What to Blame for Your Stomach Bug? Not Always the Last Thing You Ate | Hacker News Reader

What to Blame for Your Stomach Bug? Not Always the Last Thing You Ate

nytimes.com

76 points101carl42 comments

As a restauranteur, I (very occasionally!) get calls from people accusing us of making them ill, threatening bad reviews and demanding vouchers or refunds.

The majority of the time it's someone who tries the same scam on every restaurant. Fortunately, around here at least, independent restaurant owners and managers keep in contact with each other and keep a track of these things. I did hear about one scammer recently who called every restaurant in town saying they had made him ill on the same day - the chain places pretty much all gave a cash refund for what he said he'd spent.

Other times it's someone who has actually eaten with you but forgotten that they had seven beers with their steak.

Whatever the situation appears to be, the best way is to always take accusations super seriously, ask for a doctor's letter, a sample for testing, contact environmental health etc. This is the point where everyone backs down, scamming or just hung over.

Never had a genuine food poisoning case at anywhere I've worked or failed an inspection or anything of that sort...we know what we're doing better than you do at home after all

It's hard to prove. Meal is gone. Should I save my throw up?

I have had 18 gauge wire in my buritto, but figured it was just an accident.

I have worked in restaurants. Some are filthy. Some workers could care less about food handling, especially the restaurants that hire the cheapest help, which is most. It's pretty easy to pass a health inspection. Just keep the meat on the bottom shelf, and keep the coolers at the right temp.

My remedy--don't eat out as much. It's unhealthy. And it's increasingly expensive.

(It's practically impossible to prove food poisoning. If I owned a restaurant, I would hire the best, and put cameras everywhere.)

>>>And it's increasingly expensive

Especially when you have a family, one night out is equivalent to a weeks worth of groceries. Cooking at home is the easiest way to stretch your money, if you can find the time.

*make the time

Faster too, once you learn to cook some daily dinners. I can serve pasta, sauce, rolls, and salad in 15 minutes.

Obviously legislation isn't the same everywhere. Inspections are pretty serious audits here. Worked at a couple of restaurants that weren't too hot on hygiene when I started but customers aren't as stupid as some of them look.

As someone else commented, if something has been made or handled incorrectly, it won't be an isolated case. I'm sure I'm not exceptional in doing spot checks and lab tests as a precaution.

From a customer's perspective, it's really hard to prove, so I have rarely done anything when I have gotten ill.

Most of the cases it's been rather mild symptoms and I have suspected the canteen at work for serving leftovers that probably hadn't been chilled fast enough. I've simply stopped eating things that I recognize from the past...

I have also gotten sick from moules marinières where I suspect that they used the same tools for fresh and cooked mussels as it must have been some kind of virus that knocked out both me and my friend with a high fever and rather alarming symptoms for 24 hours. I just decided to never go there again...

However, I once called the health and sanity inspectors when I was served a incorrectly cooked Escolar served as "butterfish" at a lunch restaurant, which led to an interesting night for everyone in the same company. The restaurant offered a free meal but I just wanted them to stop serving shit they didn't know how to cook.

There is no correct way to cook escolar aka butterfish aka olestrafish. It's banned for sale in some places, should be banned everywhere.

Theoretically, you can grill it, and hope that most wax esters will melt, but I wouldn't want to bet my underpants on that again.

I'm told that it also develops histamines in a much higher rate than other fish so there is also a risk for a severe reaction in general.

I can't imagine that most of the fats would melt off without it ruining the fish anyway.

I've eaten escolar multiple times with no ill effects. I certainly think restaurants should educate people about the fish but I don't see that it should be banned.

I can see the warning on the menu...

Then why ban escolar but not, say, oysters? Escolar might give you acute gastrointestinal discomfort if you eat too much or are particularly sensitive to it. Oysters might give you gastrointestinal stress that lasts for months if you get a bad one. It happened to me. The GI specialist said it was almost certainly an oyster that set off my months of dyspepsia. I don't think that means oysters should be banned just because I had a really bad experience.

Even with a warning, the side effects of escolar are so severe that literally no one should be able to choose to eat it?

