Day 31 - Confounding factors

Since I last wrote, we have added a few things. Lately, broccoli, mushrooms. Before that wheat (and in D's case yeast too). I had two bananas in that blackened pungent state, so I decided to make them into banana muffins. Yum!

I slightly modified my Mum's banana cake recipe. I have to say, although I'm biased, it's a pretty bloody awesome recipe. It's in a recipe book Mum's had since we were kids. It's a hardcover book, and if you stand it on it's spine, it will fall open to the banana cake page. All be-smattered with old cake batter and butter and whatnot.

My modified version goes like this and it's just as good, I reckon.

125g butter
1/2 cup honey
2 eggs
1 teaspoon bi-carb soda
2 very ripe bananas
1/3 cup yoghurt/milk
2 cups wholemeal self-raising flour
Pinch salt

Cream honey (melt it a bit), butter and bananas. Add eggs, beat. Add yoghurt, bi-carb, flour and salt. Mix. Bake in 180 degrees C oven for about 25 mins. Makes 12 bigish muffins. Or back for about 50 mins as one cake.

Anyway, onto the confounding factors. I've been doing some tutoring on environmental monitoring. My students have to design a monitoring program, and it's really important to reduce confounding factors. This diet is just like that too. That's why there are no spices allowed and things like that, even though we're not going to be explicitly testing them at any stage. If you just started eating them, then you wouldn't be able to tell if a reaction was due to those things, or to the food you are testing. So you exclude them to reduce confounding factors. But, just like environmental monitoring, you can't control for everything.

Take wheat as an example. It's hasn't given me a stomach ache (my classic intolerance response). However, I have been waking up with a stuffy nose and throat. Hmmm, says I. Is this the wheat? Or, perhaps I'm just getting a cold. Well, I haven't come down with a cold, but the level of tiredness I've been experiencing would suggest that I have been fighting off a cold. Or... perhaps that level of tiredness if a result of a reaction to wheat? Hm, who knows! See what I mean about confounding factors? I am well confounded on this one!