Frequent causes of functional indigestion are hasty eating, defective teeth, poor cooking, worries, and constipation. Food phobias are also considered as the direct cause for the largest number of cases offunctional indigestion. Man is deeply interested in his food problems, so much so that there is hardly a religion in which food does not enter into its ceremonials and rites, and in which the regulation of foods does not occupy a prominent place in its rules and tenets. This began early in our civilization. It is therefore natural that food should receive the attention and thought given to it to-day.
In balanced and healthy diet, the regulation of diet has ever occupied a prominent place. All through the ages, this has been going on. Few people do not cherish ideas relative to foods that have no foundation in fact. It is unlikely that an individual phobia for any one food article can be handed down through inheritance. A child is not apt to inherit a particular idiosyncrasy or phobia. It has in such cases usually been impressed upon his consciousness that the article of food in question might be a poison to him because of family tendency. He, however, could inherit the tendency to develop phobias.
Food phobias are easily established. If it were simply an aversion for this or that article of food, the difficulty would not be serious. With patient and intelligent effort, it might be overcome, but reactions occur. Very definite symptoms are presented as reactions to the eating of certain articles of food, about which phobias have developed.
There probably is no article of diet that is not anathema to somebody. There are individuals who can eat most foods if they are servedseparately, but combine them in some manner, and trouble is expected. We all know people who can drink black coffee and at the same meal take a cereal with cream on it, but put the cream in the coffee and indigestion symptoms follow. Very curious are these phobias for food combinations. Only those physicians who have much to do with these problems can tell how difficult they can prove. Patients relinquish such fixed ideas reluctantly, even in the face of unanswerable arguments based on scientific facts.
The manner in which reactions to food phobias are brought about is related to nervous system. We have, first, the fixed idea dominating both conscious and subconscious mind and we have the sympathetic nervous system whose function is to regulate the secretions of the digestive organs. It is master of the motor activity of the tube (the peristaltic contractions), regulating and controlling the valves of the digestive tract between the several sections of the tube, like the switchmen of a railroad system. As we have already pointed out, this nervous system is largely independent of control by the brain. However, in some way, not well understood, emotions have an effect on the operation of parts of the system.
With the peristaltic contractions increased, valves tightly closed, and the internal tube pressure thus raised, intense symptoms may be presented, such as pain, retching, vomiting, diarrhea, and in fact, any symptoms the stomach and intestines are capable of exhibiting, all due to a reflex, the beginning of which has its origin in the subconscious mind. There are other symptoms possible in some cases that have little to do directly with the digestive tube. Skin lesions, for example, such as urticaria (hives), erythema (flushing of the skin), and others – these also are brought about reflexly through the erratic behavior of sympathetic nerves, which have control of the fine blood vessels in the skin, enlarging or contracting them according to the needs of the parts. These general manifestations often coincide with those of the digestive tube.
When a food fear has existed for a long time and has become firmly established as the result of repeated experiences, it is possible that the stomach develops a sense that enables it to detect a food substance and react to it without the operation of the conscious or subconscious mind playing any part. We then have a true sensitiveness idiosyncrasy. An altered cell chemistry may account here for the sensitiveness. It is very similar to the phenomena of hay fever and asthma. It is interesting to note that individuals, who are subject to hay fever and asthma, or in whose family histories these diseases appear, are prone to entertain idiosyncrasies for some of the common foodstuffs.