Eating beef gives me a hangover, aches and a cloudy brain
Leow Ju-Len | STOMP | Wed Jan 18 2012
Singapore, January 18, 2012
My attitude to food is that the things you put into your mouth should give you pleasure.
Before the stomach has any say in the matter, I like to submit things to my tongue for approval, and if they are accepted with gratitude, then down the hatch they go.
As I get older, however, I'm finding that the rest of my body wants to impose its view on what should pass between my gums, as well.
Everything you eat is either good for you or bad for you, after all. If you get the balance wrong, you're probably headed for an unhappy conclusion, in a hospital bed with needles putting fluids into you.
Surprisingly, I find that your body can tell you how you're doing.
I gave up eating pork when I was a teenager, having decided for some reason that swine meat is probably what human flesh tastes like, and a couple of years ago I dropped chicken, duck, goose and pretty much anything with feathers from my diet, too.
After that I started to eat fewer things from cows and sheep, surmising that red meat production is worse for the planet than pretty much anything else.
These days, I'll have beef pretty much once or twice a week if at all.
And the funny thing is, I've developed something I call ‘beef poisoning'.
If I have a steak or a burger, I wake up the next day feeling awful, as if hungover from a drinking binge, with aches in the back and a feeling of general cloudiness in the brain.
It's the damndest thing, and something that epidemiology probably hasn't covered, but I think beef could be worse for us than we realise, and it's only after you clean your system of the stuff that you feel it.
What does that leave?
Fish, eggs, veggies, fruit and pasta. I try to avoid soy because I fear the pyhto-estrogens in it will give me breasts.
Still, nature's bounty has plenty for the fussy eater, which is what I guess I've become.
Here's the tuna omelette sandwich The Girlfriend made me for dinner on Sunday.
It hopefully won't give me cancer, and the tongue gave its hearty approval.