A Fat Chance

I suffer from intestinal lymphangiectasia, an extremely rare disorder which gave me a chance to change my life. A fat chance.

Name:
Location: Pisa, Tuscany, Italy

Medical student (Psychiatry), online and face-to-face facilitation, CoP practitioner, writer for and about mental illness (mainly in psychiatric rehabilitation, volunteerism and ICT) but also facilitation nonprofit and CoPs, person with mental illness in recovery.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

EFAs help fat absorption

As I care to remember, it's not in my head.

IL hugely impairs fat absorption. Impaired fat absorption means you have less essential fatty acids (EFAs) in your body. Less EFAs impairs fat absorption, which means your tolerance toward fats is lower which in turn means you'll absorb less EFAs.

In the end you'll be taking MCT but be completely unable to eat "regular" food, and still symptomatic for the rest.

Look here if you don't believe me.... start eating more EFAs and wean yourself off of MCTs... your tolerance for fats will magically be better. You won't be healed but being able to tolerate 25-30 gr a day will mean having a life.

Birthday Cake

My own thresholds are: 30 gr overall daily fats and each meal 3% fat content or lower (I can tolerate 35 for 1-2 days, but will start doing poorly at 40) so don't tell me I don't have it just because you don't like what I'm writing.

I just celebrated my birthday few days ago and of course I wanted a cake, and a real one.

My choice went toward a cake composed of merengue and whipped raw cream (freshly whipped, with no addictives, and then frozen). Raw stuff helps my bowel digest the fats by transforming them into short chain tryglycerides, and freshly whipping the cream helps me avoiding preservative (such as transfats and mono and dyglycerides) that make my bowel even more intolerant to fats.

I ate the slice of cake with 1 cup of skim milk in order to dilute the fat content of the cream (which is lower than unwhipped cream, since by whipping it you introduce air in it *wink*).

Basically the cake I ate was 50% merengue and 50% whipped cream. I ate a 40 gr slice (pretty big uh?), which had 20 gr of cream, which in turn had around 6 grams of fats and as I said I drank 1 cup of skim milk to dilute the content (250 gr milk plus 40 gr cake means 290-300 gr total, divided by 6 means 2% fat content).

This is to say there is a way out of tasteless food ;)

Incidentally I just got my blood work from the lab... from 2 gr albumin (and edema) of november, I am at 3.1 and no edema, so it's definitely working, and it might work for somebody else.