Re: Food and drugs

[Hilary Blue <azure2@xxxxxxxxx>]

Phil
I am in a similar situation to yours, added to by the fact that I take sinemet
every one and a half hours. My first warning to you is "beware of
Thanksgiving!"  I suffered badly last year, and it was only in retrospect that
I realized what was the problem. - Turkey. Every time I walked past the
fridge, I tollk a little nibble of turkey.  So I was having a constant supply
of protein.  I must have reduced the useful, absorbed quantity of sinemet by
at least half - I felt almost as if I had stopped taking any medication at
all. The effect was dramatic and almost immediate.
Otherwise, I try to keep protein at a minimum during the day - cereal (usually
raisin bran) for breakfast, salad or veg. soup for lunch, and fruit in-between
meals if I am starving. And then my protein I eat at the evening meal -
usually some sort of meat and veg.  If I am doing something in the evening,
either I put off eating till afterwards, or I take my protein at lunchtime
that day, and know that the afternoon will be a washout.  Of course, the
arithmetic of the whole situation is impossible - don't eat for an hour after
taking medication, and wait 2 ours after eating before taking medication - and
take the darn medication eery hour and a half. Go figure!  So sometimes I just
give up, and eat when the food is there, regardless of whether it is pill time
 or not. But usually I try to separate pills and food as much as possible.
Hope that helps you,
Hilary Blue

Phil Tompkins wrote:
>
> Since I seem to have reached that stage in PD where it has become
> increasingly difficult to walk the narrow line between too little
> and too much levodopa and to achieve that delicate balance between PD
> symptoms on the one hand and drug-induced dyskinesia on the other,
> I'm wondering to what degree food intake is a factor.  Is my
> difficulty in finding just the right drug dose a result of not paying
> enough attention to what did I eat and when did I eat it?
>
> I know about the desirability of maintaining that nice 1/7 ratio of
> protein to other nutrients, although I haven't tried to observe this
> rule consistently.  Are there other factors that can be important,
> such as the quantity of food eaten, the time drugs are taken vs.
> time of eating, the frequency of food intake, ratio of solids to
> liquids, the effects of regularity and of constipation (and its
> opposite), the digestibility of what I ate -- things of that order?
> Will I have to become really disciplined about food, and in the end
> eat the same things every day at the same time and in the same
> quantity in order to achieve the right drug effective doses?  When I
> pig out, do I in effect cast my pills before swine?
>
> I would greatly appreciate any observations, good rules of thumb or
> sources of information on this subject.
>
> Phil Tompkins
> Hoboken NJ
> age 60/dx 1990