Have You Ever Experienced Pine Mouth?
Source: (seriouseats.com)
An email we received in the Serious Eats inbox today:
Have you ever written about "Pine Mouth"...it happened to me and now I never want to eat anything that has pine nuts in it again!
- Chris
As no one in the Serious Eats office had heard of pine mouth before, I searched on Google and found out that the term describes the bitter/metallic taste in one's mouth after eating pine nuts that makes it unpleasant to eat or drink anything else. This Daily Mail article from last May has more to say about it, along with this earlier blog post from October 2008 and other afflicted bloggers. While multiple studies have been done to learn more about pine mouth, this recent study in the Journal of Medical Toxicology doesn't shed much light on the subject:
While there appears to be an association between pine nut ingestion and cacogeusia, little is known about this condition, nor can any specific mechanism of specific cause be identified. It is not known if a specific species of pine nut can be implicated. "Pine mouth" appears to be an emerging problem.
Have you ever experienced pine mouth?
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Have You Ever Experienced Pine Mouth?
Filed Under: Home and Families
Yup. Got it right now.
A few minutes after eating some pine nuts in a salad a week ago, I felt unwell and had a series of burning hot flushes. My son suggested that it sounded like an allergic reaction, so I took an antihistamine.
The next morning I woke with an appalling bitter taste in my mouth that no amount of tooth-brushing would shift. It was worse when I ate or drank anything. My skin was also very itchy.
I found some references to Pine Mouth syndrome via a search engine. They suggested that this is triggered in some people exclusively by pine nuts sourced from certain regions of China and Russia. I checked the packet and confirmed that the pine nuts were indeed from China…
A week on, and I am still experiencing a bitter aftertaste to anything I eat or drink but it is less severe than it was. The itching is as bad as ever.
Still very cross at the major supermarket chain that sold me the pine nuts: 74 separate discussions about pine mouth on their own website’s forum dating from more than a year ago suggest they know full well that this problem is caused by Chinese pine nuts but they still sold them to me without any kind of warning.