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    Joined: Sep 2007
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    Val Offline
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    Originally Posted by Cawdor
    No, you are wrong making a statement without any proof backing up .. the burden of proof is on you for saying these "intolerances" exist.
    and

    Originally Posted by Cawdor
    I for one believe most of these "conditions" are pretty much bunk based on my experience "curing" a lot of kids from them in 8 weeks.

    1. First you said that I had to prove that they exist. I did that and you didn't respond. Then you said that "most" of them are bunk. Which one is it? Do you think they exist or not? Did the researchers listed in the Wikipedia make it all up?

    2. This is getting frustrating in part because it uses the same flawed logic in the gifted-kids-don't-exist argument that many schools peddle.

    Cf.
    • Most kids learn to read when they're 6. I've never met one who could read when he was 2, so therefore those kids don't exist and your kid is making it up.
      .
    • Most people can eat animal fat. I've never met someone who could get sick when he eats it, so therefore no one like that exists, and your kid is making up his illness.

    Maybe this comment belongs on the Gifted Adults thread, but personally, it's very frustrating for me when people can complain about a fundamental error in thinking in one area and completely overlook the same error in themselves, in a different area. Call it a failure of imagination or willful ignorance or an inability to admit a mistake or arguing for its own sake. Either way, the flawed conclusion is the same.


    Last edited by Val; 06/28/12 02:02 PM. Reason: Clarity
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    It seems to me a lot of this is simply missing the point. Just because a kid could eat a food without a major medical incident, and just because they will eat it under conditions of sufficient duress (famine, say, or being in the military), doesn't mean that they aren't having a very real, very unpleasant subjective experience. Some people taste chemical compounds that others don't. (Remember that experiment in biology class?) So why put your kids through that, unless your overriding goal is just to prove that you're the boss and make them knuckle under?

    I was picky about vegetables as a kid, and to this day I have been unable to overcome my aversion to asparagus and squash. Both induce mild nausea in me. A wide range of vegetables also taste unbearably bitter to me, unless they are picked very young and are very fresh. Yes, I could have choked these things down if I'd had to, but my parents wisely chose not to make me miserable. I now love vegetables, provided I have control over my choices.

    Comparing this to kids who have been so badly parented that they don't know how to make their bed or shave, or have an "aversion" to anything besides junk food, is a red herring.

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    Originally Posted by Cawdor
    Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
    ... not always, though


    I will respectfully disagree, and I am talking about food that they are not allergic [ thankfully they do not have any ].. medical conditions are different than pickiness which is what is being discussed.

    You are comparing apples and oranges.

    I'm not, actually. How do you KNOW that these are foods to which every child is "not allergic?" You don't, yet you assert that the difference is clear to you. Perhaps you were making a statement only about your own children? That wasn't clear.


    I certainly didn't dismiss your perspective or say that it is NEVER the case. I have had experience with kids for whom it is definitely a power struggle. That does not make the assertion invariably true. You disagreed that your statement was "not always" so.

    I'm simply pointing out that food allergy (and, for that matter, food intolerance) are measurable, real phenomenon, some of them with measurable, real damage done to an individual thanks to repeated exposure. Feeding a celiac gluten is a recipe for many later health problems, some of them life-threatening, and a child with asthma attacks provoked by a latent food allergen can cause airway remodelling over time. I do live this every day of my life, and I assure you that there is no neon sign above a person's head which lists probable food allergens, nor one that says "this is an allergic reaction in progress, proceed accordingly." (I wish, actually. I'd also like one that flashes for contamination in food before I eat it, thanks. wink )


    I mentioned specifically which foods are red flags for deeper examination in that particular context, and which are not. Food "pickiness" generally seems to center on color, texture, or bitterness (as in vegetables), and those things are not really cause for concern without much more overtly "allergic" symptoms, or other GI distress.

    Those things tend to NOT have much overlap with foods to which IgE-mediated allergy are common, nor do they overlap much with foods that are commonly implicated in well-understood intolerances such as celiac sprue or lactose intolerance.

    Food refusal is a common thing in very young food allergic children, and is even reasonably common in children school-aged who develop a food allergy (usually to fish, nuts, or crustaceans).

    Food refusal is quite different from a food fetish; a child that will "only eat ____" is not at all the same as one that refuses to even touch fish or anything that has been on the same plate.

    Do I think that most food pickiness in children is "allergy?" Of course it isn't. I think that true allergy presenting this way is relatively unusual. But far from unheard-of.


    Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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    ... and furthermore, you've never seen a kid with food allergy as a drill instructor, Cawdor.

    They are medical DQ's. Automatic, just like asthmatics and diabetics. smile

    Let me be the first to add, however, that much of what the general population claims as "allergy" is anything but, and a lot of those are nothing more than food preferences with over-entitlement disease. wink

    I also agree with the idea of providing a variety of healthy food choices-- as a regular thing-- and then not worrying too much about 'how much' beyond that. I don't make family meals revolve around pickiness, but nobody is forced to clean their plate or even "try" everything, either.


    Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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    I haven't read the whole thread, but I'll just pop in here with my experience. My son refused to eat anything with peanuts/peanut butter because he didn't like the smell of it. We thought he was just picky, and we offered him many different PB-containing foods/treats. He wouldn't eat them. Turns out he has a life-threatening allergy to peanuts, which we discovered when he had an anaphylactic reaction after eating one peanut when he was 5. So I do not ignore my kiddo when he tells me he doesn't want to eat something because he doesn't like the smell of it.

