One Week Later

One week after finishing up the Master Cleanse I have a new(ish) perspective on food, life, and all relationships, even the ones with inanimate objects . The short story is I still love cookies, the long story is…..

The last day of my cleanse I went to a nutritional counselor for muscle testing.  It was an interesting process and it turns out I don’t have intolerances to any foods except wheat and sugar. The health intake asked what my typical diet is like and I said “mostly healthy except I’m a sucker for a cookie.” Uh-oh.

Most people shouldn’t eat too much wheat or too much sugar, and Dr. Pat said I should really try to avoid those things. All other forms of gluten are okay and so is honey; I’ll take what I can get.

I reacted to one other thing which was in the tray of metals. Dr. Pat worked her muscle testing magic and finally figured out it was antimony, an element she’d never seen anyone react to. We both claimed to have never heard of it, but we had because in high school chemistry we all had to memorize the periodic tables. I’d actually dropped out of high school chemistry in favor a remedial science class where we got to test the pH of our saliva, but not before I bombed the periodic tables quiz.

We looked up antimony—Dr. Pat in her hardbound desk reference and me on my iphone—and I left determined to find its source in my life. Antimony is toxic (great) and dates back as far as 3100 BC. Its first (and continued) use was in makeup in Predynastic Egypt, and it’s used in fire retardants. Neither of those things applies to me too much, but apparently most bed sheets have fire retardant woven in, which makes me want to go out immediately to buy organic, non-GMO, free-range sheets.

I can live with that, but apparently fire retardant has been found in butter, of all things, because all of the chemicals that are used in nearly everything have a way of getting into…everything. Gross. Butter? That’s the third ingredient in cookies and I can make wheat and sugar free cookies, but butter? No, I’m not giving up butter. (side note: Smart Balance and other “alternative” butters sometimes seem like a good idea, and you can get used to the taste, but I hate that there are so many ingredients and prefer just the two—cream and salt—that it takes to make incredible butter.)

Most antimony is mined in Hunan, China, though it’s been mined in Mexico, California, Nevada, Arkansas and Butte, Montana. Apparently there’s a company in Thompson Falls, Montana (about a hundred miles west of here) called United States Antimony Corporation. Does my

(next) husband work there? Is he a smelter?

Antimony and silver are often underground neighbors, and this is getting the attention of investors in US Antimony and its Mexican mine, whose stock went from fifty cents (where it had sat for a decade) to well over two dollars between April and June of last year. Today it was up, again, closing in on four bucks a pop. Its year to date performance is up 54%; not many stocks can claim that right now. Should I buy some? Is my (next) husband a broker?

There’s a chance, as always, that the Chinese could flood the market with antimony and push out non-Chinese Antimony peddlers and smelters, but according to http://www.usantimony.com/ “the Chinese produce and control 92% of the world market and their production is down and their consumption is up.” Forbes said: “U.S. Antimony recently signed a large contract with a major U.S. producer of all things electrical, rumored to be worth $65 million over 2.5 years…One cheery estimate puts U.S. Antimony’s production from the Mexican operations at 40 pounds of antimony and 8 ounces of silver per ton of mined rock. At current prices, that would equal $23 million a year and $18 million, or 30 cents a share,  in earnings before interest and depreciation. At 10x cash flow, that’s only a $3 stock, but if production grows to $100 million a year as the bulls anticipate…”

Seriously. I better get some.

All joking aside I may or may never know why I reacted to antimony. I’m going to get checked again in a couple of months to see if I’m still reacting, but in the meantime I’ll keep doing research and asking questions. Does it have something to do with the process of heating, molding, and reshaping? Does it have to do with the translation of the word which means “not alone,” or something to do with antinomy (the two words are, for good reason, often confused) which is a paradox or “a contradiction between two beliefs or conclusions that are in themselves reasonable.”

I’ll keep pondering this, but for this weekend I’m going to embrace contradiction. I know, this does not make sense, but indulge me the guilt-free opportunity to eat cake in celebration of my kid’s tenth birthday. Here he is shortly after I brought him home, and below that is him today.

“The more things change, the more they are the same.” –Alphonse Karr.