Quinoa is the devil.
I used to eat quinoa fairly often, pre-Whole30. It is not on the list of allowable foods for that diet so I cut it out of my diet completely for 30 days. I didn't notice specifically that quinoa caused any problems during my 10-day reintroduction phase, but I really didn't feel great during that time period anyways.
Fast forward to last week. I made lunch for my team at work as a fundraiser for the run we are doing next month to raise money for Children's Hospital. One of the items I made was the chicken quinoa soup out of Runner's World Cookbook. It was really yummy and I ate two big bowls of it. My stomach hurt for the rest of the afternoon. I thought I just overate.
Two days later, I had another big bowl of the same soup for lunch and same effect - painful stomach cramps, nausea. At that point, I suspected the quinoa as the only other ingredients in the soup were chicken and veggies. (Also, no one else who ate the soup felt ill.)
Today I purposely brought a big bowl of quinoa for my lunch to test my theory.
Unfortunately for my stomach right now, I was right. Fortunately though, quinoa will be easy enough to eliminate from my diet.
The saponins may be to blame. I don't always rinse my quinoa, and I have no idea if the brand I currently have is pre-rinsed.
I'm not sure how long quinoa has been bothering me. I do know that I had a huge quinoa salad the day before the Boston Marathon and my stomach wasn't right then. I ate a ton of quinoa while pregnant with Maggie and had a lot of nausea during the pregnancy. This is one of those instances of retroactively trying to fit data points into the hypothesis. Moving forward - no quinoa for me!
In my opinion, it's not a huge loss. I know it's all the "rage" these days but you can get that kind of nutrition from plenty of other foods. Good thing you figured it out!
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