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Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of, and finding treatments for, complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia, long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.
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Maybe it is the Italian food and its ingredients helped you. Italian agriculture in touristic parts of Italy can be pure and organic.
Is there a reason why my ME symptoms are far less when abroad rather than at home?
I went to Spain a few months ago and was expecting to spend most of the time in bed or lying in the sun. But I was able to go out and walk 2-3 km each day with hardly any fatigue the following day. This was for four days. I recently went to Holland and the same happened.
At home in the UK i am in bad pain a lot of the time and have to take a lot painkillers. And walking 2-3 km would affect me for several days afterwards and in bed sleeping and fatigued.
I don't think that this is in your head. I use a Kestrel Weather Station (see attached images) to track several aspects of Weather. The worst to induce Symptoms appear to be Humidity changes followed by Temperature changes.
Even though in Italy the quality of average food is much better than the quality of average food in the US, it's possible to get food in the US that is far superior to what we can get in Italy. This sounds confusing, but in Italy, there is no pasture-raised meat - the cows are all crammed into barns or bought abroad from other countries. Fields here are all vineyards or corn, not animals (at least in the north, where I'm living). So while what you buy in the supermarket is probably better than the factory raised stuff in US supermarkets, it's nowhere near the level of what you can find in a Whole Foods or even in the organic section of a supermarket chain.
In fact, my in-laws eat very little meat, because the quality of what they can find in stores is pretty bad. My FIL almost never eats meat, and we all thought it was because he didn't like it. But when they came to visit us in the US he gladly ate meat every day and was shocked at how much better it was.
So in the US, I consume grass-fed local dairy and pasture-raised local meats but while in Italy, everything is corn-fed or factory farmed. It's only when we go to the mountains (the Alps) that we can find good quality eggs and dairy straight from the farmers, but that's not any better than what I get in the U.S.
I am surprised that the food in the US better quality than Italian food in general. It is an interesting information that you gave here. I was not talking about the supermarket stuff. I went to a rural area in Italy some 4 years ago, meat was really good. Actually it was a pig farm. But, the olive oil, wine, etc all produced in the premises. I was imagining that you went to a similar touristy place somehow.