Varieties of digestive experience

[nancylebov]

Fruits and veggies aren't the best thing for everybody:

So then I did some poking around and discovered the mostly-unknown-in-the-U.S. disorder called fructose malabsorption. Apparently, about 30% of the population in Western nations has it to one degree or another. Thirty percent! With rare exceptions, that usually doesn’t mean we can’t eat any fruit sugars, but that we have to know what our limits and triggers are. This covers not just fruits or their derivatives (including everyone’s favorite chewtoy, HFCS), but also many veggies and beans. (Does Michael Pollan know about this?) And in some cases, it can lead to problems digesting wheat and dairy, too.

Addendum: schemingreader chased some links, and found that 30% of westerners have non-specific abdominal complaints, but not specifically fructose malabsorbtion.

****

And more poking around still uncovered a condition called salicylate sensitivity, which we auties (among others) can also be subject to, and which covers the triggers I have that aren’t accounted for above. Guess which foods are highest in salicylates? Yes, that’s right — pretty much every produce item that’s not on the FODMAP list. (And Donna Williams, an autistic author based in Australia, says documentation exists that veggies are being bred these days with extra salicylates, which are supposed to protect against cancer.) Not to mention tons of nonfood stuff like aspirin and ibuprofen, and most commercially available shampoos and soaps. Holy frigging gluten-free donut holes, Batman. Maybe there’s a good reason some people resist chowing down on ten-foot piles of produce — we don’t just get a little farty eating undercooked broccoli stems, we turn our tummies into skin-covered Cuisinarts doing it, no matter how many times we try over and over again to “get used to it.”

Oddly enough, though, beans don’t bother me at all. Not even if I eat them with pickled cabbage slaw. I’m weird, I know.

Comments

[siderea]

Huh. For the record, I'd long since noticed that I feel after eating too much fresh fruit exactly as I feel after eating too many cookies, and have been treating fresh fruit as junk food (an occasional treat) ever since. I have no idea if I have a problem digesting them, or if my response is normal and other people just ignore the effect, the way they do with cookies.

[chomiji]

Interesting. That possibly explains why I can eat a huge pile of raw veggies and be perfectly happy, but The Mr. will have issues if he does the same. Conversely, he can eat amazingly fatty stuff that would put me totally out of commission. (And his family doesn't seem to get cholesterol problems either.) We joke that it's his [partial] Yorkshire ancestry.

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

This is misleading. I followed that 30% number to her citation, which was a Wikipedia article, and then followed the footnote, to this article (graciously supplied in full by someone really kind!) In the western world, 30% of people have non-specific abdominal complaints, not fructose malabsorption! The fructose malabsorption number may be a lot higher than people think it is, but it's not 1/3 of the population! The article covered all carbohydrate malabsorption, including lactose intolerance, which is much better documented.

I do not think this is a reason for MOST people to stop eating fruits and vegetables! The blogger herself cites the famous orthorexia essay. I'm glad she figured out her own situation, but I don't think that means the rest of us need to stop eating broccoli. (Unless it upsets your stomach, I mean!)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much for tracking that down.

I think the main point is to experiment to find out whether some foods might be a problem if you've got digestive issues, not to give up fruit without checking.

I was just told about someone who can handle fruit juice but not fruit because he can't handle that much fiber.

Something in my mind whispers ****BOGUS, BOGUS, BOGUS!!!!!!!****

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

I got suspicious of the general ranty tone, and especially the assertion "documentation exists", which reminds me of the anti-vaccinationists who persist in putting their and others' kids at risk despite the refutation of the putative link between vaccination and autism. So I looked at the article linked there.

First thing I noticed is that the 2nd-4th hyperlinks in the second paragraph

Salicylate levels build up and reach maximum saturation around day three of intake which means that if you weren’t effected on day one, by the time your Salicylate intake of day one is built on by that taken on day two and then on day three then you reach your maximum toxic state. The long term impact of being in a toxic, inflamed, immune suppressed, detox-impaired state is pretty imaginable but don’t forget that our information processing, mood balance, impulse control and anxiety management all rest on our gut-immune function and relatively balanced brain chemistry.

all just point back to her home page. Maybe she just forgot to put in the page links, I dunno, but...

Then she says, some ways down,

Then there are those with around 3-4 times the high level of Salicylate content like oranges, watermelon, granny smith apples and some veggies. So, what did biogenticists do with this information? Well, to reduce the use of pesticide sprays used on plants, they genetically modified plants to increase their Salicylate levels- true… go look it up. So the Salicylate levels of our foods has gone up since the 1970s… the same foods babies start having from around 18mth-2 years old.

Uh-uh. Lady (that is, ranter lady, Donna Williams; not you, nancylebov), if you want to convince me, or even make me spend more than another minute on this, you tell me where you found it, so I can decide if there's any more sense in this than in (FILL IN YOUR FAVORITE HOAX, MYTH, OR PREJUDICE HERE).

[sodyera.livejournal.com]

Resolved: It's always something.