Did some ND children starve before chicken nuggets were invented?

[BusWankers]

I'm not being horrible, genuinely curious.

You read on here how a child who has autism or some other issue, will only eat safe foods. Usually a lot of things like chicken nuggets, a particular brand of cheese and onion crisps, Nutella, supermarket pizzas (UPF mostly)

Do we think children in the 1920s just went hungry? Or perhaps they were forced to eat foods they didn't like. After all you do hear stories,of adults even now being made to sit at the table and choke down food etc.

Food was probably much blander and more boring in those days. So perhaps less of an issue.

I can give my personal experience on this actually, I’m autistic and struggle with food the same as a lot of other autistic people but with very different foods.

My mother did not allow ‘processed food’, blanket statement no exceptions. She made every meal I ate from weaning to my teenage years from scratch and it really worked. I will not eat food that has touched each other, food with more than one meat in it, slimy food like courgettes but I will eat basically everything else. Never had school meals, she made my lunch and it was always full of things like veggies and hummus rather than sandwiches.

My safe foods are things like avocados, smoked salmon, tomato’s in balsamic vinegar, steak, French onion soup- things that make other autistic people run for the hills. I eat food from all over the world because she cooked a wide variety of cultures food, even just in one week. I don’t remember her cooking anything plain like sausages and mash or Shepard's pie at all- probably to avoid it becoming a ‘thing’ and I was never allowed plain pasta or rice for the same reason.

If I refused food it was no big deal, she’d find me a healthy alternative I liked and try it again in a few months. The only rule was I had to try it properly, I started off gagging with foods I didn't like but I got used to trying new things. As an adult I eat really well, not into UPFs and definitely better than my DH who much prefers beige food.

I am doing the same for my family even though there’s no concerns about ND, with an exception of DH, we eat a more varied diet than average.

No, he genuinely only eats ready brek and full fat milk. That's it. With vitamins as prescribed by the GP.

This is completely different to ARFID.

I don't think they would have starved any more than any other kids did back then, they would just have had different safe foods. Probably bland food.

"Failure to thrive" was a term used in its own right.
Children who were not "thriving" were also more vulnerable to mortality from infectious illness that hadn't got vaccine programmes, didn't have access to anti-biotics or were spread more easily due to poor living conditions.
A lot of mal-nourished children would have been recorded as other causes of death.

Anti-biotics weren't easily avaliable to the general population until after WW2 and co-incided with the creation of the NHS. Industrial slums were being cleared through the 1950s-1960s. The last time the question about indoor/ outdoor toilets was asked on the UK census was in 2001 which was when it finally became statistically negligable.

Taking indoor sanitation for granted as a default has been since the later part of the 20th century.

Central heating (and its benefits for health) is also comparatively recent although affording to use it is a seperate issue. It took decades for existing housing stock to be retro-fitted. I remember being bathed in front of a coal fire in the early 1980s. It must be one of my earliest memories as we did have gas heating installed after moving to that house.
Cold, damp homes made/make vulnerable people including children more susceptible to illness, particularly respiritory illness by constantly stressing the immune system. Even worse when breathing in mould spores.

Child mortality is now fortunately rare and rarely due to illness, and usually connected to conditions such as genetic/ mitichondrial differences, cancers, premature birth and complex conditions.

It's easy to forget how recent security of food, healthcare, warmth and sanitary housing are. Society isn't perfect, and even when families struggle at least children do get respite from problems like cold by going to heated schools for part of the day.

Food diversity didn't really gain momentum until the 1980s. Traditional British diets were pretty bland and repetitive so if a child found restricted safe food within that usual repetoire, it wouldn't have been so obvious as it is now. There would have been less access to variation of the same food type too.

I have a "sensory autistic" child. He's not AFRID league, but he is very sensitive to variations of taste and texture that most people don't notice.
I had awful nausea and food aversions in his pregnancy. I was rarely sick (oh how I longed for the relief of vomit) but I had a very sensitive gag reaction. I lost weight rapidly while gaining bump in the early months. There were several phases where I could only tolerate a couple of foods without triggering painful dry retching. For several weeks I existed on a certain brand of ginger stem cookies (fortunately calorie dense!) I joked that I could eat Pot Noodles because they weren't food. The meat aversion lasted longest- about 6 months. Everything in my head about eating well to nourish myself and baby went out of the window very rapidly!
When people say about AFRID that if it's a choice between unsafe food or starve, I very easily believe that they will starve.

I never understood why people would give very young kids processed junk in the first place. Then their kids wouldn't get addicted to it.

My mum had a older cousin, born in mid 1940s, who I understand was clearly ND from description - very selective with food, extreme social anxiety, hyperactivity. Yet he was bright and went on to gain PhD in Linguistics somehow, and then worked as translator, that allowed him to live an isolated life, minimal interaction with people,etc. The family used to believe his mum spoilt the boy by pondering to him instead of implementing strict discipline and forcing him to do things. And "he was used to getting things his way". I never gave it too much thought until I had my own ND child and started adding things up.
This man had a relatively good life, his family was well-off, after parents deaths he was looked after by his siblings until he died himself.

