Grocery Shopping Take 2

This was my second grocery shopping trip (entirely for myself) that I was mindful of looking out for HFCS and honey (which apparently is terrible for me, which I learned the hard way with granola).

Exciting things:

• Pepsi Throwback (and Mtn Dew & Sierra Mist Natural) are made with sugar!
• Boylan Root Beer is made with cane sugar! (So is Faygo in the bottles.)
• Kraft has some cheeses (mostly the block ones) that have 0g of lactose! (I'm assuming it has a minuscule amount of lactose, but not enough to make me sick.) Ones I've bought: pepperjack, cheddar, and shredded Mexican 4-cheese. hooray for cheese!

Not-so-exciting things:

• Most cereals I wanted to buy have honey in them. UGH!
• Most wheat breads I looked at had HFCS or honey in them! Ditto hamburger buns. I ended up buying fancypants Meijer Organics bread that's like 1/4 the size of a normal loaf.
• A lot of lunch meat has honey in it. Even the non-honey-ham ham. :(
• Boca burgers except the vegan ones have cheese. :(

Coasta Costa Rica

I went to a warm place for spring break this year, after having spent my last two spring breaks in the bitter cold of the lovely city of Chicago.

Costa Rica, like many countries not-the-US, doesn't use HFCS in EVERYTHING. Soda? Con azúcar! Damn you IOWA and your corn subsidies!

End result? A week of basically no tummy problems. (Occasional nausea possibly from too much boozing or drinking foreign water.) Costa Rica FTW. (The 80-degree weather, beaches, and ziplining in the rainforest helped, too.)

Intro

So after about two years of gastrointestinal issues, many doctors visits and lab tests* later, I decided I probably have fructose malabsorption.** My gastroenterologist, being the ever-so-helpful and clever person that he is, printed a chart of fructose-high foods to avoid that he found through a quick Google search after I told him about my theory. (Wait, you need to go to med school for that?) This is after he prescribed heartburn medication for me after I told him it wasn't heartburn. Thus began my attempt to be as fructose-free as possible.

Here's where I'm going to document all the fun things I learn from this! (Mostly for me to remember these things.)

This didn't start off well, because I had never grocery shopped with this in mind before. My sister sent a helpful article noting that Whole Foods was getting rid of items with HFCS, but I generally don't shop there because I'm a poor grad student. I'm also lactose intolerant and allergic to a whole host of foods (that I eat anyway, for the most part) so changing my eating habits was even more fun. I did come across a tip that eating SweeTarts would help, since it's basically pure glucose (dextrose = D-glucose).

My initial give away/throw out list:

• fruit & nut granola bars from Mom (honey)
• honey & oat granola bars from Mom
• granola with honey cereal
• gum (xylitol & sorbitol fail too)
• airborne from Mom
• acacia honey (I JUST BOUGHT FROM DIBRUNOS)

* I went through blood tests for ulcers, LFTs, lipid panels, Hep B & C; an abdominal ultrasound; and a HIDA scan. Along the way they also prescribed me various heartburn medications (zantac 75 and omeprazole aka prilosec) because doctors are convinced you're lying to them when you say it's not heartburn.

** For the less-inclined-to-Google-this-right-now, your body doesn't do a good job of absorbing fructose in your small intestine unless it has glucose to piggyback on (/a fructose transporter to move fructose via facilitated diffusion), so it goes into your large intestine and wrecks havoc. For most people this isn't that bad. But for people with slightly screwed up GI tracts like mine, it causes serious tummy pain.