Et Tu, Chocolate?! Et Tu, Lily?!

First,  I want to heartily scream in the beginning of this post to set the mood of how I am feeling! 

Today I got news that my ELISA and Western Blot were "CDC negative" (most people with clinical obvious Lyme symptoms/Lyme are) but my Dr. says this actually does not mean you don't have Lyme. You do have Lyme. However, Lyme is one bacteria. No insect carries just one infection it carries multiple infections. You also have a host of other co-infections. It's like a fight between you and 5 other guys. Guys you also can't see. (Morgs of which we already secretly know) You have Bartonella, Babesia, Erlichia and likely fungal and viral others we don't yet know about. 

He urged me to not spend anymore money on Lyme tests though. He said you are extremely sick, can't work & all your money needs JUST GO TOWARD getting this treated; ASAP.  Find a LLMD as soon as you can. He said I'm not going to sugar coat it. You need to see this as a long road. You are looking at about 3 YEARS of abx long term treatment. Your liver panel looks good as of now, the thyroid and rheumatoid factor are looking good too, but the Babesia has made my red blood cells fattened. He said "one shouldn't have those high numbers at your age and not being on any kind of medication. You have 4 of the 5 bands and 2 just slightly under 60, 2 way over 80."

He said "you have the most amazing good cholesterol numbers I have ever seen in a patient (I attribute this to an avocado a day since getting sick) and beautiful nerve testing results. Your twitching, muscle and bone pain, numbness and tingling limb problems aren't your "actual" nerves - it's the Lyme and coinfections that you are fighting; which mess with the immune system, organs and move around into nerves and muscles, brain tissues etc. Overtime if you don't get treatment, Lyme will damage and kill the nerves. 

Now for the thing I want to scream about! I have had this for the last year and have had to forgo eating sweets OF ANY KIND, including fruit! Ive been subsisting on almonds and avocado snacks. However, I thought when I found the cinnamon Quest bar and the Lily's Stevia sweetened chocolate that my sad days were over. Then I researched into the ingredients today and saw that it would be foolish to keep eating these! Once again I can add these things to the EXPONENTIALLY GROWING list of foods I CANNOT have.

Let's start with the Quest Bar shall we? Often after only ingesting 1-2 Cinnamon Quest bars or Double Chunk Chocolate (the ones I thought were safer - as the other flavors have sucralose which I can't even go near) I will have pimpling, red rashes, increased all over itching and constipation. 

Today I found out that the sugar alcohol; Erythritol used in these bars is DERIVED FROM GMO CORN - as it is I can't have corn at all since it is GMO, but I have been ingesting a worse form - indigestible. GMO corn. derivative! I was thinking it was safe because it wasn't sucralose or sugar, but its neither sugar nor alcohol, its a corn derived chemical of sorts. 

Why care right? An excerpt from this link below was enough for me to put 2 + 2 together. I am having issues with toxicity, bacteria, and yeasts so WHY ON EARTH would I put a sugar alcohol that is mainly INDIGESTIBLE (aka stays in my already damaged gut/intestines) as food to FEED the very bacteria I am striving so hard TO KILL!? 

"The body’s inability to effectively break down sugar alcohols causes them to arrive for the most part intact when they reach the intestines. At that point, a process called “passive diffusion” takes place whereby the sugar alcohol that was consumed draws water into the bowels. This results in only partial breakdown. The unmetabolized portion begins to rot, creating the perfect environment for undesirable bacteria and pathogens to feed, thrive, and grow.

An imbalanced intestinal environment where pathogens and other undesirable microbes have a favorable place to exist is exactly the set of conditions that eventually compromise the gut lining, damage the critical enterocytes that line the gut wall, and promote the development of autoimmune disease symptoms."

This insanity led me to look at the ingredients of the Lily's bar, another favorite since I quit sugar...Lilys bar, the 1 chocolate bar in the world I thought was safe and could eat. Lily's bars, the only chocolate that did not contain sugar, sucralose or 3+ grams of anything. Lily''s which I thought was sweetened solely by Stevia, but really IS NOT. 

Lily's Dark Chocolate Original--> Ingredients: Unsweetened chocolate, inulin, dextrin (from non-GMO corn), erythritol, cocoa butter, milkfat, soy lecithin, natural flavors, stevia extract, natural vanilla. SHUDDER! Insert my sad, frustrated SCREAM right here. I'm not even gonna go into what "natural flavors" actually is either, lets just say there isnt anything natural about it. 

Erythritol was first up there after unsweetened chocolate and the Stevia was last. Ingredients are listed on labels in the order of QUANTITY. Ugh. The taste is erythritol, not the stevia. Now if it had said erythritol (from non-GMO corn) as it does the emulsifier agent dextrin, that would be one thing, but IT DOESN'T. Which means they ARE in fact using Erythritol from GMO corn sugar. Erythritol is derived from corn sugar which is most often from genetically modified (GMO) corn. It is important to understand that all sugar alcohols are highly refined in order to get them into the state in which they are able to be consumed or added to foods. 

So it isn't even close to being natural. Therefore, goodbye my beloved chocolate, et tu Lily's chocolate! Joining the unhealthy chocolates instead of standing strong for the little guy! 

Ce la vie, I now have to quit these 2 things as well. It will be so hard for me to find substitutes, but I must! I simply cannot begin to shoot myself in the foot in this long hard fight against these microbes trying to kill me.