The doctor is in*

With the summer season finally leaving California and winter coming into view, the winds pick up and the air gets very dry.  This is the time of the year when my nose usually bleeds like crazy from even the smallest of nose blows.  I lived with this for many years and just lived with the fact that I have a sensitive nose and feared the slightest movements (even just turning my head over my pillow while sleeping in bed, for crying out loud!) would trigger blood to bust out and gush for a while.

But then I realized something last year.  It was my diet that was causing nose bleeds!  Well, to be more exact, for creating the potential to have nose bleeds.

You see, my diet was very lacking in roughage.  Last year is when I stared changing my habits and began eating more salads.  In fact, most of my lunches now consist of salads.  When researching nutritious values of foods, I noticed leafy greens such as lettuce -- and especially spinach and kale – include huge helpings of Vitamins A, B, and K.  When looking into what the benefits of vitamin K are, I found out it helps with blood clotting.  Not the bad clotting that comes with eating a lot of meat, but the good clotting where it clots up when you cut yourself and a scab appears to stop the blood from spewing out of your body.

Based on http://nutritiondata.self.com, a cup of lettuce contains 22% of your daily value for vitamin K, while spinach has a healthy 181%, and kale has a whopping 684%!

Since including much more vegetables in my diet, my sensitivity to nose bleeds have dropped significantly.  And in the rare instance that I do get one, it quickly stops.  As you see in the photo, I dress up my salads with a lot of stuff.  Recently my salads consist of half lettuce and half kale or spinach, grape tomatoes, sliced carrots, croutons, shredded cheese, and a very small splash of fat free Italian dressing (so the cheese could stick to the greens and won’t all drop to the bottom of the bowl).  Most lunches also consist of apple slices and washed down with iced tea.

In addition to my lunches, I also snack on sliced celery sticks.  I cut them into small pieces so I can easily pop them into my mouth like potato chips.  I usually just drink water with that.

For a while I was thinking of researching pills to help with my nose bleeds, but it seems a simple change to my diet was all that was needed.  Take that, pharmaceutical industry!

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