Amaryllis sillyramA

Oh no! I’ve got the pine mouth again. I don’t know if this has happened to you, or if you’ve heard of it, but it’s the weirdest thing. You eat the wrong kind of pine nuts (there is a wrong kind!) and a few days later, everything you eat has a really bad aftertaste. For DAYS. Big M and I have both gotten the pine mouth in the past, and so we’ve avoided eating pine nuts just in case. Even though we love pine nuts. Because the pine mouth, it is awful. This time, I think the culprit was some pesto on a sandwich I had from this great subs place near my house. I forgot that pesto can have pine nuts in it. Doh!

Also this time, I got a bit more curious about it (why, oh WHY??), so I read a few things on the internet. Starting with Wikipedia (of course) which led me to an interesting article by a Dr. Gregory Möller. The article is pretty thorough in covering all the things that pine mouth, or Pine Nut Syndrome (PNS) is not. It’s not a food allergy, for instance, nor is it a food intolerance.

Here I’ll interrupt myself and say to you, I’m not going to tell you everything in the article because you can read, and also because I read it yesterday and that is way too long ago for me to remember what was in it. Except! There was one really cool thing in there.

Apparently there are taste buds in the gastrointestinal tract (also known as the GI tract, and also known at my house as the tummy*). Specifically, there are bitter taste buds in there. And when our GI tract tastes something bitter and therefore possibly poisonous, maybe it’s more likely to send that something back up? But here’s the weird thing. When the taste buds down in there taste a bitter thing, we don’t sense it that way. We sense it as a taste in the mouth. WEIRD! And that could go a long way to explain the whole phenomenon of aftertaste, or at least bitter aftertaste.

Any case, judging by this article, we do know quite a lot about exactly what’s happening in our tummies, but there is still so much we just do not know. I’m glad the scientists are on this though, because it’s really no fun to think about life without pine nuts forever, and even more no-fun to deal with the PNS when I slip up. Boo hoo, I know, first world problems.

Also, PNS.

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* And to Bart Simpson, scrambling to recover his dignity: No it’s not, it’s my tummy. I mean stomach…gut… crap factory!