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Originally Posted by Jennihul  Sorry, it must have been this paragraph that confused me...
Jennifer |
The point is that
all foods except fat and sugar contain phenylalanine, so why should I be able to eat other food without getting sick, but then get sick when I eat meat?
And to Joeschmoe: the diet I have to follow is highly deficient. I would starve to death without the yucky powder. I am allowed to eat only 350 mg of phe per day to maintain normal phe levels. Just a very small amount of sweet potatoes contains too much phe for me. I can't eat much normal food at all without surpassing 350 mg of phe. To give you an idea, one medium-sized egg contains about 350 mg of phe. Nuts and seeds are almost entirely out of the question. Broccoli, which I can eat a small amount of and douse it with butter for extra calories, contains .86 mg of phe per gram (yes, I have to weigh all of my food and then calculate the amount of phe I eat every day, and also calories to make sure I eat enough). Corn has over 1 mg of phe per gram. Things like lettuce are out of the question, because they are low-calory, high-phe. When I'm on the diet, it's like a game to eat enough calories every day without exceeding 350 mg of phe. And that, even though the powder gives me 864 calories every day.
The point is, the only food I could eat freely is fat and sugar, and that's just gross (although I have to admit, the US has a wonderful vast array of all-sugar candy
, but I haven't been in the US when on the diet). Vegetables and fruit, most all food is far too high in phe for me to eat more than a small-medium quantity of. If I eat 350 mg of phe in sweet potatoes, for example, plus the yucky diet powder, I would still be many hundreds of calories short of 1950, which is about how much I should eat a day. And you only do this diet under the supervision of a PKU specialist and a PKU dietician. It's highly specialized, you don't do it by yourself, and they take regular blood tests to monitor the phe levels.
Anyway, I have stopped eating meat now and I'll see how it goes. I'm still dizzy, but the nausea ended late on Sunday.
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Edit - This is not medical advice and you would have to check on the nuts and beans with a doctor. And you really shouldn't be taking any advice from a discussion board, without running it by a doctor first.
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Don't worry, I know the diet and the doctors and what they say.
