Hello,I used to like vegetables until the age of 6, until I got a virus one winter, and after that moment, it became much harder for me to eat vegetables. Just seeing some of them would gross me out, and their texture started grossing me out too. A workaround was to eat soups or have vegetables mixed with other food like in couscous, other wise I would struggle with eating them, especially crude vegetables like cold tomatoes or salad which could go as far as making me throw up. But I never decided that I was suddenly going to dislike vegetables to annoy people, it happened and I could never figure why. There are explanations for fears like fear of heights or hydrophobia, but for fear of specific food I never heard anything other than it’s in your head or it’s comedy.
In: Biology
Probably childhood trama, i was bully by this girl that stuck her barbie in my mouth.
Till this day i cant swallow my saliva when i see a barbie
Humans are pretty sensitive in what we can eat without getting sick, so we have various “gross out” responses to avoid things we shouldn’t eat. My dog enjoys eating random poop, half rotten road kill, etc. when we’re out on a walk. She’s never had any real issues from that. It would be a real problem for my digestive system if I ate those things, and I would puke if I tried.
Your body will learn things that have “poisoned” it. For example, many people drink too much tequila in college and can never smell it again without feeling sick. You likely had an overreaction of the same system when you were sick.
You’re describing an aversion, not a phobia – I assume you don’t have panic just thinking about those foods or saying the names of them out loud?
If it’s a big issue for you, you can work with a nutritionist who specializes in ARFID for exposure therapy.
To specifically answer your question, not eating things that make you sick or kill you is more important than a varied diet to your survival.
conditioned taste aversion
There have been animal studies, that they tend to avoid certain foods after experiencing illness. Basically, a negative reaction is associated with a certain food, leading to future avoidance of said food.
I’m reasonably convinced my mate refuses to eat most vegetables because his mom was a terrible cook when he was growing up, so he learned they taste awful.
While a varied diet is generally good, there’s obviously a lot of things that will kill you too.
So people have pretty strong reactions to something they associate with making them sick or certain smells and stuff.
The evolutionarily dominant trait is probably being cautious about what you eat and having reactions to reject it if something goes wrong.
All kinds of reasons. I’m not a picky eater at all, but there are a couple specific things I can’t eat or couldn’t eat for years because they made me sick or I ate them while sick. So a situation likes yours isn’t unusual, though applying it to *all* vegetables is a bit peculiar.
Could be that someone tried the food in a traumatic way, like in a very fraught time where they were food insecure or had their parents yell at them to eat it.
It can be socially conditioned. I feel like a lot of kids (and grown ups) reject certain foods because either their parents hated it, or because they saw media that presented it as gross. It can be just fear of the unfamiliar. Those things taken to an extreme could cause a phobia rather than a mere distaste.
It certainly *is* all in your head, but so are all phobias. But your head is part of your body just like your stomach or your hands.
As for a varied diet being good for you….it is, but you won’t instantly die from not eating certain things. Even a very restrictive diet will take a while to kill you as long as you’re getting enough calories. And, a varied died doesn’t mean you have to eat every single food, just enough different types of food. That’s why “I refuse to eat broccoli” is not seen as a particularly remarkable statement, “I refuse to eat any vegetable but will eat fruit and all other food groups” is concerning but usually not clinical, and “I refuse to eat anything other than these 5 specific things” is an eating disorder.
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