make the best of my situation, day by day.
I know it would be presumptuous to say that I want to create more awareness about fructose in general and fructose malabsoption in particular with only this simple blog. I mean who is gonna read the stuff i write about? At most and only if I’m lucky I will have a few readers like myself who also suffer from fructose malabsorption. But maybe together we can make a difference.
Welcome to Fructopia! I’m curious about what lies ahead of us.
Tell me, what lead you here, how did you find your way to Fructopia?
