“Eat all your food” is a common phrase heard in a Lebanese home during meal times. This always forced children to finish their plates, causing them to overeat. It’s not healthy, but what was one to do?
After all, mothers know best. At least that’s what they want their kids to think because that’s what they truly believe when it comes to food and parenting.
Consequently, we come to believe even the absurd stories related to food that our mothers tell us. No blame here. They took them from their mamas and their mamas from their mamas.
#1 7Up is the cure for everything
Feeling nauseous? Take 7Up. Feeling bloated? Drink 7Up. You’re feverish? Mom’s voice reverberates in the house, “Bring the 7up, quickly!”
#2 If you drink coffee, you’ll grow a mustache
Raise your hand if you’ve heard at least some dozens of times this many as a child. And if you were a girl at the time, what a terrifying thought that was!
#3 If you swallow a seed, you’ll grow a tree in your tummy
I bet some of us had nightmares about it, especially when it’s so easy for a watermelon seed to be swallowed by mistake.
#4 Eating fish with milk is poisonous
Pretty sure many people still believe this myth from childhood, but there’s little evidence to back up this claim. The number of international dishes prepared with both fish and dairy is enough to debunk this myth.
#5 If you swallow gum, it’ll take seven years to digest
Admit it, you might be as guilty of that as many of us are, especially at the instant in which the teacher nailed you with his eyes, saying: “Are you chewing gum in my class?!”
And poor you would go through days of an imaginary tummy ache, truly believing that the gum is stuck somewhere inside you for the coming 7 long years of your life!
How would you have known anyway as a child that chewing gum doesn’t even get ‘digested’, that it just passes through your digestive tract and makes its journey to the toilet bowl?
#6 It’s a health-must to eat all the food on your plate
Let’s talk about this, and how many times we’ve heard our beloved, well-intentioned mothers telling us, “There’s no standing up from the table before you finish all your plate!”
So, whether our stomach is full and our hunger is satisfied, we must keep eating or else, conditioning our body to consume beyond its needs.
And then, once we’re adults, we’re told that it’s unhealthy to overeat and we should go into diet. Well, oops, sorry! Too late for that.
#7 You can’t digest if you sleep right after eating
Somehow, somewhat, along the line of generations, someone must have come with that “wisdom” that we have to wait 30 minutes after a meal before laying down to sleep.
Somehow, somewhat, it was believed that if you lay down and fall asleep, your stomach sleeps as well, and stops its digestive function (huh?). Somehow, somewhat, the myth was born with no basis.
#8 If you eat too much bread and pizza, your stomach will turn into 3ajeen (dough)
It’s surely unhealthy to eat too much pizza and moua3janet and it will probably make us fatter but can’t we just have told that homemade meals are healthier?
And yet again, our Lebanese moms are our all-time heroes, this is undebatable, and they’ve been proven it even more so these days in particular. Nothing stops them from doing what they do best: Being awesome Lebanese mothers!
