I replaced the white flour & pasta with wheat. I know I've spoken of my mother & her resistance to anything she perceives as healthy. Well today my sister stayed home with a cold (mind you the kids had horrible colds just last week) well I heard my mother tell my sister that she gets a cold whenever I cook with the wheat flour or pasta....
Seriously, my mother has her issues but she's not crazy lady. Overall she's very sane lol.
I usually do the cooking for everyone in the house, but I'm seriously considering just cooking for my family and letting her make her own meals. It's really getting to be too much.
When you make next week's menus just tell her what meals she is on her own to cook since your menu plan will "give her a cold". Either way is a win for you, cooking less or hearing fewer odd comments!
Now, it is entirely possibly that she has some sort of wheat sensitivity and her head gets stuffed up as a reaction to the ingredients (happens to me with dairy...1 glass of milk I am fine, 2 glasses and I am stuffed up and can not breathe.)
You know I thought about the wheat sensitivity, but she hasn't bought anything besides wheat bread for years. So wheat bread no reaction but wheat flour or pasta and suddenly she's sick? Hmm, not buying it.
Great suggestion about the menu, I think I'll do that.
i agree with magrat0315 Just let her do her own cooking and if she complains about that then give her 2 options, 1. Then you will eat what I eat but I don't wanna hear any complaints or 2. Make your own food!
I've heard even crazier food-illness connection beliefs. Food-illness phobias are very common and happen when a person happens to get sick shortly after trying a new food. Whether or not the food actually caused the illness, it's very normal for a person to believe that the food did. Getting sick just once after eating a new food, can make it impossible to eat that food ever again.
We're just biologically "wired" that way, probably as a way to prevent food poisoning.
It doesn't matter if the food "really" made the person sick, or if it was just coincidence, and it doesn't matter if the person knows better.
It doesn't usually happen with foods we've eaten before (because our brains have determined that those foods are "safe.") It can happen to anyone, but we're most susceptible to it during childhood, and some people are more susceptible to others, leading some experts to think it's partially an inherited trait.
I suspect so, because I seem to be relatively immune. I've gotten sick (even extremely sick - with obvious food poisoning) from new foods, and it never affected my appetite for them. It was actually something my parents would comment on, my weird tendency to be willing to eat just about anything.
What's funny is that parents tend to pass on their food phobias to their children. My mom as a child, got sick on orange drink and pizza, and she would almost panic if she saw me drinking orange flavored anything with pizza, spaghetti or any tomato-based foods. "You're going to get sick," she'd say and would take the soda and the food away, and wouldn't let me eat anything else until she was sure I wasn't going to vomit.
That IS odd if she has no kind of reaction to whole wheat bread...but maybe it's the way it's processed??? I don't know...I ate shrimp fine all my life. Turned 25 and all of a sudden I'm allergic to shrimp and can't even be in the same room w/ a display of raw shrimp w/o having to walk out in order to be able to breathe (it didn't start out that bad...it's just progressed over the 10 years I've had the allergy). Now THAT was a cruel joke that God played on me, I'm telling ya.
Good point Kaplods. For years I couldn't even look at cole slaw after getting food poisoned after eating some at a chain restaurant & the same thing happened with pecan sandies cookies when I was a kid.
She is a picky eater and is resistant to many new things but maybe she genuinely doesn't feel well after eating.
@ Natasha I know several ppl who developed allergies to shell fish later in life. Too bad they sure are yummy!
The last four times in my life that I've thrown up (other than my 21st birthday...) were after eating cheese enchiladas. Enchiladas completely unrelated to eachother, from entirely different places, the whole bit. I didn't eat cheese enchiladas for over ten years because of it. (Other than the 21st birthday "extravaganza" I haven't thrown up since I was twelve) Now, I eat them, they're completely fine, I love them even. But, for a long time, I couldn't even look at them without feeling like I was going to hurl. I wonder if she ate wheat pasta, got a really bad cold, and now just associates the two with eachother.
Bet you've never heard this before!
