I don't know, I haven't ever looked. I make my own.

But if you do use dairy you might try goat milk kefir, I think that works pretty well for me.

I hope you return someday, and please give us an update about your health and your experiences with the low fructose diet.

Lil' Annie, thanks so much for your encouragement. I've been off this forum for over 2 years. Can't believe it's been that long! I always found lots of good info here, not to mention entertainment, but I'm so busy I've had a hard time keeping up.

My last post to this thread was Dec. 2006. Here's an update since then, and I'll try to be concise.

Dec. 2006: Elimination of fruit led me to add dairy back into my diet big time. Big mistake. I ended up with severe malabsorption. I can tolerate a little dairy now but mostly avoid it.

Early 2007: Ate a lot of squash, beets, and carrots for my vegetable choices to compensate for lack of fruit. I'm always seeking the sweet side of food. Eventually I realized my joint pain was continuing because of the fructose content of these. Switched to primarily green vegetables.

Early 2008: Not a food issue but a very important revelation for me: The hand and body lotion I had been using for some 25 years, which contained barley extract (gluten) was contributing greatly to the joint pain in my hands.

2007 & 2008: Continuing problems with calcium-oxalate kidney stones, most likely brought on by overconsumption of nuts. Nuts are in and out of my diet now. I'm hungry and they're a good snack, but the consequences can be pretty awful for me.

Today: I consume eggs, beef, poultry, green vegetables, seeds, coffee (with agave nectar and coconut milk), and dry red wine (14% alcohol or higher, which means the sugar has been turned into alcohol). I try to avoid all grains, all fruit, dairy, and pork (which causes joint paint as well). I can't do this 100% of the time but I do pretty well. Some fruits are still more tolerable than others for me, such as bananas, while others are killers (e.g., clementines).

This diet sounds awful, I know, but here's the good part. In 2006 I was taking methotrexate, high dose NSAIDs every day, and 10mg of prednisone daily to control my rheumatoid arthritis. Today I am taking 1mg prednisone. That's it. Since drug control of my RA pain is so minimal I can really tell now what affects my joints, be it a lot or a little. Just this week I've started thinking that I may have a problem specifically with corn, and that my assumption that all grains are bad for me may be a little too broad (although gluten is forever off my plate). I ate some tortilla chips the other day and had a wrist that hardly worked the next day. As I reread this thread this morning I see that over 2 years ago I was having a terrible day after eating tortilla chips the night before. Hah!

That's my looong story. I've received little help from doctors, general or specialized, but have learned a lot just through my own trial and error.

If you're trying to avoid fructose then you certainly don't want to be using agave, that stuff is like 90% fructose. It's higher in fructose than HFCS is.

Congrats on the improvement in RA! I think I was misdiagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. Most of my joint pain went away after going grain free.

Hi there!

I was hoping that maybe you were still subscribed to this messagethread, and I thank you for the update.

The first time I had ever heard of Dietary Fructose Intolerance was the day before yesterday, and I am sure that I have it.

Evidentally, there is a great book all about it called, THE SUGAR FIX by Dr. Richard Johnson, but I've not had time to order that, much less read it.

There are two of us here who plan to do an experiment on ourselves, following an EXTREMELY low, or even fructose-FREE diet for a while, to see what happens.

I am just astounded how I've lost 4 pounds after ONE day of extremely low-fructose, as I certainly was NOT low-carb, I don't think, (yogurt, blueberries, oatmeal, rice); but more importantly is that all my digestive symptoms have VANISHED.

As too, has my appetite. I can eat, just fine, but I'm not experiencing any hunger, much less any actual craving. For ANY food.

I hope that you might share your experiences with DFI and a low fructose diet over in this other messagethread:


Fructose Metabolism By The Brain Increases Food Intake And Obesity
LC Research/Media Forum : Active Low-Carber Forums

http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=393715

I knew someone would call me on my inconsistency here. The agave nectar probably keeps me needing my 1mg dose of prednisone. I think I've tried every kind of sweetener under the sun. Agave nectar does cause joint pain but not as much as stevia does, for example. Xylitol isn't so bad but I can't use it regularly or it causes diarrhea. I haven't yet been able to face the idea of giving up coffee altogether, or drinking it without sweetener. I did it a couple of years ago for a few months, but that was before I lost so many food groups. I'm hoping to get there some day.




I am very happy to hear your news about your AS! My thinking about my diagnosis of RA is this: I wasn't misdiagnosed, I had very high rheumatoid factor and CCP numbers, joint pain was symmetrical and in the usual places that RA hits. I think it's likely that many, many cases of RA are caused by food. Probably many other autoimmune disorders can be linked to diet as well. I recall reading quite some time ago that RA didn't exist in the human fossil record until after the introduction of grains.




Lil' Annie I started going through this thread last night and will continue to read through it. I'm just amazed at the interest in and research done in this area in the last couple of years. Thanks for the link! I'm glad you've seen improvement by excluding fructose from your diet. Those aha! moments are almost worth the struggle. There's another woman in my local gluten free Yahoo group who will be interested in this forum and the fructose intolerance threads as well, she had fructose problems before I did and is a font of info on the subject.

CH

Hi again, PaleoCH!!

