Food you love, but can't eat

Cafe Society
41

There are different families of liver enzymes that help digest many types of food and many different medicines. If the same family is involved in metabolizing both the food and the medicine, it can have an effect on the effective dose of the medicine. So it can be like taking a lower dose of the medicine, or a higher dose, or cause no change. The exact effect can be hard to predict.

Some of the early research on these families showed grapefruit has an effect on many medicines. So it became part of standard medical advice. But so do many other foods, like barbecued meat.

If you really wanted grapefruit, you could probably adjust for it. In the case of statins, it would mean retesting your lipids after a week of using it to see if it has a significant effect. In the case of blood pressure, it might mean checking it more often during a week long experiment. You could talk to your doctor about specifics. Or just decide grapefruit ain’t that important. I don’t much like it myself.

42

This thread is sad! I wish we could all do some trade-offs: I’ll swap the things I can’t eat for the things you can’t eat, because I don’t even like the things you can’t eat.

On that score: grapefruit. I marvel that anyone likes grapefruit. Please explain how it tastes to you, as I’d like to understand. To me, it’s inedibly sour/bitter if eaten plain, and I have no interest in dousing it with a sugar to make it barely palatable; then it just has an unhealthy, grainy, disgustingly sweet coating.

@snowthx @Mama_Zappa @SpoilerVirgin @carrps @teelabrown @xtenkfarpl: What are those of you who like grapefruit tasting that I don’t?

43

Forbidden fruits may taste better?

44

I won’t eat grapefruit plain. But sprinkled with sugar, there’s something about the combination of bitter and sweet that hits the spot. I don’t love it the way my mother did, though. I may eat it once or twice a year.

I think the ruby red grapefruit is sweeter than plain yellow, but that may well just be a perception, since we tend to consider “red” foods sweeter.

I also happen to like candied grapefruit peel. I’ve made that myself, several times.

45

I must now avoid the hotter hot sauces. I never went for the insanely hot stuff but I did love me some ones with scoville units over 10K. But reflux got to be too much. And hot sauce heat is NOT reduced by PPIs or H2 blockers or antacids. Only a slug of casein will tame it.

Thankfully CPAP has improved the reflux along with the sleep apnea, and I can tolerate your basic tabascos, cholulas, and srirachas at least.

46

I like bitter foods, and I don’t sugar my grapefruit…that is, I didn’t when I could eat it. I like all citrus, and I like the flavor of grapefruit. Maybe it’s because I’ve been eating since I was very little, it tastes like home to me.

47

Cake with buttercream frosting, cream pies, ice cream, sugar cookies, and flan or tapioca. I realize this is more than one type of food, but I would literally, happily eat only these foods at all meals every day for the rest of my life. I don’t because doing so would have extreme negative health consequences. I want to, though.

48

I love “pepper” (peppercorn). But discovered I’m allergic to it.

49

Ginger ale; might as well pour a 12 oz. bottle of battery acid down my craw. Fast acting, too — almost immediate heartburn and antacids don’t help.

50

interesting. Do you like the taste of quinine? I do, but to me it’s a different kind of bitter.

51

I don’t think I’ve ever had quinine. Never been to a country where malaria was endemic.

52

I’m in the same boat. I suspected alpha-gal syndrome but my allergist says that’s probably not it. She calls it chronic idiopathic urticaria probably triggered (but probably not allergically) by red meat. I miss beef a little but I miss pork and pork products products a lot. Especially real bacon. There’s such a thing as “turkey bacon” that’s better than nothing. But it’s not very much better than nothing.

53

I’ve been very lucky so far. The only thing I can think of is raw onions - I can still eat them, but they’re starting to cause annoyances if I eat too much, and my office partner would suffer for it.

The big thing though is I can only eat a fraction of what I used to or else I gain weight fast. I lost a lot of weight about 14 years ago and have never been able to eat a satisfying amount of food since. Altered metabolism due to both dieting and aging.

54

Quinine is what gives tonic water its taste, so if you’ve ever had a G&T, you’ve tasted quinine!

55

Coffee.

I used to be a heavy coffee drinker, and got quite pretentious about it: I’d order whole raw beans from Hawaii and roast them in small batches at home, then grind them using a burr grinder and then brew my fresh coffee in either a Swiss made French press or a Bialetti moka pot. I drank it straight black, no adulterants of any kind. The result was truly biblical manna from heaven. I’d make several pots every day.

