Bad Food, Bad Eating Habits

In case you haven't noticed, the stomach flu, also known as norovirus, is exploding across the United States. 91 outbreaks in the first week of December, about 20 million illnesses per year, 2.2 million outpatient medical visits, 465,000 ER visits, and over 100,000 hospitalizations. It's also known as the cruise ship stomach flu. Apparently it only kills about 900 people a year which isn't bad, unless you're one of the 900. Additionally, there's all the other bugs like salmonella, E. coli, listeria, etc. tainting our food supply.

And of course, 1,908 recalls of food and cosmetic products by the FDA. Let us all remember that most of what goes on is under the radar and never even reported.

How did our food supply get so shitty? And I use that word loosely (pun intended) since that's one of the main symptoms. Obviously some of it is related to the industrialization of agriculture itself and the whole supply chain thing. Who knows where your food has been and who's been handling it. And where their hands have been. Ugh! There's a lot of Typhoid Marys out there.

But interestingly, humans have been making themselves sick on food since they began to eat, which was pretty early in their history I believe. As for all animals. I'm sure if you compare things to the pre-refrigeration days, things are actually looking pretty great right now. Or maybe not. No statistics to rely on from the old days. Maybe in olden times, people were smart enough to look at the food and smell it and say, “Nah, I don't think I'm going to eat that. It just doesn't look or smell right.” Maybe we've lost some of our common sense or our senses of smell and vision have atrophied.

Certainly common sense plays a role. Just take a look at Zachary Taylor, our 12th President, who lasted only 16 months into his first term. One day, he ate a massive amount of cherries and iced milk (raw of course, since there was no alternative) and promptly developed some sort of acute gastroenteritis that may have been cholera or some other food poisoning/dysentery and that was it for him. Apparently he couldn't control himself with the cherries, and ate an enormous bowl. But it still could have been the milk.

Eating habits and judgment often have unintended effects on people who in retrospect, likely regret the eating decisions they made. King Adolf of Sweden is a good example. Apparently he died after a somewhat huge meal consisting of (according to Wikipedia), “lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, kippers, and champagne as well as 14 helpings of his favorite dessert of semla pastries and hot milk.” This is not what I call self-restraint. Bet he had a swollen gut after all that. But apparently he didn't last long, so not much suffering.

Then there's Johann Schobert (not Franz Schubert!), a victim of what I call Steve Jobs Syndrome. That's when someone who's really smart at one thing, has the arrogance and ignorance to believe that they are smart at everything. Jobs sadly thought that he was smarter than all his docs and treated himself for an often curable, slow growing pancreatic tumor that may well have been cured had he followed initial advice. But he decided to handle it himself. No one will ever know for sure, but we all know the sad outcome. At least he didn't kill anybody else with his hubris as our next contestant did.

In 1767, Johann Schobert, the composer and harpsichordist, went mushroom gathering with his family and came back with a fine yield. He took them to two different restaurants and both chefs told him his cache was poisonous. That wasn't good enough for a man of his brilliance. Finally, he found a foolish doctor who would agree with him and he went home and made a delicious soup. That killed him, his wife, and all his children except for one, and fittingly, killed the doctor as well. It just goes to show that you can always find someone to agree with you if you search hard enough, no matter how stupid you or they are.

A modern-day version of excessive eating occurred in 1981 involving a London model who would intermittently fast and then binge until one day on a binge, she ate: “two raw cauliflowers, two blood sausages, 1 lb of raw liver, 2 lb of kidneys, 2 lb of raw peas, 3 lb of raw carrots, and 1 lb of raw mushrooms…. then a bag of fruit including 10 peaches, four pears, two apples, four bananas, 2 lb of plums, 2 lb of grapes and then some cheese and bread.” This was after a 3-day fast and unsurprisingly, she developed abdominal pain 5 hours later and subsequently died. I consider these severely bad eating habits.

Before everyone starts yelling at me about eating disorders, EVERYONE who eats themselves to death has an eating disorder, from Zachary Taylor to King Adolf to the poor London model to Baron von Wassenauer, admiral of the Dutch fleet around 1700, who was the first person to officially die of something called Boerhaave Syndrome, where you rupture your esophagus from forceful vomiting. Though he certainly wasn't the first in history - he just got his disorder an official name, from his doctor who performed the autopsy. In his case, he took emetics to empty his stomach so that he could eat more food and drink more beer. Sheer gluttony. Now that's an eating disorder. They just hadn't invented the word bulimia yet.

Now it turns out that some of these people could have prevented their deaths had they trained their stomachs properly. That's right, you can train your stomach and stretch it so that it can handle an unbelievable load of food if that is your goal. Just takes a little bit of planning and a great deal of practice. I refer you to the world champion hot dog eater, Joey Chestnut.

The story I was told is that he was approached by some university physicians who were trying to figure out exactly how he could eat what is now his world record of 83 doggies in 10 minutes, and not explode like the historical figures above. The question was whether all those dogs were sitting in a huge stretched out stomach or if somehow the opening from his stomach into his intestines was enlarged and the dogs were passing directly through his stomach into his intestines, like a conveyor belt. This is high-powered medicine obviously. So they took him into an x-ray room and had him eat a whole bunch of dogs and watched what happened.

Turns out his stomach can stretch out to the size of under seat carry-on luggage. The jumbo size. It's all about training. You have to admire his level of dedication. So when you get ready for your next potentially explosive meal, prepare yourself and work up to it slowly, but surely.

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Let's go back to the food poisoning. I will now publicly confess that I personally, albeit unknowingly, poisoned somewhere between 30 and 40 people at a baby shower given at my home a few decades ago. It was not intentional and I can prove that by stating that I ate every single different type of food that was served at a long buffet table and absolutely nothing happened to me. Nevertheless, when I went to work, within a few days a couple of people were out sick. Over the next few days I happened to hear of several other people who had gotten sick, with GI symptoms. Because of the time delay of a few days, I didn't really associate it with our baby shower food and thankfully neither did anyone else.

But then by the end of the week we got a call from a good friend of ours, Shiela, in Maine, who had graciously sent us about 20 lb of smoked fish from a company near her home, with whom she was friends of the owners. She meekly asked if anyone got sick at the baby shower. For the first time I became a little bit nauseated. I hesitated and said, “Uh, maybe, why?” And she said, “Well, the company that smoked all that fish was just shut down due to listeria contamination. I just wanted to let you know.” Talk about late notification!

So I called around to some other people and it turned out that a whole bunch of people had gotten sick but fortunately didn't associate it with the baby shower because symptoms didn't come on for several days. Since there's no real treatment other than supportive care and no one was hospitalized or died, I confess that I really didn't tell them about the listeria. My bad. And it turns out that the reason I likely didn't get sick is that only a certain percentage of people who eat listeria get sick, not everybody.

And for those of you who think that food poisoning has socioeconomic ramifications, you can forget that. Rich and poor are vulnerable alike. It's not just McDonald's or Jack-in-the-Box. In mid-December, there was a celebratory event for the top restaurants in Los Angeles where 80 people were sickened by norovirus tainted oysters. And people had to pay twice for their illness because general admission tickets were $264 a person and VIP tickets were $600 a person. There's a particular irony there, isn't there.

I would also like to point out that I decided not to send out this post until after the holidays so as not to create any artificial or real concern about your consumption or overconsumption of good or bad food for the holidays. I thought that was very gracious of me.

Eat Hearty! And if necessary, start training.