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. (Long term is another matter --

like, a year or so.)

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! <grin>

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! <grin> 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

Babette the Foundling Beagle