I’ve heard of that: it’s the True Scotsman Diet. Those who get better have stayed true to the diet and the ones that don’t get better have obviously cheated.
oh, somebody thinks he’s important.
No, I’m aware that I’m insignificant. My significance, though, or lack of it, has nothing to do with the fact that many digestive diseases, as well as plenty of other chronic health problems, can often be greatly improved or cured with better diet, the right supplements, posture work, and other simple, safe healing methods.
People are a combination of ignorant and unwilling to change. Few even seek, and the ones that do often pay a heavy price, both socially and in their health. Experimentation can hurt you, when there are so few good sources of unbiased, useful information. I’ve seen quite a few of my friends in the alternative health movement accidentally harm their own health temporarily, through dietary or other experiments gone wrong.
I used to be more willing to share what I’ve learned, but I finally woke up and realized that people are mostly either stubborn and hard-headed, or easily-led and not able to grasp or stick to useful health practices.
Either way, I usually can’t help them. When they come to my forum, I will sometimes make an effort.
I’ve got an intestinal condition which has motivated me to try a number of different dietary restrictions and additions. I guess I’m ignorant and unwilling to change because the only thing that’s actually consistently helped has been medication. Reading what al27052 wrote, I now realize that I just wasn’t eXtreme!!! enough. So my new plan is to get on a radical diet and try to qualify for the X Games.
Have you done the food diary thing yet? Aren’t those FUN? If I never see another bowl of plain boiled rice again, it’ll be too soon. I can still eat rice if there’s some flavoring to it, but plain boiled? No thanks, I’ve already eaten my share for this lifetime, and for several more lifetimes, too.
Wow.
And I want to speak to my fellow “Not Allergic, Just Sensitive” diners:
Stop being so sensitive.
Seriously, if I share a pizza with friends, I fart up a storm later. I used to bring up my lactose-sensitivity, and try to get the group to order a second pizza without cheese. Now I just enjoy joining in on an evening with good friends. And my wife is more than willing to let me have the bathroom for an hour of gas pains later. It’s still less annoying than me suddenly becoming the center of attention and demanding special treatment.
(Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE being the focus of everyone’s concern… but I’m trying to be more mature and not enjoy that quite so much) (much to friends’ relief)
I’ve got a half-dozen sensitivities like that. And I just deal with them (in a low-key way-- ask the server to leave off an ingredient, but if it’s “built in” and unavoidable, I’ll just shut up and eat it).
Hey, if I can’t avoid a food that’ll make me feel crummy the next day, well, who doesn’t deal with feeling crummy occasionally?
I’m not talking to you Actually Allergic people. You have my unbridled sympathy. I’m talking to me (and any fellow recovering Dramatically Sensitive Foodies here).
There are degrees of sensitivity. If you get an hour of gas pains, I’d say that’s pretty mild. With some foods, I’ll be miserable for a couple of weeks. I’ve done food diaries, and I know which foods will set me off, and for how long, and what sorts of symptoms I’ll get with each food. I’m willing to put up with an hour or two of pain, for some foods. I’m less willing to put up with pain for longer than that…especially when it’s NOT just gas.
Yeah, I was really hoping my self-critique wouldn’t come across as being tone-deaf to conditions like yours.
You get no snark, just sympathy. Life is really unfair sometimes, and allergies is one of those times.
So, was I correct when I (a cook) told my servers that lactose intolerance isn’t an allergy, it just makes you fart? We had a group a while back that was just loaded with alleged gluten-allergic and lactose-intolerant people, and some of the servers were freaking out over whether or not some of the items on the buffet had dairy in them, because they didn’t want to kill anybody.
Lactose intolerance might make a person fart. Or it might cause other, more severe symptoms. The symptoms will vary from one patient to the next, and will also vary according to how much dairy the patient has consumed.
There are also genuine milk allergies.
Some people claim to be sensitive or allergic to ingredients when they just don’t want to eat the food in question (as has been noted in this and other threads) because some people just won’t take “no thanks” for an answer. However, some of us really do have problems when we eat certain foods, and would prefer to be taken seriously.
I’m not allergic to foods, so far as I know. I’m allergic to half a dozen antibiotics, and certain insect bites and stings.
But sensitivity can also cause problems, and I’m pretty tired of my problems being dismissed, which is why I reacted as I did. Maybe I’m “allergic” to comments like that…that is, I have a response that’s out of proportion to the stimulus.
Heh, first thing I did was clear soy sauce [and all forms of soy to be thorough]
I am seriously glad it is only IBS, not anything more serious, though with the increase in farting, and the runs in combination with animal fats [primarily] I think my gallbladder is going wahooni shaped. I have 4 of the 5 Fs, female, fat, fifties, flatulant and thankfully due to an hysterectomy no longer fecund.:rolleyes:
So how ya doin’… want to grab lunch?
That article pretty much confirms what I was telling the servers; that is, “uncomfortable/unpleasant symptoms” vs. the “instant death” they were worried about. This particular instance was a few months ago and I don’t remember now what the exact item in question was, but I do remember that the dairy in it was a very minor ingredient and that the amount present in a single serving was insignificant — assuming “intolerant”, not “allergic”.
