Friday, October 23, 2009

Go Flax Seed Oil!

So I know I said something about knitting and pictures and it's a draft...but I wanted to share this with you all first.

On Facebook a couple days ago I posted something along the lines of:

Dude, my life is so over...purine rich foods (salmon being one of them apparently) are making my inherited gout-like-symptoms, um, bloom. Stupid genes.


See, we made Salmon cakes....and almost immediately after I had dinner I noticed my left ankle was what Andy's cousin affectionately calls a "cankle." You know, when your ankle is so inflamed that you can't tell where the calf ends and the foot begins?

Fun times in TaclessLand, lemee tell ya.

Of course I didn't go to the doctor, hello? What is the internet for? That's how I came up with"purine rich foods." And the fact that I have a world of pain to look forward to in my "golden years..." (sigh)

Only, I didn't think I'd scarfed down all that much Salmon.

Then last night it happened again...and there was NOTHING that I ate that was on the list...except for maybe the pasta...(certain carbs are purine rich you see...). But as my right ankle was getting in on the action? I was getting a wee bit more concerned.

Two things have changed in my life the last few months:
  • My BC pills went generic
  • I switched to the Costco brand fish oil.
Yes, I know taking any kind of hormone is prone to making your life a mess, and as much as I LOVE not writhing in pain for 7 days every month...I'm still thinking of ditching the pills if things don't change for the better...i.e. I get my chubby ankles back. Cuz I never realized how much more attractive my stumpy chubby ankles until they were gone...and Dr. Internet says BC/hormone pills will adversely affect a woman's water retention ability to the big clumpy nothing-fits end of the scale. Oh it is SO fun to be a girl.

Before getting all drastic though, I decided to ask the intarwebs about fish oil causing swollen extremities. I mean, remember, I did decide to experiment on myself using fish oil as an anti-inflammatory for my hip woes, right? Maybe it's a side effect?

Um, no. Or rather, I can't find any correlation.

What I did find out I want to pass on as a kind of PSA though. If you mix vitamin D (which I also take) with certain fish oils you can get bad things happening in your system. Nothing mentioned cankles...but the word "toxic" was thrown around a WHOLE lot. So I read the ingredients of my Nature's Made vs Costco omega 3 oils and...did you know that Nature Made has some fish but also flax seed oil in their Omega 3 oil pills? And the Costco brand is like 100% fish oil?

So maybe, just maybe, mind, I was kinda o-d-ing on the purine richness of the oil + salmon cakes + (cuz I fergotted until just now) sushi the other night + maybe a sushi lunch the day before the night of the sushi dinner... Add that to the fact that (since they don't list what kind of fish they use in their pills) I might have been poisoning myself with the oil + vitamin D...and that might explain a few things...

So I'm altering my experiment on my use of fish oil. I'm switching back to the burpy goodness of Nature Made (the Costco brand did reduce that little aspect of taking fish oil, by the way) and seeing if I can have ankles again.

1 comment:

Bezzie said...

Maybe you used to be a fish in a past life and your old friends are getting back at you for eating your own kind now. ;-)