So Long As It Might Not Be The Fish
I got a different brand of pickles, a substandard generic brand, and they made me sick. Not once, but twice. The first time, I attributed it to just drinking more than a fair share of the pickle juice, sort of a "pickle overload". The second time, I only ate two pickles (they're small) and I still got pretty darn sick, of the diarrhea variety. So I'm looking at the ingredients, after all, pickles are a pretty innocuous food source, and the big differences seem to be calcium chloride, yellow 5, and blue 1. Huh.
Well, I know lots of folks are dye sensitive....
Oh wait, the day I decided I was allergic to ALL meats, including fish, was the day I tried that tuna fish sandwich. Well, I put relish and Old Bay in my tuna sandwiches, although that day I think I specifically nixed my usual mayonnaise because I was worried that it would upset my tummy. I went and checked my relish and found calcium chloride and yellow 5, no blue. I think I might be on to something here.
I know that pretty much every meat I ingest makes me feel nauseated, and sits like a lead lump in my stomach, but only sometimes do I get the awful stomach cramps and diarrhea, which I couldn't seem to place. I kept thinking I had some sort of "meat tolerance level" as in, eat a small amount of meat and be okay (okay being somewhat nauseated, but not dying or wishing for death), but eat too much meat and be horribly sick. But now I'm thinking, maybe it's not the meat that leads to the actual cramping, maybe it's something that goes along WITH the meat, like a ketchup or mustard or barbecue sauce, or even just a spice accompaniment. Yellow #5 is the number one dye for causing stomach upset in people who are dye sensitive, and it's damn near in everything. It can even be in organic foods, because the FDA allows a food to be labeled as organic provided 95% of it's contents are organic, by weight, and how much does food dye weigh, if anything?
If I am intolerant of food dyes, it's not a true allergy. I made up a sort of at-home skin test using food coloring and my glucose pen. I've considered just putting some drops on something and eating it, but I have things to do tomorrow and I'm not that kind of masochist. There's also the chance that it could be the calcium chloride, especially if I'm having some form of malabsorbtion issue or electrolyte imbalance already in play. Although if the latter were the case, I'm probably in worse of shape than I think (calcium issues are no joke) so that's highly doubtful.
I wish I had a couple of those allergy sheets, but they went to labs. *le sigh* I don't remember dyes being on there, but I can't imagine them testing for food allergens and NOT testing for dyes.
If anyone knows what the standard food allergen test includes, give a holler.