I do recall, though, that this was a group of ~100 people, of which no fewer than 32 of them were vegans/vegetarians, gluten-allergic, lactose-intolerant, or some combination thereof that made trying to assemble their special meals insanely complicated. It wasn’t a matter of “12 v/v, 10 gluten-free, & 10 dairy-free”; it was more "5 vegetarian, 3 vegan, 1 vegan/gluten, 1 vegetarian/dairy, 2 vegetarian/gluten/dairy, etc. etc., plus several in this sub-group with additional allergies/sensitivities/intolerances alongside their gluten/dairy issues. For the served meals, this resulted in assembling the 32 “special” plates taking longer than plating the other 70+ “normal” meals, largely because we had to individually label each plate with each guest’s name to make sure the right person got the right meal. And then the meals that were buffets — where everybody can pick and choose for themselves what they want/are able to eat — were almost worse because now these same people were sending the serving staff running back and forth between the kitchen and buffet line (at opposite ends of the building) to ask “does this have X in it?” “does this have Y in it?”
And finally, the thing that just infuriated us in the kitchen, was the final dinner this group had. The servers started serving the “normal” meals while the kitchen was still struggling to assemble the “special” meals, and apparently a large number of the “special” guests conveniently “forgot” their dietary restrictions (including several of the vegan/vegetarians) when they saw the nice steak dinner that was being served, and just dug in to whatever was put in front of them without mentioning their special needs. Which of course now left us short on meals for the “normal” guests (steaks are expensive, so we’re not in the habit of cooking 30 extra steaks for a group of 100 - we cook a few extra “just in case”, but not that many for a group that size). So now we had to start deconstructing those “special” meals and reassembling them into “normal” meals, adding in what few extra steaks we’d cooked, in order to have enough steak dinners for everybody.
And only then, after everybody finally had a plate in front of them, did some of the guests “remember” to ask their server, “is there dairy in this?”. GAAAAAAAAHGHGRRRG!
Remember I’m on your side here 
I want to make sure each guest gets what they need/ask for. And honestly, if I’m cooking in a restaurant where I’m preparing individual meals for individual orders, doing so is actually a fairly simple matter, and it doesn’t really matter if the guest’s dietary restrictions are “real” or not. But the kind of cooking I do now (conventions, often for several hundred people at one go), it just turns into a logistical nightmare, especially when those people aren’t consistent with their special needs from one meal to the next.
Also, I honestly think a lot of convention guests simply don’t comprehend the difference between restaurant cooking and convention/catering cooking. That is, they don’t grasp that we’re not preparing their meals just before they’re served. We spend hours before the meal preparing everything, and if we were informed about “special needs” in advance, we can include preparing those special meals in that time. If they don’t tell us in advance, then we likely haven’t prepared anything, and when they wait until the meal is actually being served to say something, it turns into a frantic scramble to come up with something they can eat, especially if their special needs go beyond the most common requests (veg, gluten, dairy).
I was just in line at a coffee shop. All I wanted was a bagel and a cup of coffee. The person in front of me asked about each item in the display case and what was in it. Then wanted to know if they had syrups for the lattes and what flavors they were, then had to think it over for a while. OMG, can’t you see that there is a line forming behind you? The shop can’t make money if every $3.50 transaction takes 5 minutes.
Pull my finger? 
I prefer supper, I like to keep my lunches the same, makes my insulin calculations easier if I do
I’ve actually worked as a banquet server, but mostly as the person who preps the tables, serves the drinks, and cleans up. I bet my customer complaints were different than yours, though. Mostly the male diners complained that my skirts weren’t short enough (this was back in the 70s, when any skirt that was longer than mid thigh was considered prudish). I also had a friend who was the convention manager in a hotel in Las Vegas, so I know a bit about breakage and last minute dietary changes.
Travel articles used to advise people to ask for “special diet” meals on flights (back when airlines ordinarily used any excuse to serve a meal on a plane) or in other mass serving situations, like banquets. I don’t know if they still do. Apparently, these meals were supposed to be of higher quality than the default meal.
I don’t know about vegetarians, but I am friends with several Jews, who observe kosher to various degrees. Some are pretty strict in what they will and won’t eat, and won’t budge even in the face of a bacon cheeseburger. Others will eat a cheeseburger on occasion, and might or might not leave off the bacon. Others figure that their G-d made shrimp and lobster, so it MUST be OK to eat if there’s no health hazard, as there would be in a desert. And others think that eating traif is a sin…but it’s so darned tasty. I suspect that many of the vegetarians/vegans in your group fell into that category.
I’m neither allergic nor sensitive to any foods I’ve ever eaten (well, I was once as a child but outgrew it). I do, however, go out to dinner regularly with a group of four (including me) people. One is gluten intolerant but never makes a big deal out of it - she just quietly asks the waiter which items on the menu are suitable for her to eat. Another is allergic/sensitive to nothing but is incredibly picky (won’t eat Chinese, won’t eat Indian, won’t eat Moroccan …)
Guess which one makes dining out and choosing a restaurant more difficult?
What’s so special about a bacon cheeseburger that they should abandon their beliefs, Lynn?