Yum, yoga mat! List of foods that include this new food group!

[laundry_queen]

32. I have wondered about this for awhile.

A little anecdote (yes, for the 'scientific' amongst us, I'm well aware this means shit in science. Don't read my anecdote then.) My mom and her 7 siblings were all raised on bread. Homemade bread from the flour that her dad grew in the field (he would set aside some to take to the flour mill himself). They ate a LOT of bread. Bread for breakfast as toast. Bread at lunch with soup. Bread for dinner in the form of dinner buns. No one had any stomach issues.

Fast forward to about 10 years ago. My grandmother had long since stopped making bread now that she could afford to buy bought bread. A bunch of my mom's siblings developed GERD (reflux) and gastritis. All concurrently. So did I and my brother and a few of my cousins. So did my grandparents (my grandfather got such a severe ulcer, he had to be hospitalized because it had swelled to close off the exit to his stomach). We are all on medication like prevacid or nexium.

Now, if stomach issues were hereditary, don't you think everyone would've developed stomach issues at a round the same ages? Like, my grandparents would've developed issues at around 40, mom's generation would develop it at around 40, then when I reached 40, I would've developed it? No, we all started with stomach issues totally concurrently. We came to the conclusion it had to be some additive that started being put in packaged food at around the same time we started with stomach issues. I never did research it (kinda busy with school and kids) but I became convinced after learning the only one without stomach issues was my aunt who grew her own food, and canned everything and made her own bread, like my grandmother did.

My mom is very anti-medication and has tried numerous times to wean herself off the prevacid. She doesn't eat very much for packaged foods, but she still eats some. I was in a lot of pain last year and went for endoscopy in my stomach because of it and basically, I have 2 mild stomach conditions that are untreatable. I decided at around Christmas time to try harder to cook from scratch (something I did before my divorce when I was a stay at home parents and I had much less stomach pain) and I have been cooking almost every dinner from scratch - I have even been trying to make my own flavorings and sauces to stay away from the bottled stuff. And my stomach is better. Not great but better. I still eat bread, but I buy organic artisan bread from our local bakery at the grocery store my daughter works at. They have basic ingredients and claim zero additives. In my quest to figure out what is wrong with my stomach I had some gluten sensitivity testing. I have zero sensitivity at all. So I know my stomach issues have nothing to do with any kind of gluten issue. I still think it's some kind of additive causing it, but I can't pinpoint WHICH additive from WHICH food because my symptoms don't show up immediately.