Image via WikipediaI was in the city for a few days and had a few "funny turns". Prior to leaving for the city, these funny turns would even sometimes visit me in the middle of the night. The symptoms were weak, leaden-feeling legs (like walking on a bed), dizziness, balance feeling a little out of whack, sweaty palms and anxiety due to those odd symptoms, which incidentally made me feel that something was drastically wrong! At one point when I felt at my most melodramatic, I thought for sure I must be dying! I do have Hashimoto's Thyroiditis although I am mostly in remission. I say mostly because I still take about 30 mg of natural thyroid hormone every morning. There is a story as to how that outcome was achieved and anyone who is interested is welcome to enquire. Such a simple way to get to better thyroid health and most doctors on this planet are totally unaware. Anyway I first suspected low blood sugar and then I wondered about my thyroid, but my body temperatures soared to hyperthyroid levels the minute I increased my dosage, so it is not that. I prayed about it and asked for revelation. The next day I Googled my symptoms and they matched menopausal symptoms.
Later that day my longtime email buddy, Jan Ballas, made me realize that most of the symptoms were related to "hot flash" symptoms. She sent me to a site that described the hot flash precisely and I had most of the symptoms, but my eyes alighted on the words tamoxifen (it was a breast cancer site) and that women taking tamoxifen might experience extreme hot flash symptoms. Then I remembered immediately that flax meal is the tamoxifen of foods. Sigh - of course, it will mess with my hormones!! I am extremely sensitive to having anything mess with my hormones. I tried progesterone and ended up having such a strange few turns that I had blurred vision and I mean really blurred vision. When I was younger and on the birth control pill, I was miserable with all kinds of unwanted symptoms, such as depression, weight gain, sore breasts, moodiness and crying spells. Those symptoms left seemingly overnight when I went off of it. Several times during my life doctors wanted to put me back on the pill and more recently on bio identical hormones. I always refuse. That's ironic as here I shot myself in the foot recently by starting to include flax meal which is a phytoestrogen into my diet.
Younger people may not have this issue with flax and probably many people tolerate it just fine. My youngest son, however, who is building muscles via weight lifting was horrified that I had recently been feeding him phytoestrogens! Oh dear. So..., back to the grindstone with the Gluten-free Bake Mix. I'm thinking that using coconut flour in reduced amounts in the new bake mix might work, but this will need to be tested. Meanwhile, there is a GF bake mix using coconut flour on my blog under bake mixes.
I'm so sorry and I apologize profusely if anyone out there has suffered on account of the flax meal in my gluten-free bake mix. I'm very grateful to have figured this out with God's help and that I can now pass on this knowledge to others.
Besides the obvious messing with one's hormones, flax meal also contains trace amounts of cyanide - a poison! I didn't know that. Cooking apparently destroys the cyanide compounds. Here is an article about the side effects of flax seed meal.
I found this statement in a negative article about soy and the thyroid when I was looking into the effects of flax on the thyroid: "Studies have shown that supplementing the diet with 1oz of ground flax seed but not with 1 oz of soy flour significantly alters the estrogen metabolism in the body. The end result is that there is a favoring of the less biologically active estrogen metabolites (2OHE1) in postmenopausal women"
Note:
This seems to indicate to me that if my body started using the less biologically active estrogen metabolites in the flax preferentially, then my body would make less real estrogen, and this would appear to my body as an estrogen withdrawal and to my body this would look like I was going through a severe menopause of sudden estrogen withdrawal each time I consumed enough flax. No wonder I was experiencing funny turns. This conclusion is corroborated by the next link where I found this: microbial action of flax suppresses the effect of estrogen in mammals.
About the effect of flax on the thyroid: I'm not exactly sure, but I assume it is a goitrogen similar to soy. Here is an interesting article on flax. I don't think I will try chia seeds although some people can, if they like, to replace the flax meal. These things always come back to haunt me it seems, so I'll stick with something like coconut flour that has been around for an age and is a name I recognize.