Four little words – and/or sunflower oil. Does it really matter whether a cracker, cereal bar, or chip contains avocado, canola, corn, palm, safflower, soybean, or sunflower oil?
It does to me. That little and/or business has frustrated and mystified my search for foods that cause adverse reactions. If not for a particular accidental order of events, I’d still be wondering why potato chips sometimes make me ill and sometimes don’t.
I thought I couldn’t tolerate corn, popcorn, potatoes, almonds, cashews, and some gluten-free oats. I puzzled over the reason crackers with essentially identical ingredients caused very different responses and why a particular brand might bother me sometimes and not others. I eliminated foods right, left, and upside down only to continue having symptoms.
I mostly chocked intermittent reactions up to excessive burden. In other words, I’d probably eaten too many slightly irritating things at the same time which created an excessive burden on my system causing a reaction. That was my allergist’s go-to explanation when he was unable to explain an allergic response.
That explanation lives in the back of my mind. But should it? Or is there always a direct line that can be traced if we can just isolate a problem ingredient or combo?
I don’t know the answer. And given labeling standards plus the way in which elimination diets are often practiced, it’s going to be hard to get to something definitive. That is unfortunate because for health, comfort, and quality of life, individuals NEED TO KNOW the specific things that are problematic and what foods, drugs, supplements, etc. contain those things.
In that sense, and/or doesn’t cut it. Which is it? What is it? Is it in this food or not? I need to know…definitively.
Of course I understand I can only know what’s in a food if I make it. I’ve written those words countless times. But on occasion I must navigate restaurant food, parties, and events.
It’s difficult for hosts and considerate friends to keep up with a lengthy list of everchanging things they can’t feed me. And a list that frequently changes back and forth starts to look suspect, lending a certain credence to the skeptical who believe dietary restrictions are made up.
This lands as another frustration on top of the frustration of feeling bad while doing your best to avoid problematic foods. Could the food industry make things easier? Of course. But it would eat into their profit and give them less flexibility. Given ingredient shortages, supply chain difficulties, and inflation, it’s doubtful that fighting for more specific labeling standards would be a winning option at this moment.
The best you can do is write it down. Make a list of suspect foods. Compare and contrast over and over and over again until you find the commonality. This can lead you to problem ingredients. Starting with words like and/or and eliminating ingredients on either side of the phrase can help save a lot of time, especially when you’re experiencing intermittent reactions.
And since I began this post with oil, remember that vegetable oil is a very wide category and analyze accordingly. I hope you arrive at the answer more quickly than I did!
