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Phil I am in a similar situation to yours, added to by the fact that I take sinemet every one and a half hours. My first warning to you is "beware of Thanksgiving!" I suffered badly last year, and it was only in retrospect that I realized what was the problem. - Turkey. Every time I walked past the fridge, I tollk a little nibble of turkey. So I was having a constant supply of protein. I must have reduced the useful, absorbed quantity of sinemet by at least half - I felt almost as if I had stopped taking any medication at all. The effect was dramatic and almost immediate. Otherwise, I try to keep protein at a minimum during the day - cereal (usually raisin bran) for breakfast, salad or veg. soup for lunch, and fruit in-between meals if I am starving. And then my protein I eat at the evening meal - usually some sort of meat and veg. If I am doing something in the evening, either I put off eating till afterwards, or I take my protein at lunchtime that day, and know that the afternoon will be a washout. Of course, the arithmetic of the whole situation is impossible - don't eat for an hour after taking medication, and wait 2 ours after eating before taking medication - and take the darn medication eery hour and a half. Go figure! So sometimes I just give up, and eat when the food is there, regardless of whether it is pill time or not. But usually I try to separate pills and food as much as possible. Hope that helps you, Hilary Blue Phil Tompkins wrote: > > Since I seem to have reached that stage in PD where it has become > increasingly difficult to walk the narrow line between too little > and too much levodopa and to achieve that delicate balance between PD > symptoms on the one hand and drug-induced dyskinesia on the other, > I'm wondering to what degree food intake is a factor. Is my > difficulty in finding just the right drug dose a result of not paying > enough attention to what did I eat and when did I eat it? > > I know about the desirability of maintaining that nice 1/7 ratio of > protein to other nutrients, although I haven't tried to observe this > rule consistently. Are there other factors that can be important, > such as the quantity of food eaten, the time drugs are taken vs. > time of eating, the frequency of food intake, ratio of solids to > liquids, the effects of regularity and of constipation (and its > opposite), the digestibility of what I ate -- things of that order? > Will I have to become really disciplined about food, and in the end > eat the same things every day at the same time and in the same > quantity in order to achieve the right drug effective doses? When I > pig out, do I in effect cast my pills before swine? > > I would greatly appreciate any observations, good rules of thumb or > sources of information on this subject. > > Phil Tompkins > Hoboken NJ > age 60/dx 1990