Potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, corn, cocoa, etc. are now staples of cuisine all over the world. But these foods were unknown to the rest of the world prior to the “discovery” of North and South America. I would expect that many people in Europe, Asia and Africa would have experienced at least some gastrointestinal distress to many of these foods due to unfamiliarity. Did this happen, and how widespread was it? Did people react worse to some of these new foods more than others? Does the fact that these foods are now essentially safe for most of the world’s population suggest that we’ve evolved to accept these foods more easily?
This paper says that capsicum peppers actually are good for digestion because they irritate the oral and gastrointestinal membranes, increasing the flow of saliva and thus the passage of food through the mouth to the stomach, which is better for digestion.
https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/qian/resources/NunnQianJEP.pdf
(Search on the word “gastrointestinal”.)
So, surprisingly, capsicum peppers are good precisely because they burn your mouth.
At an English dinner party for the king, the cooks took this new vegetable that had sprouted on its voyage from the New World and not knowing about it served the green stalks and made everyone sick. Because of this potatoes were banned from England for many years.
Dairy and alcohol have been problems for a lot of people in the world.
As mentioned, if the wrong parts of potatoes are served they can be problematic. I have done considerable research on the Columbian exchange of crops, and I have not hear of other problems.
Why would an unfamiliar vegetable give you an upset stomach?
But they are not of New World origin, rather the reverse.
Example: Eating a sprouted potato because you don’t know you’re not supposed to.
Everyone has a different mix of gut bacteria. If you introduce something new to your diet, your flora and fauna may have a hard time adapting.
At the bottom level of digestion, though, aren’t our systems dealing with pretty much the same chemical reactions? There are a set number of -ose molecules that our digestive system knows how to hook together and break apart. There are so many amino acids that we build up into proteins and tear down again.
So when a human runs into a ‘new to you’ brand of grain, doesn’t your body just pretty much shrug and get on with it? Yeah, the molecules are hooked into a new pattern we will label ‘maize’, but aren’t all the components the same ones that were used to build ‘wheat’ and ‘rice’ and ‘barley’? Maybe a different break down of how many of variety X you have vs. how many of variety Y, but not really alien?
This is probably not true.
I’m not sure this is a thing. Eating something poisonous, sure. Eating a potato or corn for the first time? It’s not like we need special bugs for digesting them.
Maybe not, but potatoes and tomatoes are part of the nightshade family. Old World people avoided eating them for a long time in the belief that they are poisonous. And they can be, if you eat the wrong part of the plant.
What part of the tomato plant is poisonous?
Dairy products are hard to digest for those peoples who did not milk their domestic animals. Meat can be difficult if you have been a vegetarian for a long time. Those – and alcohol for those who never invented it – are the only things I can think of that have caused problems for any large group of people. Certainly not grains, fruits, or vegetables.
Potatoes which are beginning to green up are extremely bitter. It’s hard to believe anyone would eat enough of one to be poisoned.
All of it except the tomatoes themselves. Same with all the nightshade foods – eggplant, potato, okra.
Like anything involving nutrition, you can find conflicting advice.
Link: Nightshade vegetables and inflammation: Do they affect arthritis?
Link: https://www.diynetwork.com/how-to/outdoors/gardening/are-potatoes-poisonous
Both suggest potatoes are safe, but one suggests that solanine isn’t particularly dangerous and the other suggests that it’s very dangerous, or at least was before that was bred for lower levels. I don’t believe large numbers of natives were killed by poisonous potatoes.
The Smithsonian Magazine reported on the tomato’s introduction to the old world, like others mention, a lot of misunderstandings about how to eat the proper part of the plant and the way it was served, no issues about human genes being affected.
Most adults lose the ability to digest lactose, the sugar in milk, unless they have the mutation that never stops the production of the lactase enzyme. This, as said earlier, is correlated with milking populations, which historically have tended to be white. When humanitarian programs brought large amounts of dairy products to Africa after WWII, they found people refused them because of claimed sickness. It took a while for the reason to be understood. So-called adult onset lactose intolerance wasn’t in the medical literature until about 1970.
There are other intolerances, gluten and fructose probably the main ones. In addition, two other pathways exist that cause digestive distress. Allergies usually affect the skin or respiration, but some digestive effects are known, including abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. More significantly, several diseases, like irritable bowel syndrome, have food triggers. It’s unclear how far back IBS goes, but food triggers likely play a large part in the difficulties people have when encountering a different ethnic food.
Please provide a cite for the claim that “milking populations have tended to be white “.
As per my reading the cow was first domesticated in the Middle East.
In India, many people are vegetarian and milk is considered to be vegetarian and consumed by much of the population, old and young. If I remember correctly cattle was reared in the Indus Valley civilization circa 3300 BC.