Balance Over Time

[Guest guest]

One thing to be aware of: while vegetables are a

good and worthy thing, and a variety of

vegetables can ultimately contribute to good

health, they are NOT utterly critical as part of the daily diet.

Hope you'll forgive me for dragging my Dachshund

Duo in here, but they ARE my furkids! Over the

Christmas Shopping Frenzy Season in 2002, I was

working two extra days a week and flat forgot to

grind enough vegetables for the bratlings to last

the season. (It happened again in 2005, after

Hurricane Katrina, when I was working full time

and our electricity service was, to say the least, dicey.)

Dogs don't have the flat grinding surfaces we

humans do for mashing and breaking up vegetables

so the nutrients can be extracted; wild canids

normally get their veggies pre-digested from the

stomachs of their prey. To simulate this, I

grind/puree various vegetables, and pack them

into ice cube trays, freeze and store the cubes,

and then they get two cubes of veggies and one

cube of red meat (bison if I can get it, venison,

ground round, sometimes liver) for their breakfast.

We ran out of veggies the second week of

December, so Harry just gave them extra meat for

their breakfast. (They get raw, meaty bones for

dinner, and get their minerals from the bones.)

By the time the Shopping Frenzy was over (after

New Year's) and I was back on a normal schedule

and ground the veggies, my crew was delighted to

see them. In fact, they begged a small bowl of

them right there as I was preparing them.

BUT -- my point is that they didn't suffer any

ill health from going a month or so without fresh vegetables.

We are so conditioned by modern agro-business

that we absolutely have to have every meal

properly balanced (because they want us to buy

their products!) that we sometimes forget that

for many hundreds of years our food came in

cycles dictated by the seasons of the year --

which could include no green vegetables for up to

five months at a time, since if you couldn't grow

it and store it, you couldn't eat it.

We are also conditioned by modern agro-business

that we must have variety. Our ancestors couldn't

import food from all over the globe, although all

of theirs WAS organic and free-range!

Before panicking about variety and so forth, give

poor guts a chance to heal a bit more -- and for

the new SCDer to detox from their starch and sugar addictions.

When I started SCD, I could not tolerate carrots

at all. They tasted nasty to me. (Peas still

taste nasty.) They also came through my system in

big, undigested lumps if I forced myself to eat

them. After 16 months on SCD, carrots no longer

tasted nasty -- and they no longer came through undigested.

The key to this is not a balanced meal every

meal, not even a DAILY balanced diet, but BALANCE

OVER TIME. For my Dachshund Duo, the four weeks

they went without veggies was about the

equivalent of going four months without them in a

human. (Dogs' pregnancies are 9 weeks, not 9

months.) And they were just FINE. In fact, they

were so delighted to have veggies back as part of

the menu that I was able to sneak a couple of new

veggies in on them -- they're a finicky, spoiled

rotten pair of bratlings who want certain foods

at certain times of the day! And I am a

very indulgent Dachshund Mom, although THEY are

convinced I am abusing them when I don't let them

have grain-filled commercial dog treats.

Something to think about....

— Marilyn

New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Undiagnosed IBS since 1976, SCD since 2001

Darn Good SCD Cook

No Human Children

Shadow & Sunny Longhair Dachshund