I am just floored, after one day of eating LOW-fructose, I lost FOUR pounds overnight, and this morning when I weighed myself, they are still gone.

I'm certain that fructose had an inflammatory effect upon me, and obvious the 4 pounds were water-weight from the inflammation -- yesterday, I felt like a dried out old sponge, from which every single molecule of water had been firmly squeezed out.

I first got into veggies & fruits in the 70s, and I am certain that they are behind my exhibiting symptoms associated with celiac disease in the 1990s.

I am just furious that "They" permitted the food industry to flood the market with high fructose corn syrup.

Not that I ever actually ate huge amounts of it, as I was "fresh produce" and beans & legumes, with a little meat on the side type of eater.

However, ALL my digestive problems, which in the past would only disappear were I to fast on either water or on water & coffee -- they've vanished, it was immediate, I think because I've been low carb all year - but NOT low fructose.

I did really well when I did a high protein version of Atkins, but the official Atkins site said to EAT MORE VEGETABLES to virtually everyone.

When I did that, I totally stalled.

So, the first ten days, I lost 12 pounds, and two months later, had lost nothing more, and I'm positive that it's because of all those "healthy" vegetables & fruit.

Say... you are NOT eating hot peppers, are you? Or LOTS of chili?

I've read that lots of people who believed they had terrible arthritis found out that it was a reaction to hot peppers. Weird, hey?

Also, there's LOTS of stuff online about sore aching joints due to infections, sometimes subclinical infections. There's a book that was written about this years ago, but I can't place the title, but when I do, I'll post it for you here.

Take care!

Are you saying you had symptoms similar to celiac disease, or you have celiac disease?


I was also amazed at the difference when I stopped eating fructose, or at least stopped eating large quantities of fruit every day. The joint pain that had been getting worse and worse as I strictly followed the Paleo Diet nearly disappeared, overnight. I was eating a lot of raisins, mixed with nuts, and I think dried fruit is like a little concentrated fructose bomb.

Are you still trying to lose weight? If so I hope eliminating fructose works as a huge kickstart for you.

I eat peppers occasionally, hot and green, but they don't seem to bother me. I'm aware of the potential problem of nightshade vegetables for arthritis, but it doesn't seem to be an issue for me. I also went on a long term antibiotic a few years ago to see if my RA was infection-related, but it brought about no change.

Even if you're eliminating fructose you probably want to continue eating vegetables, mostly green ones. Maybe at some point add back in some non-green vegetables to see how you react.

I get joint pain from avocados, which seem to be an odd category unto themselves. Last time I researched them (and it's been awhile) I couldn't even tell if they were definitively fruit or vegetable, or what their fructose content is. Maybe the USDA site now has that info, I don't think it did when I was puzzling over it.

CH

There's scads of research showing a correlation between fructose consumption and weight gain -- until I learned of Fructose Malabsorption a couple days ago, why I gained so much weight simply never made sense, because vegetables are "SO healthy," --- well, I have no intentions of ever eating another high-fructose fruit or high fructose vegetable ever again in my life.

I just can't believe that they are telling the public to eat NINE servings of fruits & veggies every single day -- when they KNOW that one-third of the population is Fructose INTOLERANT.

It's just unbelievable.

AVOCADO --- FRUIT --- 4 'net' carbs

Total Carbohydrate, g 17.15

Fiber, total dietary g 13.5


Sugars, total g 1.33


Sucrose g 0.12

Glucose (dextrose) g 0.74

Fructose g 0.24

Lactose g 0.00

Maltose g 0.00

Galactose g 0.20

http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/

Have you tried using Maltodextrin or just dextrose in your coffee? It's granulated glucose and has no fructose molecules. (ref )

Patrick

Really?? I was unaware of this. I guess I've missed a lot of research in 2.5 years. If this is discussed in the thread you referred me to earlier I'll get to it in the next few days.

Thanks for the avocado breakdown. Not much fructose, not much in total sugars either, so I don't know why they bother me. Same as pork.



I'll look for them. I recall that I found dextrose somewhere, maybe Whole Foods, a couple of years ago but it was at the end of my sweetener experimentation, it was available in a big bag, and it wasn't cheap. My experiences to that point had been buy a new sweetener in the smallest available container, try it once, have poor results, and give it/throw it away. Now that I'm beyond that cumulative frustration I'll give it a try. Can't recall if I've ever seen maltodextrin for sale, but I'll look. Thanks Patrick!

Christy

I'm uncertain about maltodextrin, but I know for sure that Amazon carries lots of Dextrose - available in various sized amounts:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...on.com+dextrose

Hmm... and it seems there are some interesting comments about maltodextrin over at Amazon.com, but I'm unsure if it's available as a SOLE plain ingredient, all by itself:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...om+maltodextrin

Yesterday, I read in an article that forty-six percent of Europeans have Fructose Malabsorption, but that one-half of them are asymtomatic. And again, that at least one-third of Americans have FM.

Thanks for coming back to talk to us, CH! You're a pioneer - low-fructose is all the rage now.


How about Karo? It turns out that REGULAR corn syrup is almost 100% glucose. And it's cheap. If you buy dextrose, chances are it's just "corn syrup solids," no matter what the price or the label.

But maybe you should talk to Nancy about making the leap - she just gave up coffee completely.