Special Carbohydrate Diet Protocols and Breaking the Vicious Cycle

How V Smiley Preserves aligns with Elaine Gottschall, GAPS Diet, Paleo diet, sugar free living, and restaurant cook. 

Immediately upon graduating college in Maryland, I moved out to Los Angeles where my sister lived. She was in the middle of a health crisis. I learned the layout of roads and neighborhoods in Los Angeles as we drove to doctors offices in the hills, on the Wilshire Boulevard flats, in high rises, trying to answer a mix of questions about digestion, lost eyesight, inflammation, bleeding. The final diagnosis was ulcerative colitis. There was no cure. Months passed, life continued. Eventually someone told my sister about a book called Breaking the Vicious Cycle (BTVC) by Elaine Gottschall. It was a diet protocol to rebalance gut bacteria and reduce inflammation. I remember sitting in a friend’s hot tub with my sister in the Mount Washington hills as she told me about this diet. I remember a feeling of dread. It was a restrictive, elimination type diet, the type where you start out eating a handful of foods and very gradually, painstakingly (taking daily notes in a food journal), add in and try new foods. But not all foods got added back in. Grains were out. Cane sugar was out and would never return in any quantity. The dread? For one thing, the restrictiveness sounded awful. Could I do that I wondered, immediately comparing myself to my sister. What would eating like that be like? My sister and I had many similarities mentally and emotionally. Living in the same city as her only made the familial shared qualities clearer. Part of the dread was a tendril sized assuredness, I’m going to end up on this diet too. 

Looking back, my sister experienced years of symptoms, somewhere between 4 and 7 years of them before getting a diagnosis of colitis. When I began to experience symptoms I was terrified but not surprised. I quickly put myself on the BTVC protocol. I still carry vivid memories of a preparatory evening pantry-cupboard-purge.I tried to give my last gluten free beer that I’d bought at a soda shop on York Ave in Highland Park to my girlfriend along with the rest of my pantry but she didn’t want it so I drank it myself after she left that evening. It was too big to finish and the next morning I dumped out the remaining liquid and steeled myself for months of broth, boiled eggs, steamed vegetables and applesauce. 

At the same time this was happening, steeped I think from a mixture of a being in a comfortless relationship AND following a diet that had me completely scratch-cooking (learning to make my own mayonnaise, mustard, and yogurt) AND generally being consumed with getting full and feeling better, I found myself wanting to cook more and more. When you start cooking a lot, you want to share it. See what I made!? Let me take care of you. This will help me take care of myself. Eventually, fortunately, this mix of heartache, anxiety about health, and loneliness got me a prep cook position in my favorite restaurant. I didn’t follow L.A’s dining scene so when some acquaintances opened a restaurant, that was my favorite restaurant. 

Years later, as I worked through what kind of food business to start, I waffled between making a product that I could eat (something SCD or GAPS diet compliant and by now Paleo had become popular and I know there are many other gut-healing, anti-inflammatory diets with names and acronyms that I don’t even know about) or something more traditional. Working at restaurants I was obsessed with preserving and canning. Along with fruit, honey had been the sole source of sweetness in my diet since 2008. Did I want to start a jam company that preserved with sugar or with honey? I can’t emphasize how much I agonized over this decision, in large part because of my professional setting. I was working in high end restaurants, cranking out desserts and entrees that I’d taste, but never eat. The environment was one of conformity, a mixture of “this is how everyone does it and this is how we do it”. When you are learning to cook in a typical restaurant kitchen, the individual is secondary. Sugar and flour were the gold standard of making delicious, economical food. So could I even consider myself, my product, legitimate if I went ahead and made honey sweetened jam? 

I mentally made it out the other side and now cannot imagine making a different product. Of course I make something I can eat. You learn about market differentiation, how you distinguish yourself from the other jam jars on the shelf. V Smiley Preserves has market differentiation in spades. There isn’t another product like this on the market. 

V Smiley Preserves produces a broad range of items. Some items might be more compliant than others for an anti-inflammatory diet, especially depending on how far along you are with your particular protocol. For instance, starting out on SCD, we are encouraged to avoid pectin, which is especially present in things like fruit peels. For years I peeled my apples before eating them. All to say, if you are curious about what part of the fruit is in a certain preserve that you have your eye on, drop a line via the contact form.