In Which I Form a Highly Preliminary Hypothesis

[akirlu]

Pine mouth, they call it. You get it from pine nuts. It only happens to some people, and only sometimes, a day or two after eating the pine nuts. Basically, all of a sudden everything you put in your mouth tastes bitter, metallic, and leaves a lingering bitter tang. Food, drink, toothpaste, it all tastes nasty. The effect can last for days or even weeks, so they say. I got it Sunday afternoon.

I went through a fairly typical voyage of discovery. Am I poisoned?, I wondered. Is this a symptom of Something Really Bad, neurologically speaking? I worried quietly for the rest of Sunday, woke up Monday with the effect still lingering, and then eventually did something semi-sensible and Googled the symptom. One of the top hits if you search on "bitter mouth taste" is an article on pine mouth. Had I eaten pine nuts recently? Yep, Saturday I had snacked on a handful from the open bag on the kitchen counter. (Should really have been back in the freezer after the last use in soup, but sometimes, you know, I Am Bad.)

At first, based on what I was finding, it looked like the only thing to do was endure the thing. Seems like nobody knows what the cause of pine mouth is, so it's non-trivial to offer a remedy. Looked like I would just have to hunker down and endure this, for however long it took. And hope it didn't last a couple of weeks. Or, you know, forever. At least it probably wasn't a brain tumor.

But yesterday evening when I got home, I happened to wonder if something topically was stimulating my bitter-detecting taste buds. I looked in the mirror and stuck out my tongue. My tongue was white-ish, coated. Hmm, says I. Wonder if treating it as if it were an oral infection would help? So I flossed and brushed extra thoroughly, then gargled and rinsed, in sequence with: a dilute solution of hydrogen peroxide, mouth wash, and finally warm salt water. A while later, re-rinsed and gargled with more salt water.

At first, the regimen didn't seem to affect anything, but over the course of the evening the bitter taste tapered off quite a bit. My tongue also seemed less coated. By 9:00pm I was able to enjoy the dinner I made myself without much evidence of bitter taste. Then I made the mistake of falling asleep while reading, and never brushed or flossed before bed. This morning the bitter taste was back, a bit, and the coating on the tongue. Queue aggressive oral hygiene, take two. Bitter taste faded back again, though it seemed to increase a bit toward the latter part of the day. So, I'm home, I have brushed and flossed and gargled like the very devil and the bitter effect seems greatly reduced, and my tongue looks almost normal.

So. The Big Science hypothesis that I've seen batted about -- that there's a chemical in the nuts that is due to their being an inedible variety of pine nut -- may for all I know be the right one. But I wonder if it isn't possible that there is a bacterium or yeastie beastie or other microbial culprit that sometimes takes hold on pine nuts that can, given the right oral environment, form a colony on the sufferer's mucosa and produce a biproduct that tastes bitter? Obviously, I'm just offering a personal anecdote here, it's not really even a proper hypothesis yet, but it seems to me like it might be worth investigating further.

Meanwhile, I think I shall seek out a bit of dinner, and see how it tastes.

Comments

[bedii.livejournal.com]

I have spoken to folks that have had this problem with pine nuts from China, which are apparently different enough from other species of pine nut to cause this to happen: the victims were able to take care of the problem by checking when they shopped to make sure the nuts came from other countries than China. Don't know enough botany to know one way or the other, myself...

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, it's one of the competing claims out there -- that the source is Chinese pine nuts -- you see that repeated in some places, but there seems to be a fair bit of contrary evidence. People have been experiencing the condition who, as I did, got their pine nuts from Trader Joe's, whose pine nuts say they are a product of "Russia or Korea".

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Oh, hey, that would make sense too.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Not pine nuts, but when I consulted for M&M Mars, they tested everybody to see who went on the taste panels, and I got roped in. The primary thing we were testing was new versions of peanut M&Ms because the US didn't grow enough peanuts that year and they had to buy Chinese. The Chinese peanuts tasted different enough that they had to change the ingredients of the M&Ms to make them taste as much like the regular ones as possible.

(The other thing I tested on was the filled pretzel tubes. I'm still surprised they sold.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It's not where the nuts come from, it's the species. My Lucky's sells two kinds of pine nuts, which they label Chinese and European. I think they also give the species names, but as I load the nuts into a sealable container and throw away the package, I don't know these offhand. The Chinese ones are smaller, rounder, and less expensive per pound; the European ones are slightly larger and more kernel-shaped.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay, further data supporting the species hypothesis. Interesting.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Wow. That is a bizarre thing. Your regimen for fighting it is similar to the regimen I've used to fight thrush in the past, and the physical description certainly sounds like thrush/yeast overgrowth. I brush with baking soda in addition to the hydrogen peroxide and salt rinses. My old doctor said it confused the yeast by changing the chemical background too frequently for them to keep up. Subtract the idea that the yeast thinks about it, and it makes sense to me.

Good luck.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Your hypothesis (that it's a bacteria or yeast) sounds reasonable and deserves to be investigated (not that I'm volunteering to either experiment or be experimented upon, mind you). It could be a matter of improper storage, either encouraging the growth of micro-organisms or producing chemical changes within the seeds if they've been chilled long enough and are then kept warm & moist enough to begin to germinate (which some pinus sp. do at temperatures close to freezing, if memory serves). If the problem is species-related, one needs to remember that parts of China, Russia, and Korea share a number of the same species of plants, including pines.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

This has not happened to you before? You have perhaps not eaten the nuts in this manner before? Just checking for additional variables.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Never happened to me before, even eating from the same batch of pine nuts. And I have certainly eaten pine nuts raw from the bag before.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Now that's interesting. That suggests that only some of the nuts cause this reaction. So it may not be the species per se but genetic variation between trees of the same species. If the Asian trees weren't traditionally harvested, they may not have experienced evolutionary selection for the best tasting nuts, the way the European trees have been. I wonder if the trees being harvested for pine nuts are being grown specifically or if they're harvested from the wild.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I had something similar happen right after I ate a fair amount of rhubarb (freshly picked, during a local celebration of Rhubarb Days). I couldn't taste salt. Discovered this while eating pizza; didn't taste right. I'm pretty sure it came back, or else my taste buds just got used to it and rerouted, but it was weird for a few days.

Hasn't happened before or since, even with rhubarb, though I didn't go back the next year.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Those sneaky dentists.