About a month ago Chris and I were both ill. Thankfully, my illness just showed itself as a high temperature and I continued to be able to stomach normal foods without too much trouble. Unfortunately for Chris, his illness was violent and food refused to stay in his system.
The mystery we quickly hit on was how to get some health-creating nutrients into him without his body rejecting them. Common practice is to feed the patient on dry toast, crackers and perhaps a little marmite (for the salt – we don’t have Marmite in our house, being a household of dedicated Marmite-haters) and then move them onto more robust, but plain, foods (pasta, rice etc) once they are able to hold these down. Unfortunately toast and crackers are definitely non-Paleo because of their grain-based ingredients.
How do you get better without non-paleo foods?
What we tried – phase 1
We started out by trying Chris on very normal foods. Having rejected his lunch salad on the Monday in the early evening he went on to try a small portion of Bolognese with broccoli for dinner but there was no way that was going to stay in the system either. Finally, he tried his breakfast eggs on Tuesday but those came back out almost immediately.
With each food rejection Chris also had a scorching temperature to accompany the rejection by his body.
After this experience, Chris decided he would prefer to not consume anything. Despite his body sending him hunger messages he fasted until Wednesday evening. For the last 12 hours of this fast, once he had moved from tap water to bottled water, his body finally stopped trying to reintroduce him to things he had consumed before the fast.
What we tried – phase 2
While he had been fasting I had been wracking my mind. When I was in Georgia (former USSR, not Georgia, USA) on archaeological digs several years ago, most of the team got dysentery. There was no medicine where we were and the locals brought us back to health with dried toast, sparkling water and local honey. They were particularly keen on the honey and water (I think the secret was that it was bottled water instead of well water) which they would feed us before they tried dried toast.
I suspected that the stomach upset had stripped the good bacteria from Chris’s gut, so my focus was on repopulating the bacteria.
On Wednesday evening I stopped off at home on my way to a job away from home (for the rest of the week – I made a dreadful nurse) with a pot of Live Culture yoghurt, a jar of honey and instructions to try a couple of spoonfuls of the yoghurt with a little honey. I’d been hoping to find some stem ginger for him to nibble on too, but the supermarket didn’t have any.
In the end, hunger drove Chris to eat half a pot of yoghurt. It didn’t stay in but the fever was not as marked and the reaction was not quite as violent. By the end of Thursday he was managing half a pot of yoghurt with only a mild temperature rise and I was comfortable that as long as it stayed in his body it was helping to repopulate the good bacteria in his gut.
Naughty behaviour
Somewhere amidst all of this, Chris has taken himself to the village shop and bought himself a packet if Minstrels to cheer himself up. For those who don’t know, Minstrels are lumps of a dense milk chocolate paste covered in a crunchy milk chocolate shell. His discovery was that Minstrels didn’t make him react. I think it was on Thursday when hunger won out and he also decided to give in to old-school wisdom and start eating toast, liberally coated in honey (to appease me).
By the weekend he was happily holding down pasta with a plain ratatouille sauce but still avoiding dairy, eggs, meat and fish.
Roast chicken was plain but still not staying down
Paleo suggestions
Chris’s depressing discovery was that anything that we classify as a “non-food” in our house seemed to stay quite happily in his digestive system. I have no idea what the science behind this is. Perhaps it is because he wasn’t giving the bad bacteria anything to react with but simultaneously providing something that satisfies the hunger and gets some fibre working through the system to push the bacteria out of the gut. It’s upsetting though, given everything I’ve learned about irritation to the gut and immune system from “neolithic” foods.
What I have found (after the event) is a couple of threads on the CrossFit forum, but they aren’t that relevant. One is from someone who found that high fever flu led them to desiring lots of “rubbish” food (advice was to get back on the healthy food that wouldn’t keep hitting their immune system); another from someone who got severe sick symptoms from some chicken broth, but that seems to have been a one-off.
It seems that nobody on the internet addresses the issue of what to eat if you get a severe stomach upset. Instead the internet is filled with people celebrating their improvement with stomach problems by converting to the paleo diet.