I know I’ll get flamed but rather than pursuing a diagnosis for DD I went full Jo Frost technique and she eats really well now.

Have you never heard of eating disorders which do indeed lead to children dying?

My mum is 80 and was very restricted in the food she would eat, as a child and still now. My grandmother tolerated a lot at the time I think - she wasn’t made to eat eggs or meat etc. DM still makes fish fingers for her dinner most nights (pretty similar to chicken nuggets right?).

Don’t kid yourself it’s just a modern phenomenon and they all grow out of it (I do suspect ND but never diagnosed).

Food was much blander back then and there was a lot less choice. Potatoes and bread featured heavily which are often safe foods for those with eating issues. I have ARFID and struggle with complex or strong flavours.
A bland diet would have suited me fine!

So it's ok, if, like my ASD child it's something 'healthy' they stick too (weetbix and milk from 10 months old)? I mean sure, weetbix is portable, but it is still really scary if your kid won't eat.

i am mid fifties so born in the seventies. I had a uni friend who literally only ate potatoes.

my diet was fairly restricted (no fruit or veg) and things like pasta etc were quite unusual in those days so not an option. I ate potatoes meat bread cheese and puddings. My parents took me to the doctors and he said “she’s fine, she won’t starve, she will always eventually eat so just let her get on with it.” I’m fine despite my lifelong poor diet.

In my experience it is not unusual for children and young people to eventually grow out of ARFID, but as you can see from the experiences on this thread, it helps if parents didn't pressure them unduly.

BEAT, the eating disorder charity give a stat of 1.25m people with ED in the UK of whom 5% have ARFID.

That's only people in contact with services though, I expect. Children can and do expand what they eat especially at transition points (new partner, going to university, moving country, entering the workplace etc).

A boy at school lived on marmite sandwiches ( his father was a chef!). My best friend now recounts as a toddler she durviyon Heinz chocolate pudding, and my husband's mother said when he was small he ate so badly she'd give him a cup of milk with raw eggs beaten into it every day. All now eating 'normally'

When my son was 17 months we left him with my parents so dp and I could go to a concert, have a night off and let him have a 'holiday' with grandma for a night. They phoned us during the interval saying he had had nothing - no food, no milk, no water, nothing all day. My mum had tried everything she knew to get something into him, but was concerned by the evening and called us to come home and feed him. We drove home from London, got there 2am, and after breastfeeding him he then proceeded to vomit green bile all over me, so empty was his belly.

This is not about being fussy or being fed junk food as an easy way out. DS is 9 now and still just won't touch anything if he is in any way stressed or anxious about what we might be trying to poison him with.

I was at a boarding school in the 60s, and with hindsight a number of people there were clearly ND. I suspect they managed because the menu was universally pretty bland and tasteless, and we were allowed to ask for small portions of things we disliked.

I'm in my late 60s with a ND diagnosis in my mid 50s.

I, and my brother, had huge issues with food as children and both were forced to eat it at home and at school. At home we'd be left sitting at the table until we ate. If we didn't eat then the meal would reappear the next day. At school we were just left at the lunch table, so no play time unless the food was eaten.

I was hospitalised often as a child with other illnesses and the attitude there to food was take it or leave it.

I was very relieved to leave home and enjoy the miracle of actually eating food I liked.

I don't feel traumatised by the experience, although I hated it at the time. My parents had grown up in the early 1920s in poor households. They didn't do what they did to torment us they did what they did because they didn't understand and, to be fair, neither did doctors.

DH (almost certainly autistic; our child's diagnosed) pretty much lived on baked potatoes and apples when we got together. Left to himself he reverts to a few foods.

How old is she? Think it can work in some cases but not in ARFID.

Toast, rice, super noodles, my safe foods. DH, any meat plain and grilled.

I started school in 1979 and we were forced to eat school lunch. One of my earliest school memories is watching a little girl being forced to eat chopped frozen veg in a white sauce and remember watching her crying terribly and then vomiting it back into her plate. She had braces and her mouth was thick with vomit because the sick was trapped in her braces. This is the reality of how children were treated with food in the “eat it or starve” mentality

If they've not eaten in days, you'll get pretty desperate to get something into them.

The food that you eat is more nutrious for your body than the food that you didn't eat.

I run residential camps and the majority will go with the flow and at least try different things when they're with a group of peers and away from parental expectations. In nearly 20 years, we've had a couple that really, genuinely can't. It is real and it is different to being picky/ having preferences. It is commonly, but not exclusively associated with being ND.

Interesting, so what do you think was happening here? Not brave enough to try new foods? Easier to eat what you know. I mean at some yshe would have had to try Subway to know she likes it, so I wonder why she restricted herself in that way.