11:02pm July 8, 2013

Recommendation: Complete Tubefeeding: Everything you need to know about tubefeeding, tube nutrition, and blended diets ( By Eric Aadhaar O’Gorman)

I strongly recommend the first half of this book to anyone interested in tube feeding, whether it’s you yourself who has a tube or someone you know. It’s the only book I know if on the subject written by an actual tubie. The small amount :(other books for laypeople are mostly by and for parents of small tubie children. Which I’m not too interested in as an adult tubie. It has information on everything from the history of tube feeding to the different types of feeding tubes, to how to take care of your tube.

The only very minor problem I had with the first section was that he seemed to believe everyone goes through a grieving process, and that even being very attached to your tube and the formula diets and everything is a manifestation of grief. I did all my grieving about food long before I was tube fed, the tube was nothing but a welcome relief at the end of a grueling struggle. It’s fine that some people grieve, but don’t be alarmed if you know a tubie who isn’t grieving. That’s normal too and it’s not denial.

The second part of the book, I had a really hard time getting through. It’s about blended diets. That’s useful information for people with g tubes, not as much for j tubes although it can apparently be done. I’m content with my formula diet so I didn’t need that section, although it was interesting.

But when I read it, it was one of the few times I’ve had to come to tumblr and snark to let off steam in order to finish a book. The problem is that the useful information is tightly interwoven with the author’s unusual beliefs about food. Through doing Google searches on some of the odd phrases he kept repeating, I was able to determine that he got all his (inaccurate) information and opinions on food from the writings and speeches of one particular famous food faddist. And he got very lecturey and scary at times, ranting about the way bad eating was running the economy through obesity and other health problems, and how all health problems can be traced to bad eating, and… you get the drift.

I would not recommend reading the second section of the book if you are prone to orthorexia or other eating disorders involving food restriction, and read with caution if you’re fat. I had to snark to avoid being badly triggered.

Another thing I disliked about the second section, was the recipes section. He printed a lot of recipes sent in by tubies and their parents. And the food fad connection became apparent yet again. I expect recipes to tell me the basic ingredients. I do not expect recipes to specify that the food absolutely must be organic… otherwise it’s just not the same recipe? Idk, my exposure to and harm at the hands of food quackery may be showing, but I had tell trouble getting through section two.

If you do read section two, I would recommend ignoring him any time he specifies which food is real food and which isn’t, any time he goes on about food and health, in short any time his food fad tendencies come to the fore. I really wished this section was as unbiased as the first section, but he never lost an opportunity to evangelize about food.

The worst part to me was when he declared that many foods are not foods at all, merely “edible food like substances", including things like sugar and white flour. A terrible thing to say in a book dedicated to feeding people whose diet is going to be limited enough already. One use of tube feeding is for children so picky that they can’t get adequate nutrition. Does he really want to add to that problem by convincing them that loud if perfectly decent foods aren’t food at all?

His food fad ideas come from Michael Pollan, often word for word. That’s a man who has said, “The healthcare crisis is a euphemism for the catastrophe of the American diet.“ Which is untrue to the point of ridiculous.

If you wade through all the Michael-Pollan-speak, though, you can find some useful information. He describes in great detail how to blend food, what equipment to get, which food work better for what, and so forth. Just be aware that nearly anything he says about food and health comes directly from Michael Pollan, sometimes even word for word phrases, which is how I traced it back to him. (It looked too much like the ideas of one particular person, so I became suspicious.)

So I recommend the first section wholeheartedly. I recommend the second section only to people who won’t be triggered by health food fads, our to people who so much need the information about a blended diet that they don’t mind wading through that. And of course to people who are actually into health food fads, who obviously won’t mind it.

I was still disappointed by that section, though, because I expected it to be more even handed, and instead ran into a recovering orthorexic’s nightmare. And since feeding tubes are sometimes the product of eating disorders and children who have a hard time recognizing most food as food, I found that aspect of the book really irresponsible.

I don’t want to let my intense dislike of that part, overshadow the whole book, though. Overall I loved it. All the information that didn’t originally come from Michael Pollan was excellent. Section one was uniformly excellent, then, and section too had elements of excellence and elements of WTF. I hate to let the WTF mar the only book of its kind, though. There’s information here I found nowhere else. And that’s really the important part of this book. Despite my dislike of that one element, my recommendation of this book to tubies and caregivers to tubies, as well as to anyone who wants to know how to do blended nutrition, is extremely strong.

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