More diet info by JK

Well, what I said was (and people can check the archives): "Little barley, oats, or rye, or beans". My actual consumption is about one serving of green beans or peas a week. That’s about all I can take without starting to go for the hair. I’ll even have an egg occasionally, as long as I don’t have anything else on the list. After nearly six years of this diet, it does get to be a pain, so I’ll cheat a little. But you’re smart; let’s keep this to ourselves.

On tomatoes: I’m not so sure about this, and they are not a fully "bad" food for me. My own experience is that fresh raw tomatoes are bad, but in a way not purely TTM: they fill me with rage. Since I sometimes get the same thing from other citric acid foods, I don’t think it is only the tomato itself. However, I think the major difference between fresh raw tomatoes and nearly every other form of tomatoes is the cooking. Spaghetti sauce and pizza are OK to me. I don’t think cooked tomatoes have been on anyone’s top 10 list, but again, keep a food log and see.

On other vegetables: Salads appear fine. Lettuce, green peppers, carrots, celery, cucumber: the stuff of lunches is just fine for me.

On sandwiches: white bread (for me) appears OK. I am extremely allergic to whole grains (please don’t start me on that story), but standard white bread and rolls and buns are OK. At least one other puller, however, has tested positive to a wheat allergy; again, you have to try it. In terms of a yeast theory, the starch and gluten don’t have much to do with yeast nutrition, and the amount of yeast in the breads themselves are small. And they are dead, and they are the wrong genus, so its not like eating hair roots; they won’t grow.

On soybean oil: I suspect it contains some of the phytosterols that legumes have in general. These are signals to yeast that food is nearby, so start multipying. I avoid it, and use olive oil instead. Soy ("vegetable") oil is impossible to avoid, and a little bit won’t hurt (it’s far more important to avoid sugar, or soy itself); try it and see.

Crackers and chips: Crackers are basically wheat without yeast; they’re fine (to me). Chips are potatoes, also OK (to me), as long as they aren’t in soy/ vegetable oil. Corn oil seems OK.

Nutrasweet: I’ve never touched the stuff, so I don’t know how it affects me. It does affect some people, and with good reason: it provides a nitrogen source to yeasts. I beleive Mike Grant did an experiment with it on his Malassezia culture and found that it was growth stimulant. But in general, you don’t need a lot of it to sweeten foods, so maybe people aren’t getting much of it anyway. In ancy case, some people don’t seem to mind. What may be at work is that one of the more common sources of nutrasweet is Diet Coke, and it may be the caffeine and the cola (and, to some extent, the acidic pH) that are driving people to pull, especially since it is unusual to find a moderate Diet Coke drinker—from what I can see, these folks tend to really guzzle it.

On garlic: the important ingredient is allicin, which is an antifungal.

Tablets should help. But I’ve never tried it.

On acidophilus: I like and eat yogurt and I think it helps. Never done the tablets, and I don’t know how significant or long lasting the flaky scalp effect is. Others will have to comment.

Cuticura, as far as I know, comes as a bar soap. The company has recently gone bankrupt but has been rescued; I think their plans are to continue the product. There is a related soap made by Dial: look for the ingredient "triclosan", which is the antibiotic in it.

John