She Couldn’t Figure Out Why She And Her Family Were Getting Sick, And It Turns Out Recalled Peanut Butter Was To Blame
As someone who loves peanut butter, I always have some on hand, for when I get that peanut butter craving. That’s the case with a lot of people I know, given that they’re not allergic, of course.
So when I hear that there is a recall of any kind for peanut butter products, I panic a little bit. In the past month, products that are associated with peanut butter produced in The J.M. Smucker Company have been recalled due to the possible risk of salmonella.
I looked at the FDA website to make sure that my peanut butter wasn’t in any of the batches that were being recalled.
The way to check this is to make sure that the lot code numbers aren’t between “1274425-214025, and only if the first seven digits end with 425 (manufactured in Lexington, KY)”, the website said.
One family did the same thing, or so they thought.
A TikToker, user name @kelsewhatelse, shared her story about her and her family having a mysterious sickness.
“For about 9 weeks my family’s got what we call the ‘Monday sickies’ because we would only get sick on Mondays,” she explained.
“We would have 12 hours of fever followed by about 12 hours of stomach cramps or diarrhea.”
TikTok; pictured above is @kelsewhatelse in her video
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Now just experiencing that for one day, sounds awful. But to go through that cycle for 9 weeks seems completely ridiculous.
If it were me I would be checking to see if there was something new introduced into the household on the weekends that isn’t normally there. Or if someone that came to the house had been sick and hadn’t realized it.
The most interesting thing was that it was only the mom, dad, and older son getting sick. The baby wasn’t getting sick at all. So it most likely wasn’t something that was environmental.
They cleaned the entire house, avoided going out, and didn’t invite anyone to their house for weeks. Thinking that it was something outside of the house.
For 2 months they didn’t see any of their friends or family, because they thought they were going to get sick. Her son missed school because of this mysterious sickness.
On an emergency visit to the hospital, she asked the doctor if they had heard of anything like what was happening to her family.
He said that he hadn’t heard anything like that. Then his facial expression changed. “The peanut butter!” he exclaimed.
“No, it can’t be that. I saw the recall. I went and I checked our big thing of peanut butter. We were fine,” she continued.
She goes home and her husband asked, “Well, what about the little peanut butter cups?”
“What little peanut butter?” she asked. Apparently, there were little peanut butter cups in the back of the pantry.
She hadn’t known about these little cups, because when she uses peanut butter it’s from the big container.
But on the weekend her husband is in charge of breakfast for their son, and he uses these peanut butter cups.
“That’s why it’s always the ‘Monday sickies’ because my husband is serving these contaminated little cups on the weekends,” she pointed out.
“That’s why my son and my husband were always the sickest because my son would eat it and then my husband would finish his peanut butter pancakes.”
The reason they never knew this was because they bought the cups, before the recall, but they were unknowingly giving themselves salmonella poisoning every weekend. They never noticed it because it was never bad enough to send themselves to the hospital.
Just thinking about how this peanut butter ruled their lives for nine weeks is upsetting. They were so worried that they had something contagious that they didn’t have contact with anyone for nine weeks.
You can check out the original TikTok video here, and here is a link to the FDA page as well.
@kelsewhatelse This has been an ongoing medical mystery and I can’t believe we have just been poisoning ourselves this whole time. ? #medicalmystery #momsoftiktok #poisoning #storytime #jiffpeanutbutterrecall #salmonellaoutbreak
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