My mother-in-law was, by all accounts (includlng her own admission), a hard-ass about her daughters’ diets when they were growing up. Lots of veggies (often cooked to death), very little in the way of junk food or convenience food, no sugary breakfast cereal, etc.
My sister-in-law wound up with an extreme craving for all things sugary and junky, and is morbidly obese; she steadfastly believes that her cravings, and weight issues, are directly because her mother would never let her have such foods. So, she went to the other extreme with her kids – no restrictions on what they could eat, and there was always tons of junk food in the house. Probably not surprisingly, her son (20 years old) is also morbidly obese; her two daughters (15 year old twins) aren’t as big, but one of them does seem to be heading that way, and all three kids are absolutely junk food fiends.
Sorry for the slight hijack but I wanted to say thanks for this info. As a no-kid person I had never heard this. I knew baby aspirin had a " not for under X age" warning but didn’t realize it was for most kids. Looking up Reye’s it seems like a very rare disease,1000 cases a year in the US, is that the main reason for not recommending aspirin?
Jeez, what a messed up story. You would like to think the mom would get the idea that all extremes were bad, not just the one she was forced into.
You would think so, but my sister-in-law has a boatload of issues, and this is just one of them. (Also, she’s one of those people who are convinced that their POV on anything is the only valid one.)
I’ve lost track. Are we talking about castor oil (a laxative) or Cod liver oil (a vitamin supplement)? Not that there is meaningful difference in nastiness.
Yes, but vitamin D is complicated. Vitamins were largely discovered in the 1910s and 1920s, vitamin D was the fourth one discovered. That does not mean that the biochemistry was understood - forms of vitamin D were being discovered in the 1960s IIRC. Sunlight exposure increases vitamin D3 levels. I do not think this was appreciated in the 1930s, but had trouble finding a history of vitamin D from a lab medicine perspective. (I couldn’t quickly Google when the first accurate blood test for D levels became available. Even now there are questions about the accuracy of a blood test for measuring whole body levels of some compounds.)
Not necessarily! There have been many cases of kids indulging in that nasty-flavored adult aspirin. (It doesn’t take much to poison a child, either.)
One of my Facebook friends, a high school classmate, said she called poison control once on each of her 3 kids. She caught one eating Vicks VapoRub, another licking spilled table salt off the floor, and the third eating some non-food thing I can’t recall right now. Anyway, guess which was the only item she was told she needed to worry about?
You guessed it, the table salt. They told her about the symptoms of hypernatremia, and told her to try to get her daughter to drink as much water as possible. In the end, she did not have any of those symptoms, and was fine.
I called Poison Control when my son was a toddler, and ate an OTC decongestant. I dropped it, reached down to pick it up, and he was faster than I was.
He was not quite 2.
They told me he would be fine, but he might be bouncing off the walls-- and he was. He was like a pinball for almost two solid hours.
According to my mom, I ate a whole bunch of adult aspirin when I was young and had to get my stomach pumped. Never doubt the ability of small children to do dangerous illogical things
Cod liver oil was the one mentioned, and yeah, it’s far more disgusting than aspirin. These days it comes in capsules (which you can cut open if you’re curious), but in the thirties it was still in liquid form.
Kids do eat and drink weird things, but cod liver oil has a famously repellent, rotten smell that is hard to get past - disliking it isn’t learned behaviour. And after a whole bottle the kid would have terrible diarrhoea.
At least through 1958 my mother lined up the 4 kids every morning and went down the row with a tablespoon and her bottle of cod liver oil. No escaping it. This was in Iowa, but she grew up in Maine and that is what rock-ribbed mothers did there I guess. She spent some years in orphanages in Maine, so there is that.
Of course lots more cod livers to be squeezed for oil in Portland, Maine than in Iowa. I almost gag thinking about it.
Her Boston baked beans were pretty good though. Didn’t make up for the damn cod liver oil.
Yup. It’s disgusting, and like you say, it makes you gag. It’s kinda supposed to - it’s not exactly food. Downing a whole bottle would make you do more than gag.
That part is either bullshit or the child was very disturbed in some way. Given the way those kids were living, that’s a possibility. It’s definitely not a sign that, given the option, most kids would become so enamoured of healthy foods that they’d choose to drink cod liver oil.
If the theory is that they’re young enough to consume what the body “needs” then they wouldn’t consume cod liver oil in a quantity that would definitely make you feel sick.
I’m preaching to the converted here, of course, since no-one here thinks the story has any credibility. Just exploring one of the reasons for that, I guess.
I’ve seen lemon-flavored cod liver oil, and castor oil, at my local natural-foods store. Haven’t tried either of them.
I have also read, in old home-remedy books, about a cod liver/castor oil “sandwich” - pour a small amount of fruit juice in a cup, pour the oil on top, and then pour more juice on top. Bottoms up, I guess.
Modern oils are, no doubt, more refined than the old-fashioned remedies. Back in the day, liquid medicines were deliberately foul-tasting, because people believed that the worse it tasted, the better it worked.
It might have been for that reason, and it might have been because it makes it less likely, before child-safe tops, that a child can get hold of them and overdose on them. And I guess adults would only take them when they really needed them, too, so that might make some of them work better.
I was once told that paracetamol (tylenol) tablets in the UK tend to be huge, mostly filler, because it makes them more difficult to overdose on (you can grind them up, but that takes planning and effort). Can’t find any info for that, but apparently discouraging suicide is the reason our painkillers usually come in blister packs rather than large bottles.
Well, at least you can know it wasn’t a pointless exercise-- you were getting Omega 3s, and vitamins A & D.
I don’t think that’s going to discourage a really determined suicide. It does help you keep track of whether you took a dose or not, especially if you are post-surgical, and generally groggy and out of sorts. A lot of people accidentally overdose on painkillers, because they take one, fall asleep for an hour, wake up, and can’t remember whether they’ve taken one in the last four hours or not.
Also, in regard to medicine tasting nasty-- a lot of people experience a dulled sense of taste when they are sick, mainly because if they are congested and can’t smell, they can’t taste well, but for other reasons too. Things you can’t choke down when you are tasting fully, you can manage when you are congested.
Nasty tasting medicine does discourage children above about the age of four from swallowing medicine, but kids three and under put everything in their mouths, and cannot spit as effectively as older kids. They can projectile vomit, but they can’t spit out something nasty tasting with a lot of force, no matter what you’ve seen on TV.