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Monday, August 22, 2016

KeenWah Kause for Keeling Over

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!

1 comment:

  1. 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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