/life/Dairy
So, I'm currently experimenting with a dairy-free diet. Why, you ask?
Well, when I was in Morocco, I had a bona fide asthma attack. There was no denying what it was. It took a fair bit out of me, and though I think I would have been alright without it, I was more than glad to take Clare's inhaler, which cleared things up right away.
The symtoms have been growing steadily, and are primarily of a sort of congestive nature. Kind of like after drinking a nice tall glass of milk. I've cut way back on sugar (which is incidental -- there was relatively little in Morocco, which has made me want it less and diswant it more), and (also incidental, happened just before Morocco) dropped fries ("chips") on account of the fact that, if someone sat down to design a food that would be more disruptive to human health for more people, they'd be hard pressed to do so.
So, amongst all these allegedly incidental dietary changes, I was hard-pressed to order at the pubaurant that we were hard-pressed to find amongst the Friday evening pubularity in Dublin. So I ordered lamb stew. Weird.
There's a host of things that have changed as part of moving to Dublin. I think my lungs are not one of them, at least inherently. I'm told that environmental particulate standards are much weaker here, and there's certainly more diesel engines on the roads. And then there's food -- a slow slide away from a strict vegetarian diet, with increasingly common dabblings towards dead animals. More junk at work. And lots more beer, of course. And whiskey. Surely that's good for you, though, right?
The weather is different, of course. As are the housing standards, heating standards, and air exchange standards. My current place is fairly damp, with black mould growing if we don't work hard to air the place out, which is difficult because it's ground floor and street-facing, so we can only open the windows when we're around. This would be the obvious candidate, except that things were reasonably bad last winter, before I had moved in here.
So, there's plenty to try over the next few months, as I try to avoid medicating the symptoms away. Asthma's symptoms -- closure of the lung's passage ways -- seem fairly reasonable to me as a reaction to toxins. Paul's suggestion to wear a face mask at least when commuting seems like a reasonable second try. I went around trying to find a Peak Flow Meter, which gives a metric on lung health (around both a personal baseline and published expectations based on height, gender and age) to try and lend some actual validity to my efforts, but neither of the two pharmacies I found had the right thing in stock.
So for now, out with dairy. Which is in a lot of things. Between sugar, dairy and fries -- and by the same argument, crisps/chips, but that one is a bit harder to maintain since I like them more -- there's almost no snacks at work I can eat. Oh the travesty, free luxury snacks not varied enough.
Comments
Tony wrote
I wasn't aware that diesel engines generated more pollution than gasoline ones. Do you know why this is?
Also, does a peak flow meter measure more than just pulmonary capacity?
Rob wrote
Diesel engines generate more particulate (carbon + misc particles from imperfect combustion; think of the black puffs of smoke you sometimes see coming out of a big semi truck). A modern well-maintained diesel is very clean, but Dublin is not full of modern well-maintained diesels. :-)
Peak flow meter measures your peak flow, in volume/time, of a rapid exhalation. It's a measure of the healthiness (i.e. unblockedness) of your lungs.
