How to Make Your Crohn’s Worse for $10 a Week

 

For obvious reasons these extreme budget food haul videos are very popular, where people who live in BFE rural America where a gallon of milk is $1 manage to eke out a sustenance diet on almost no money.  I’ve lived on these extreme budget diets myself for many years, where “beans and torts” was a staple and I could almost never afford a $5 block of cheese but when I could, mmmm, cheese.  What a treat!

These days of course, as a Crohn’s patient, there are more limitations on my diet than a lack of funds although as I am disabled and mostly unable to work, that limitation still applies too.  While I have managed to remain medically stable with no hospital visits or emergencies for almost 5 years due to “lifestyle changes” and importantly, daily marijuana use, I am still severely limited in what I can eat.  For example, through painful trial and error, and as corroborated by the medical literature as well as anecdotal evidence/reports from other patients, I have learned that I, like most Crohn’s patients, am severely lactose intolerant.  For me and many Crohn’s patients, it would be less (well, equally) painful to eat industrial solvent than most dairy products including milk, soft cheese and ice cream.

And since Lactaid and other lactose-nullifying agents don’t work for me to make dairy products tolerable, I also think it’s the proteins in dairy and not just the lactose/sugar I’m reacting to, which makes sense: it seems to be proteins in food that my immune system is attacking which makes eating most foods impossible.  To be even more specific, it seems to be genetically modified proteins — in other words, GMOs — that give me the most trouble.  But genetically modified or not, I cannot tolerate most dairy at all.

The woman in the above vid was able to get a gallon of milk for a dollar, which in most parts of the country is unheard of — it’s usually closer to $4 if not $5.  But as a Crohn’s patient who cannot tolerate most dairy, even if I could get 10 gallons of milk for a nickel I couldn’t drink it, blend it with other things or cook with it.  And of course, a lot of premade and processed foods contain dairy and so are also inedible.  Hard cheese is still on the table and I still look forward to that budget-busting block of cheese when I can afford it.  Of course, now it’s more like $12 and it has to be organic.