Yogurt

I made my first batch of SCD yogurt yesterday.

"Eat yogurt" is a common refrain from doctors and friends to anyone who has IBS.  The reason is that yogurt (generally) contains a lot of bacteria that is good for your gut, specifically lactobacillus acidophilus.

As someone who has believed for the past 30 years that he's lactose-intolerant, it's a bit strange to be eating yogurt.  However, because of the process for making SCD yogurt, lactose isn't a problem: it's cooked (or "incubated") for much longer than regular yogurt.  The idea is to give the good bacteria a much longer time to eat the lactose in the milk.  The yogurt maker I bought indicates that you can make yogurt in 4 to 4 1/2 hours, but SCD yogurt is cooked for 24 hours.  Apparently this is enough time for the bacteria to eat all the lactose.

The yogurt maker that I bought is the YoGourmet Multi.  I bought it on the recommendation of several SCD sites.  Fortunately, several of those sites go into detail about how the maker is fine for the standard 4-4.5 hour time, but that it runs too hot to use for an entire 24 hours: long before the 24 hours are up, it will have heated up to 125F or hotter, most likely killing off the majority of the bacteria that you're interested in.  That will mean not enough good bacteria, and too much lactose, a double-whammy negative.

The solution that someone came up with is to use a plug-in dimmer switch.  You let it get up to the optimal temperature of 100F - 110F, then turn the dimmer down to about halfway (depending on the switch), which should keep the temperature in range.  Since I had read all this, I went ahead and got a switch before my first batch.  Without knowing how much power the switch lets through, it's a bit of a guessing game at first: it's still a bit hot, turn it down; turn it down some more; oops, seems a bit cool now; etc.  Hopefully I kept the temperature close enough that the bacteria thrived, and the lactose is gone.  And now that I'm familiar with the switch, it shouldn't be so hard next time (if there is a next time!).

The yogurt came out well.  I'm definitely not a yogurt connoisseur, so I asked Jenny to try it, and she thought it was very good.  I had a spoonful on some blueberries this afternoon, and I liked it.  If I'm doing okay tomorrow, I'll try two spoonfuls.

Unfortunately, water intake still seems to be a problem.  For some reason, it seems as though too much water is getting to my colon, and my colon isn't efficient enough at absorbing it, and bingo, diarrhea.  My current hypothesis is that a) my gut motility has always been on the high side, meaning everything moves a bit too quickly; and b) the appendectomy either negatively impacted my ileo-cecal valve operation, allowing it to open too easily, or it damaged the nerve structure in my lower gut in a way that decreased its ability to absorb liquid, or both (there's also the possibility in this scenario that the surface area of my appendix was just enough to keep things in line most of the time, and not having that surface area available is just enough to tip the scales toward diarrhea; not having any nerve damage down there would be nice, although the end result is the same).

This problem is much more pronounced on days when I take on strenuous physical activity in the morning: I sweat a lot, and get thirsty, and drink a lot of water.  Later in the day, boom.  I try to limit the amount I drink without getting dehydrated, but it's a delicate balance.  If only my body was like the World Book Encyclopedia illustrations under "Human Body" that I so loved as a kid: layers of plastic pages, each one revealing a deeper layer of the body.  If I could just see what the hell was going on in there I'd be so much closer to a solution!

But I can't.  So I'll continue to muddle through the best I can.