I expected the following response from a handful of readers, but not 59:
“Dear Mr. Bell, you are wrong. Mankind is NOT an animal, mankind is separate and apart from animals. Above them. Please do your research before repeating this sort of slander.
-A FORMER reader”
59 of that was sitting in my inbox this morning. 59 people were so certain that they are not animals that they took time out of their lives to tell me so. Then each one of them ate, defecated and went around all day long being multicellular. Odds are, at least a few of them even tried to reproduce sexually.
Sorry for this accidental, unfinished duplicate post.
And sorry for not knowing how to use emoticons to express that cutely.
And sorry, Darrin, for the thread-hijacking! We got health kvetching, we got food persnicketiness, we got "I'm so old that I remember…" And speaking of so old, as well as adult Attn Deficit, jeez, can't decide if I wish I could figure out how to stop & read specific Tweets or I'm relieve that I can't! I just saw the line "vomit from ingesting mold"!
Lemont's argument for aspartame (which aggravates migraines, so folks prone to migraines can't drink/eat it) is exactly the same as my father's argument defending pollution and urban sprawl. It was a good way to end the argument, because I was too frickin' appalled to say anything in response.
Sugarkat, I am a lifelong and severe migraineur and diet coke not only doesn't aggravate or cause my migraines, it eases them! In my case, at least, the mild dose of caffeine helps ease or even eliminate them, while the cola syrup treats the nausea of migraine. In contrast, Exedrin used to work on my migraines, but the concentrated dose of caffeine felt like it was burning a hole in my stomach & gave me violent shakes. I figure Diet Coke is a pleasanter alternative, taken w/ an acetaminophen or naproxen. I used to be able to use mild iced tea for this, until I sensitized to the tannin in the tea, and it started to aggravate migraines. Tannin is also why red wine is such a strong migraine trigger for most migraine sufferers. All I have to do is think about having a glass of wine with dinner and my left temple starts to ache! Then again, I must not be a typical migraineur, because some of the contraindicated foods don't bother me; aged cheese gives me no problems, nor do onions in moderation. Alas, dark chocolate is as horrific as red wine– too bad, as they are also a delightful combination… except for the hammer they swing upside my head and the ice pick they stick in my left eye.
Caffeine is a drug used to treat migraines, but any decent neurologist will tell a migraine patient to stay away from aspartame, which was never properly tested before it was put on the market because the company which developed it was owned by a buddy of President Reagan's. If I were you, I'd make sure that the sugar substitute is something other than aspartame.
Have you tried tea instead? It has caffeine, but is much gentler on the tummy (esp. with a drop of milk). (I can only drink coffee if it's in latte form, since I need the milk as a buffer.)
If you want to drink red wine, drink European reds, because they are not as prone as Americans, Australians, or Peruvians to shove tannins into their wines in order to push them onto the market before they're ready. I always get a massive headache from American reds, but a decent French or Italian is just fine.
I know caffeine is a drug in the migraine repertoire. I carry Fioracet, which manages to have a more tolerable delivery system than does Exedrin. And in my youth, all they had for me was cafergot, which, as my mother used to say, brings on a feeling of impending doom. As I said mid-post, I used to be able to get a therapeutic dose of caffeine from tea, but then the tannins in it got to be too much for me. The pleh instant iced tea powder is lower in tannin, but also in palatability. I, too, cannot tolerate coffee w/o massive, low-fat milk buffering and instant is easier on the stomach w/o nearly the loss in taste that powdered tea (an abomination before G_d!) has. But somehow, coffee has never been any help with my migraines.
As for the red wines, my late mother once told me the name of one that she could tolerate [she from whom I inherited the migraines, and her mother before her], but I foolishly did not write it down. I am sensitive enough to tannin [see above re: tea] that virtually any country's reds will trigger [esp. now that I'm no longer allowed to take Imitrex & its kin.] Sometimes I can get away w/ white wine [rosé/blush being another one of those abominations- I was raised by wine snobs, I mean, purists], but only if it's easy on the sulfites [enough like MSD to trigger Chinese Restaurant migraine.] Oy, all this kvetching makes me feel so old!
I'm a third-generation migraine-sufferer, so I've picked up all kinds of advice from family trial-and-error.
You're probably drinking crappy tea if the tannins are getting to you. A nice, full-leaf tea, brewed properly, does wonders and has few of the deleterious effects of a cup of crud like Lipton. That's not tea, but the bits and pieces left over at the very bottom of the bag of actual tea leaves. Calling Lipton "tea" like saying stale, moldy crumbs are bread.
Powdered tea is not tea. It's an abomination unto the Lord.
The only time coffee works to kill one of my migraines is if I drink a couple of shots of espresso with milk (no less than 2%). A trip to Starbucks by a kindly friend or family member has saved my day more than once.
The fats in milk are what make coffee easier to drink. If you're drinking coffee with skim milk, you might was well just pour water into it, for all of the effect the "milk" is having.
(The one exception to the powdered tea rule is Japanese tea ceremony tea, which is bitter but beautiful, a dark green that makes one think of light through a forest, and hard to come by here in the States.)
So we are agreed on the abomination of powdered tea mix. I don't use skim milk in coffee, I use 2%, but it would take ice cream for me to down espresso.
I don't drink any kind of caffeinated [i.e. "real"] tea anymore… As I say, I've hypersensitized to tannins [not just tea and wine, but grapes, grape juice, cran juice, unpeeled apples…]… and no, not crappy Lipton's… My ex-husband is both a wine AND tea snob, and would make special trips to the one tea store [yes, only tea & its utensils] in our bi-state area that could meet his specs. In restaurants, he would conduct 10 minute inquiries w/ wait-staff about whether they could accommodate his expectations & would send back the insufferable cups of hot water with a tea bag on the side. So we had the real goods.
It was revelation to me some 20 years ago that there prevention regimens had actually been developed [e.g. Beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, etc.]. So much for dealing w/ snobby med school neuros… It took an internist from a small town to tell me that no, migraining over half of the time should not be tolerated.
Have you tried magnesium supps? I know, most of those amateur-hour, on-line lines about supplements and herbal remedies come off as either hippie-dippy or patent-medicine bull. But after learning a pediatrician friend was also a migraine sufferer, I checked w/ him and he said magnesium deficiency is indeed common among us. Since I started taking the supps [not just in say, Tums form, but actual supplements], my migraines have become rare… provided I don't go looking for one in wine or dark chocolate…
For the sake of fellow Candorville fans, I'll try to end it there…
Sounds more like you're straight-up allergic to tannins. I have a mild allergy, which leads to sneezing when I take a sip of wine with too many tannins, which is a nice warning system to keep me from drinking crappy American wines (being every single one I've ever had) and giving myself a migraine.
Magnesium has to be carefully balanced with calcium to be effective. There was some research at a university here in NYS on it that I read some years ago. Anyway, you need to pair Mg with calcium at 1/2, and in a certain way, or else it won't metabolize properly.
Some day, I'll grow up and start taking my vitamin supplements. Right now, I'm still enjoying my ice cream headaches after pint-sized binges and cold cereal for dinner.
Attention idiots!
Darrin Bell happens to be very intelligent and well read, he is in fact quite correct that humans are animals. We are mammals.( warm blooded animals) Mr. Bell does not just lay around and aimlessly pull his subject matter from his backside. He DOES research but in this case he probably didn't as it is common knowledge that human beings ARE animals. So get a dictionary (app or book, paper back or hard cover) before you accuse anybody of slander. I would suggest that you definitely continue to read Candorville as you MIGHT learn something.