Not only pastries, but mass-produced ice cream, as well.
For the past few years, every time I eat even a small amount of, say, a sheet cake from a grocery store or a Twinkie or some ice cream from Thrifty’s, I promptly get a very acidic stomach and indigestion.
Before you say it’s because of high fat, I can eat homemade baked goods or artisan pastry or ice cream from a farmer’s market and have no such reaction.
Is it some sort of preservative or chemical in the factory-produced stuff?
There’s a chance it’s carrageenan. For years I thought I had a strange lactose intolerance that only presented when I ate ice cream. An offhand comment by a coworker whose husband has Crohns tipped me off to the fact that carrageenan causes gastro distress ranging from mild to severe in some unlucky individuals (mine is pretty severe. yay me).
It’s really hard to find any info that’s not on a ‘woo’ site, but I did my own experiment on myself and determined that it’s absolutely carrageenan that does it. Ice cream (except carrrageenan-free Haagen Dazs), powdered hot chocolate packets, half and half…all of them are off limits.
Most commercial ice creams and many mass produced sweets contain Carrageenan. It’s often in milk. It’s even in most (but not all) soy, almond & rice milks. It’s pretty pervasive as a thickener in food stuffs.
Carrageenan is used in clinical research to induce colitis in lab mice.
You may have sensitivity to it and small amounts cause you discomfort.
ETA: Ninja’d.
I bet you guys are right.
Yesterday, after a light lunch, I noticed a new Asian milk tea joint. These shops make you a big iced tea with sweetened milk in it. Now that I’m looking online, I deduce that some shops use a milk powder as the base. The final milk tea is supposed to have a slightly creamy quality to it, so I assume carrageenan is added to the milk powder to produce the illusion of creaminess.
From this new shop, I drank a big delicious Assam milk tea at about noon and by 3 p.m. had a nasty case of heartburn and sour stomach. A previous milk tea place I had visited had much better-tasting drinks (i.e., they really tasted like fresh milk), and they never caused me any stomach issues. I’ll have to restrict where I drink these things.
That’s interesting about Haagen-Dazs. I don’t drink shakes because of the stomach upset issue, but I recently cheated and had a Haagen-Dazs shake from Smashburger, and it didn’t bother me a bit.