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    My kid is an extremely limited eater, with significant anxiety about food, a number of texture aversions, and a huge number of food allergies.

    Our pediatrician has told us to leave him alone. I would rather have him deal with being the adult who orders a hot dog at a fancy business dinner than him being the teen who dies from eating a hidden allergen.

    I also think he deserves the same basic respect as the adults in our house, which means that we don't knowingly serve foods that we know someone dislikes, and we don't try and force or shame each other about our aversions. (I don't eat meat, my wife hates mushrooms. Neither of us like olives). She does not make meat dishes and I don't make things with mushrooms, even though we both love those items.

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    Originally Posted by epoh
    I've not met kids that have access to healthy foods that refuse to eat ALL of them.


    Mine wink But you haven't met us, so your statement stands!

    (he refuses to eat unhealthy foods, too. We've had some funny moments where people tried to get him to eat candy and cake and stuff, because they were sure he was just gunning for treats. Interestingy he does demand to COOK treats by preference to healthy food... but doesn't eat either wink

    -Mich
    (our experience is really kinda off topic, since DS is decidedly not picky, just a light eater)

    Will prob. write more later, this is an interesting thread, given the issues we've been having. But just wanted to be annoying on this detail first...


    DS1: Hon, you already finished your homework
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    Wow. Soo much I wanna say.

    Background:
    I have multiple life-threatening food allergies, and spent extended periods of time in hospital for asthma as a child. (enough I got all nostalgic seeing a kid at the hospital library with her in-hospital tutor, I did most of a couple or three years that way ;)).
    My son has one mild non-IgE mediated allergy (yup, non-IgE, still a true allergy, just a different kind, rashes and blood oh my, oh my, but a different timing, and little chance of true anaphalaxis, but don't get me started on THAT. Key point: does not show up _consistently_ on skin prick tests, if he has others, they will be impossible to id except through challanges) Oh, and he has brittle asthma, he may not get true anaphalaxis, but anaphylactic asthma, yes, entirely possible
    My son has two (count 'em) OTHER medical conditions which shouldn't, but possibly could cause discomfort when eating. Neither is generally considered significant, but there's that little "but" in there. And, there's two (FCOL)


    So... I'm pretty convinced by the argument that REAL physiological issues can lead to food aversions. Absolutely convinced that that is often the problem... and our case looks like it MUST be something real, after all, exactly how many possiblilities did I list up there for physiological causes?

    Also important: my son is NOT a picky eater, he is a light eater, who has failed to gain weight/height in a way that meant we had to address the issue. He has always eaten a wide variety of foods, just one bite of each. That includes cookies and cake.

    Erm... actually, there's one more possible physiological cause...

    Longstanding habit.

    As far as I can tell, once we hit a certain threshold of getting him to eat decent sized meals regularly, he suddenly wants to eat more. As if his stomach was simply not prepared to accept reasonable volumns of food at a sitting.

    Getting him over the threshold happened when we started the power struggle. And we're definitly not out of the woods yet, but he's beginning to eat most meals by choice now, and is increasing the size of his meals by his own choice. This is awesome. He ate an entire taco for dinner tonight.

    So, I can ALSO see why parents get into the power struggle. They tell you over and over that a kid won't starve themselves. They tell you that at the appointment IMMEDIATELY before the appointment in which they suddenly say "Your kid is starving himself" It's really, really, NOT TRUE. Most kids won't but some do, for a variety of reasons, and reasons asside, SOLUTIONS may involve a power struggle.

    Life is more complex than "always trust the kid" or "they're just trying to get away with it." In our case, I suspect, there is a VERY HARD thing that our three year old has to learn to do NOW. I'm trying to respect how hard it is for him to stop doing other things to eat, and how hard it is or at least may be for him to actually swallow. I am NOT going to respect his efforts to exercise his preference to not eat over eating. I need him to eat. That's all there is to it.

    (in case you're getting too worried, he has gained weight quite quickly since he started eating, so we even have a little room now for backsliding and having to restart, wink



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    I just got a really young guy on disability for an impressive number of really, really bad food allergies along the lines of Michaela.

    He would have preferred that he wasn't skeletal.

    That being said, most food "allergies" aren't allergies. I'm pretty sure that you can do blood tests for them.

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    My son got a bit picky around three. I didn't make a big deal of it. He got on some PBS Kids game that taught him all about nutrition. I think it was called Prof. Fizzy's Lunch Lab. He got his "gifted" on when it came to nutrition. He wasn't even four when he said "Dad, you already had one donut. Those are loaded with transfats that will clog your arteries! Please Dad, eat those only in moderation.".
    He has moved on, but on most days he can still tell you what he has eaten, what food groups everything goes in and whether he should have more of something to balance his diet. So there you have it! Relaxed parenting and video games solved it.

    I get that this wouldn't work with everyone. My husband has food texture issues and will vomit it he eats a long list of veggies.

    One thing we've worked on is being nice about refusing food and finding something thing to eat. Like just quietly picking off the pepperonis instead of going on and on about how nasty they are.

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