Ironic that I’m writing this after writing a post called “How to Never Get Sick“… ok, so maybe it should be “How to ALMOST Never Get Sick…” whatever.
There are two predominant “sick diets” that I’ve heard of in the past: the BRAT diet (bread, rice, apples, toast) and chicken noodle soup.
If you have to choose one or the other, chicken noodle soup wouldn’t be a bad choice (BRAT, not so much) – but I think there’s better, once you understand the why involved.
Let’s frame the context: you’re sick, and you’re trying to slowly nudge food back into your system – get things working again. You have an awareness that you can’t go whole hog, or you’ll barf (or whatever).
In this context, my favorite go-to is chicken and pickle-juice (for us, that’s actually typically pickled onions) – and I’ll tell you why.
The problem with the BRAT and the chicken noodle soup approach is that they’re carb-heavy (and, obviously for me, NOODLES are made of wheat so there’s that…). In this context, carb-heavy has two major downsides:
- – First, bacteria feed predominantly on carbs: if you’re experiencing a contagious (or even non-contagious) bacterial infection, or even a secondary bacterial infection from a primary viral infection, you’re throwing gas on a fire that you need to put out.
- Second, carbs are easy but inflammatory – blood sugar up, inflammation up. For years, drug-based medicine thundered against this fact, but with the sharp rise in diabetics, as well as self-monitoring equipment (rings, CGMs, etc.) there’s no longer much debate on this except where “experts” who have alot of investment at stake are involved. Try it for yourself: put a sugar cube in one cheek and a bit of chicken in the other, for a few minutes. The “chicken” cheek will be perfectly unaffected after a few minutes, while the sugar-cube tissue will begin to get rough and inflamed – realtime DIY test of what sugar does to mucous membranes.
Chicken is also helpful here because it’s low fat.
Now, if you had a flash of righteous indignation when I said “low fat” good for you – usually you DO want more animal fats, in almost any other healthy context. However, fats are “expensive” – which is why fat doesn’t make you fat, sugar does. Take a second to map out your various chemical enzymes/factors at play: stomach acid, pancreatic enzymes, and bile from your liver. Fat requires approximately 5-10x the overall chemical resources that proteins do, and proteins require approximately 2-4x the overall chemical resources that carbs do. Carbs are easy – cheap – but in bigger doses, inflammatory and require an “after the fact” surge of insulin (which is the start of fat-building, by the way – you can’t build fat without insulin) to manually correct them, so to speak.
This is why chicken is helpful – it’s neither super fatty nor is it carb-loaded. You’re not feeding the bacterial surge; you’re also not overloading the chemical requirements of your stomach acid, pancreatic enzymes, and bile.
As an aside: my pet theory is that the reason you barf, then wait 20-30 minutes, then barf again, is that this is your bile release cycle: you barf, feels great because you got everything flushed out, but then your gallbladder releases another load of bile (as usual) which is highly caustic and irritates your hypersensitive intestine – normally no problem due to a healthy amount of mucous, etc., but when it’s completely flushed out, it’s too much. To the bucket you go!
Combining pickle juice/pickled onions with the chicken has the added bonus of “helping” your stomach acid – your stomach doesn’t have to make another load of acid, it can piggyback off of the acid that you’re eating. One word of caution: unfortunately, almost all pickles have the ugly synthetic petroleum-based preservative Sodium Benzoate – I would strongly recommend avoiding it. For me, it’s a hard line.
But overall, I’ve found that chicken and pickles are the best mid-food sickness combo – I can almost always load up without “what goes down must come up” happening.
