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Comment by cardanome | Hacker News Reader

I used to be very judgemental about picky eaters and felt they are all super spoiled people but it important to know that there are vastly different reasons for being one.

Some neurodivergent people have genuine sensory issues that forces them to be selective about their food. They can't just get over it. Especially as exposure therapy does not work for them or at least not as well as for neurotypical people.

So it is always good to remind oneself to be kind and not judge people harshly. You don't know what they are struggling with.

That said, yeah most people absolutely profit from opening up their palate and trying new things.

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I've eaten all sorts of strange and exotic things... but most seafood, I simply... cannot.

Most of it smells like it is rotting to me and the taste is overpowering[0]. Trust me, I've tried countless times. Something that my wife will insist has no or little seafood in will taste like I am eating the entire ocean.

People would tell me "Oh you don't know what you are missing out on!" so I would try to get myself to eat it again. I've now learned that the only thing I am missing out on is suffering - I don't like seafood. I'm ok with this.

[0]I have occassionally managed if it's exceptionally mild or watered down, but even then there is usually a sense that something taste a bit "odd" while not being wholly unpaletable.

> Something that my wife will insist has no or little seafood in will taste like I am eating the entire ocean.

I can relate, I'm the same with coffee and alcohol. Coffee just tastes like I'm eating/drinking charcoal, and alcohol tastes like bleach.

People always go "oh but you can't taste the alcohol in this cocktail!". No, you can't taste the alcohol, it tastes like lemon-flavored bleach to me.

Wait - are there people who don't taste alcohol that way? I also taste charcoal for all coffee/espresso and people say the beans were burnt. Nope, my buddy ran a coffee shop and my kid is a coffee aficionado. All charcoal. But I just assumed everyone thought alcohol tasted like what I imagine bleach to give impressions of.

Interesting!

I've never thought alcohol tastes like bleach, though in some I can now certainly get a taste of "ethanol", same with the charcoal coffee thing -- many flavours I've found in coffee, but never charcoal.

I wouldn't be surprised if we all have some kind of genetic marker/mutation (I'm not a biologist, sorry!) that impacts the way we taste certain foods.

It very much seems that they do not.

Also, most people can't express "this food is triggering a minor allergy, enough to make me uncomfortable but not recognize it".

There was a post on Reddit (which came from Twitter or whatever) just now about someone who got itchy when eating plums; some food allergies are minor or just unconscious. Others take a while to trigger a response (bowel issues).

But since spicy foods hurt and pineapple is tingly and that's normal, I suspect a lot of people with mild food allergies just... don't realise they have an allergy.

tbh, it'd be great if there was just national (any country) testing for allergies.

It would be great if there was accurate tests for allergies. Blood tests shows what you absolute should stay away from, you maybe should be careful with, and what to do more testing with. Then there are different tests to learn more, but in the end they end of with learn to read your body's reaction and stay away from things you react badly to.

And yes, this have made me a picky eater, not because I don't want to try new things but because the setting with trying new things is in most cases not the settings where you want to get the bad reactions

AFAIK skin prick tests are the best for contact allergies, blood tests unlikely to find anything but severe allergies.

and I'm not sure how to find mild food allergies directly, seems to be all food diaries and correlation which feels mostly useless..

There also seems to be a hair test that AFAI can tell is an outright scam.

The problem with blood tests in my experience is all the false positives, skin prick tests are often used based on result from blood tests. But when having many allergies it is normal to only check for the most severe using skin prick tests.

Food diaries are probably good for those that are more experimental in what they eat, the difficult part come when it is a combination of things that give a reaction. The most important is to learn to listen to your body and not buy into peer pressure when someone urge you to try something new that you are not sure about

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