More constructive ideas?
About a week after this exciting escapade, Robb Wolf was asked about the same issue on his podcast, The Paleolithic Solution (final question, podcast #36). Someone asked what Paleo foods could be consumed instead of dry toast when recovering from a stomach illness. I could have done with the answer about two weeks earlier.
Robb’s suggestion centered around soups and broths. Things that were smooth and would therefore not aggravate the stomach. This seemed logical and also seemed to be slightly supported by the less violent reaction to the yoghurt. However, I wasn’t entirely satisfied by this suggestion since there was still a reaction to the yoghurt (perhaps because it was dairy?) and toast isn’t exactly gentle when it first hits your stomach, however I would quite like to try this next time. I’m kicking myself for not having thought of it at the time.
Would homemade paleo chicken soup be the answer?
Now I just need to find a way to make one of us really, really sick again so I can perform the experiment on us and see if it works!
In the meantime, have you tried some “real” foods when ill and found anything that would classify as Paleo which isn’t rejected by a body which is suffering from a severe stomach upset? All ideas would be gratefully received.
Related posts:
Interesting experience. Sorry he had to go through it!
I just had a stomach bug, too. I ended up with about 4 days of <1000 calories. Since I'm avoiding gluten on a trial basis, I couldn't go back to that even for this. My diet during this time consisted mostly of Gatorade and chocolate pudding. Basically if it was solid it wasn't working. So the idea of broths and soups is probably a good one. I bought some vegetable juice but never actually tried it while I was sick.
Sorry to hear you’ve been unwell. I hope you’re fully recovered now. Lots of people seem to be getting something this summer. Even the people who are on good diets and getting plenty of exercise seem to have been coming down with something (although when you delve into it, there’s often still something impacting the immune system – in our case I think it was work stress, elevated cortisol and the tough week of Alps walking).
Vegetable juice? Is that like a vegetable smoothie? You’ll have to try it when you’re completely and unequivocably better and let me know what it’s like. It would probably be spot on alongside the soups and broths for getting some nutrition in while ill.
This sounds like it was horrid, glad you are both feelign better now. My mother always used to give me apples when I had gastroenteritis, peeled and sliced (I think that msut be very important
) followed by home made soup. It always seemed to work pretty well. Also water with a little salt and sugar in it, ie basically what you get in rehydration fluids. If you can’t get that then flat coke is really good, although even my limited knowledge of paleo stuff would lead me to think that coke doesn’t quite qualify but its good if you are someplace where you don’t trust the water as long as its in a can…
We are both completely better now, thanks.
The apples surprises me but it’s good to know that soup worked for you too. When I couldn’t get hold of any Dioralyte for Chris when he first started being ill I did try making electrolyte solution (a litre of water mixed with a teaspoon of honey, juice of half a lemon and a pinch of salt). Apparently it tasted pretty foul but hopefully it did the trick. The lemon means that there is potassium in the fluid as well.
You’re right that coke is non-paleo. It has quite a high potassium level which makes it a good rehydrator (to a certain extent – it is possible to overdo the potassium). But it means we’ve got another sickness solution that is non-paleo again…
I haven’t been ‘Paleo’ all that long, but when I have digestive upsets my ‘fallback’ food is carrot juice. Store-bought or homemade, cold or hot, it seems to work to soothe and give the body some nourishment,too.
Probably other veggie juices or even ‘blended’ soups would also work well. Protein-based broths comes next in line for me once digestion calms down. Then I ease back into solid foods.
Personally, I find the ‘lighter’ proteins of fish, followed by chicken or turkey to be much easier to digest than beef. I don’t digest pork well at all, so I don’t eat it at all.
There’s an excellent book that I think should be in everyone’s home, and that’s “Heinerman’s Encyclopedia of Fruits, Vegetables and Herbs ” by John Heinerman. (I have the 1988 version) He’s a medical anthropologist and I’ve found his book(s) extremely useful for resolving health issues at home using food instead of medications.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll keep an eye out for that book – sounds good!