You make good points, but if a warning is mandated, I don't imagine anyone actually selling it. It's not so much intestinal discomfort as unexpectedly crapping your pants due to the indigestible esters.

How do you think the restaurant/fish industry could phrase this in a way that anyone might actually buy it: 'warning: this fish may cause you to unexpectedly shit yourself'

I misunderstood your sarcasm. I thought you were saying you've seen the warning on menus already.

I wonder how common uncontrollable diarrhea from escolar actually is. I don't know anyone who's suffered even minor ill effects, but "I shit myself" isn't something most people would share.

I've heard bad things about this fish, but I've had it raw as sushi a few times and nothing bad has happened.

I think the proper butterfish is something else entirely.

Escolar filets looks like big tuna filets.

Small amounts of escolar is fine for most people, so if you're eating it in sushi rolls along with other types of fish you're unlikely to eat enough of it to run into trouble.

Isolated cases of food poisoning are not common. If food at a restaurant is contaminated most likely multiple people will get ill.

The question is: will people report it to health authorities so that a pattern can be discerned?

During my younger years I spent a summer working in a hotel with restaurant, doing hard manual labour for a pittance. What surprised me was what went on in the en-suite toilets of the hotel rooms. The guests had eaten very expensive meals during the previous evening and on the 'Bristol poo scale' I would say that things had usually got to the diarrhoea end of the chart.

The culprit? Nouvelle Cuisine.

Absolutely no corners were cut in the kitchen, there were no bad practices whatsoever. Everyone took pride in their work and there were never any problems with inspections from the authorities or reviewers. The kitchen and the restaurant were horror story free. Yet the toilets told their own story.

We did get one bad review from a guest that had to be 'torn out of the book', this was actually a very good review in that the guest had taken time to look at the food served from a nutrition point of view. Turns out that Nouvelle Cuisine is not all it is cracked up to be, it might look pretty on TV but in reality it is not what you want to be eating. Too much of the food was highly processed.

For instance, take the humble pea. Normal people eat peas that come out of the freezer to be boiled/steamed and then served. However, in Nouvelle Cuisine (at this anecdotal hotel) were 'fresh', in their pods. The peas would be shelled, then the outer skin of each pea would be removed. Then the peas would be shoved through some sieve to make some type of mush. This would go on hours before tea-time, for some lackey in the kitchen it was a major chore taking hours to do. I never was one to partake in these silly foods but I imagine those peas sat around all day - albeit covered with clingfilm and in the refrigerator - to then be heated/served somehow with the silly and expensive luxury dead animal stuff.

I would be surprised if it was these glorified mushy peas that resulted in the in-toilet explosions, however, strange food upsets people's guts if they are not used to strange food.

The clientele did not get absolutely trolleyed, there was never any signs of rooms trashed by partying and I was surprised people didn't make mention of gut problems.

"Other times it's someone who has actually eaten with you but forgotten that they had seven beers with their steak."

I think you Bozo can't tell the difference of being drunk and having a hang-over from food poisoning. Tragic!

Since last August, when I had a severe GERD issue that took six months to go away, I keep a very detailed daily journal of everything I eat, the time I eat it and any kind of symptoms it might be causing me even hours later. It's the best way, and probably the only one, to isolate foods that make my stomach upset. Now I can correlate symptoms with foods/hours and draw conclusions based on hard data. It has helped me a lot to fight GERD, even more than the drugs my gastroenterologist prescribed. So I guess I've hacked my own health in a way.

Hey, how do you track your meals?

I'm working on an app (Bitesnap) to help people keep track of their diet. At some point we'd like to add more features to help users figure out what's causing their dietary issues.

I'm using a simple Excel worksheet to record everything and once a month I move the data to an SQL Server table for easier correlations.

BTW, make sure you also give the ability to record beverages because in many cases they're the root of stomach problems. And you could add some social functionality so users could correlate with others who have similar dietary habits.

> Now I can correlate symptoms with foods/hours and draw conclusions based on hard data.

Only if you repeatedly try the same foods to ensure you've avoided confounding variables.

GERD can also be caused by bad posture (which is often a problem with IT folks).