Now I can’t handle it at all. It tears up my stomach something fierce and even a few sips can make me nauseated. But the smell of fresh coffee brewing is one of the most amazing, delicious scents imaginable. I confess I usually make a pot of coffee in the break room at work first thing in the morning just so I can smell the fresh brew doing its thing. I never drink a drop but the aroma as we have our mandatory daily AM meeting is divine.

Up until very recently my replacement caffeine delivery system has been black tea, brewed British style: violently boiling water added to a preheated tea pot with Typhoo, Tetley, or PG Tips tea bags. Steep for ~4 minutes, pull out the tea bags, and the resulting brew, drank with a small splash of milk, is quite nice. Not as soul-healing as a cup of dark black coffee was, but a suitable if inferior substitute. Now… ugh. I fear I may not be able to handle the tea either. It’s made me nauseous the last couple of mornings I’ve had it. I really don’t want to depend on Rockstar energy drinks for my morning caffeine fix but I fear that may be where I’m at now.

I’m a T2 diabetic so I’ve given up almost all sugary snacks that I used to eat: cakes, cookies, candy, and sugared soda. I was never a big bread or pasta eater so cutting back on those wasn’t a thing since I wasn’t eating them to begin with. Honestly I’m not too upset about any of those except for one thing: Starburst jellybeans. Those were my favorite and I sorely miss them. I have some in the house still for when I’m hypoglycemic but that happens so rarely that those jellybeans just sit untouched for months and months at a time. Now that I’m thinking about it I’m not even sure where they are.

Alcoholism runs deep and wide in my family and I’ve seen it destrpy or outright kill a lot of people, including my own mother and soon, I’m almost certain, my father. I’d love to be able to kick back with a Guinness or one of the local Portland craft beers after a long day at work and then be a weekend wine snob, but I’ll be damned if I’m going down that road. I will not touch alcohol at all.

Oh. And anything spicy. I used to eat spicy stuff, the hotter the better – I even grew my own hot peppers, dried them, and crushed them into powder which I spread with reckless abandon on almost everything. Now restaurant salsa is too hot for me, and Taco Bell hot sauce? Right out.

Covid is the reason. Like most people I lost my sense of taste when I caught it and while my taste buds returned to mostly normal functioning after I recovered my ability to eat spice did not. I can barely handle black pepper now.

56

Macadamia nuts are what I really miss. I used to eat them as often as my wallet could afford, but then I started a period where I would throw up violently with little warning. I eliminated all possible causes except for mac nuts, so I just avoid them now. It’s strong enough that just the small of mac nut powder in some of the Pepperidge farm cookies is enough to upset my stomach.

A theory I have heard is that you develop a food allergy if you eat something at the same time you get sick. Right before This started happening I took a vacation where I took a bag of mac nuts and ate them sporadically through the week. When we got back to our car, I ate a few and we headed for home. We stopped halfway there because I had to throw up.

57

I don’t have allergies but simply due to old age full maturity I no longer enjoy spicy foods as much as I used to. Given a choice, I now go with “medium” rather than “hot”, even when “hot” isn’t really all that hot. I cannot deal with really super-spicy stuff any more, although I’ll still entertain a pretty spicy lamb curry once in a while.

58

Add me to the list of people who can no longer eat grapefruit. It’s not as a result of my statin, though. Or even my GERD. I’m on a psych drug called Latuda. If I ate grapefruit, it would spike my Latuda level into the stratosphere.

I can’t even have Sun Drop or Fresca soda.

When I was a kid, my paternal grandparents Nee-Nee and Pop-Pop used to send us a big box of oranges and grapefruits every year for Christmas through a delivery service. I love grapefruit. I used to sugar it. When we went to their home in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, I would have grapefruit as part of my breakfast.

59

I actually prefer turkey bacon over pig bacon. Too much fat in the pig bacon and I hate fat/grease.

60

I keep gout at bay by drinking lots of water. Like an insane volume each day. I drink beer, eat red meat, organ meats, anchovies, all the “bad” foods but I don’t have dietary gout attacks.

My gout has been secondary to trauma. My last attack was after I, out of frustration, kicked a wall. I was in horrible pain for a few weeks.