The Very Boring Diet: When the gut needs some time off industrialised food

By Jeroen van Lozenets

In this book you will not find a detailed set of prescriptions and recipes, but tips and advice over how to avoid the food and the ingredients that often cause or exacerbate intolerances or other digestion complaints. Ingredients added by the food industry to almost everything we eat, sometimes sneaked in discreetly sometimes embellished by smart marketing. This book will challenge the carefully constructed perception of what is healthy with its numerous overhyped images.

The initial idea for this book was to write some advice for those who suffer from food intolerances from the point of view of a fellow patient. But eventually it developed into a diet useful for everyone. A way to get off for a small period of time from the wave of industrialised food surrounding us. A way to reduce the stress on the gut, but also information that will always be useful to understand the impact of what people eat when they are not on a diet.
In this book you will also find some of the small, but important, details that doctors, busy as they are, often forget to tell to their patients.

• Language: English
• Publisher: XinXii
• Release date: Mar 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9783987628535

Book preview

The Very Boring Diet Copyright © Jeroen van Lozenets March 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

Edited by Jeroen van Lozenets

Cover Art by Jeroen van Lozenets

Self published by Jeroen van Lozenets.

Contact address: [e-mail]

ISBN: 978-3-98762-853-5

Verlag GD Publishing Ltd. & Co KG, Berlin

E-Book Distribution: XinXii

www.xinxii.com

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Contents

Introduction

The dangerous confusion about allergies and intolerances

What food to ban or restrict for a while

Processed food

Frozen or canned Vegetables

What is industrialised food?

This is not a vegetarian diet

More a lifestyle than a diet

The Diet

Breakfast and the coffee porridge

A Dessert

What to drink

The second phase

The difference with the low FODMAP diet

After the end of the diet

Few warnings

Final Notes

It might be boring to question every single piece of food that ends in our plates.

It might be boring to be always fussy about all the small details.

But it can save a lot of pain.

Introduction

I am writing from the so called developed world where food is abundant and not so expensive for our average income. Considered what we usually spend to keep a roof over our heads regularly supplied with heating and electricity, plus what we spend to move from one place to the other, food takes a minor part of the budget of our daily life. But there is a hidden cost, food remained affordable over the years by becoming increasingly industrialised, everything from the most sophisticated delicatessen to what seems simple basic food has come under the scrutiny of chemists and accountants. It might bring more profit to the food industries, but it is getting more difficult to digest, add to it a population growing older and you can have a lot of people complaining. The statistics say that food intolerances are increasing, how much is difficult to say because they often they fall under the catch all term food allergies which is a good way to increase the confusion and the misunderstandings that surround the issue and this confusion is one of the reasons why I wrote this small book. But not the only one, many things that are well known to those in the field are too often glossed over and they fail to reach those who would badly need to be aware of them.

I am not talking about life threatening problems, to some people all of this might seem trivial, but what you eat it is what day after day shapes your body and your health. Small problems slowly building up over the years, almost unnoticed, often end up affecting your body and your mind, your mood and your daily life.

I am not a doctor, here I am putting my experience as a patient. My problem since the beginning was a common lactose intolerance, but many years passed before it was diagnosed and with time it got worse and worse. The bad luck I had to with the doctors meant that even after it was finally diagnosed they gave me little help, I had to search a lot of information by myself and do many experiments with my own gut. It took several years before I could reduce the symptoms enough to lead a normal life and in the process I found out many things that apparently are obvious for a lot of people, except for those who need to know them. Like the moment you tell someone how you found something you were looking for a long time and they casually reply Of course, didn't you know that?. In the same way many doctors will find what I am writing trivial, but so trivial that often they forget to tell their patients anything about it.

If you dear reader are not suffering so much, if you are not spending a lot of time trying to guess what is the matter with your gut, do not abandon this book straight away. As you will learn with time, modern industrialised food is putting a lot of pressure also on the digestive systems of healthy people. Sooner or later you will need to give your gut a break. Of course you will find around a lot of more or less covert advertising telling you to detox, but then the question you should ask is what do I want to detox from? Here you will find some tips.

Actually I am not the first one to refer to that word. It seems that detox is a catchy term and unfortunately it was already used to promote many diets, some of them quite absurd. To avoid falling in the same trap I will try to explain as much as I can, you will not have to take what is written here as something to believe in. Some things can be verified reading other sources, some things will have to be verified doing few experiments and if still you are not convinced you will in any case have a lot of tips that can be taken separately and keep some useful knowledge without actually following the diet.

Although the title of this book refers to a diet you will not find here a full prescription of what you have to eat, let alone anything referring to doses and quantities. Instead I will talk about what you should care and what you should beware and above all, why. The arguments will not be systematically organised, but exposed in the order that will render the explanation as clear as possible. Eventually you will find no fixed rules, everyone will have to adapt the tips and the ideas to their own personal situation. But my hope is to provide everyone a set of rules that could be followed for a fixed period called diet, and then could be taken into account in a flexible manner after the end of the diet. A set of rules and information that could help people deal with modern food throughout their life.

Note. To make clear that I am not a doctor and this is not a medical text I will avoid technical language. Everything will be exposed in a colloquial, simplified language.

The dangerous confusion about allergies and intolerances

Before starting to talk about the diet itself I have to talk about why I thought that there was the need for a book like this. Looking around, reading articles and talking to people I came to the conclusion that the notion of food allergies and intolerances is something