I did this too. Actually I found it didn't really provide me with any concrete solution to my issues. You know what solved it? I started meditating because my anxiety about the GERD itself was through the roof. My blood pressure dropped and my GERD symptoms started just not appearing. Incidentally, the more I read about stress being linked to GERD incidents the more it makes sense. If you're struggling with GERD, a fantastic, free e-book to read is called "Down With Acid". It explains how it all works and could come about and is really informative.

I find that treating the symptoms as soon as they appear with a combination of Gaviscon (for throat burning reflux) and Ranitidine (for the stabbing heart pains) and keeping on those remedies for a few days helps. The best description I could find was imagine putting your finger over a candle flame. At first it doesn't hurt, but if you hold it there long enough it burns and fucking hurts. Now even the smallest bit of heat on your finger is going to be really painful! When I followed this analogy by making sure I treat the symptoms instantly, I no longer worry about GERD on a day-to-day basis. Big post for me, but I spent 2 years researching and really doing everything I could to understand how this happens and how to treat it and I hope this helps anyone else reading who has these symptoms.

In my younger days, I used to get my normal share of cold and flu and gastric upsets. Since instigating a few basic precautionary behaviors and no-gos, I haven't had a sick day for more than ten years.

I never stick fingers in my mouth or nose, and I only rub my eyes when reasonably satisfied that it is safe to do so.

I take care not uncritically to touch exposed things and surfaces in public areas. And only use trolleys or baskets in supermarkets if absolutely forced to. I'm aware that anything conveyed by the check-out conveyoer belt is potentially contaminated.

I wash my hands, of course, though I am by no means fanatical about it.

Curiously, I do all those things without a second thought -- as well as my daily habit of picking up at least one piece of trash from the street and putting it in a trash can, putting my bare hands on subway poles and in dirt when gardening -- and have also not had a sick day in as long as I can remember, at least a decade.

And if your goal is to be productive as a programmer: any faint headache will make you feel as if you are not motivated. These barely noticeable headaches may come from bad water, bad food, no water, no food, you stayed in wind, you are about to get sick, you stayed in hot sun, you didn't rest well (too cold, too hot, not enough sleep) and so on.

This probably explains why I'm often tempted to binge eat instead of working.

Gastrointestinal issues are almost never due to the last thing you ate, unless you're living in a third world country. It's usually the highly contagious norovirus, which you typically get from shared bathrooms and door handles. Most people just call it food poisoning because that's just how our brains work, as a protective bias.

Citation needed

See outbreaks:

https://www.cdc.gov/norovirus/trends-outbreaks.html

50% of food borne illnesses are already caused by norovirus. Now look at the graph above, and notice that non-food based transmission of norovirus is almost 8x higher.

Differentiating between norovirus from actual food poisoning is not too difficult either.

This strikes me as an interesting case if the credit assignment problem from reinforcement learning[0] (Think of the reward in this case being negative, you get sick)

[0] http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Reinforcement_learning#....

When people say they have "food poisoning" and blame it on something in particular I always point out that it's almost never what you think it is.

However, even knowing that doesn't help a whole lot with the queasiness that one associates with that food item. I've had a few GI bugs which have caused me to never be able to eat at the "offending" establishment ever again, even though I now the likelihood that the mental connection is correct is near 0

I got sick drinking a bit too much limoncello once day. Now I can't stomach lemon flavored seltzer. I taste it and feel like I'm going to vomit.

That's called taste aversion.

My family used to own a restaurant. We used to get occasional calls from people claiming to be sick. People would be dumb enough to call us screaming, with an indignant attitude, blaming something they ate at our establishment an hour ago.

Foodborne illness usually takes longer to set in, and in most cases, is something they prepared for themselves at home. Not all restaurants are perfect of course, but most take precautions, not risks, when it comes to their livelihoods.

It surprises me that the article doesn't mention the idea that intentional maintainence and nourishment of ones own intestinal flora is one way to help defend against unpleasant intestinal events.

Because it's still unproven. And your friendly intestinal flora is gonna get it's asses kicked if a load of salmonella or e-coli comes a-callin.

This article reeks of Germ-o-phobia.

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