The nice people at Julian Graves wrote straight back to my email and sent me a post paid envelope so that I could send the nuts back to them for analysis. Lets wait and see what they say.
BTW Julian Graves has be bought by Holland and Barrett.
The bitter taste remains especially after eating carbohydrate rich things like white bread. Perhaps a link to saliva amylase? Does not appear to be getting any worse. If anything it is clearing. I don’t have a noticable cold or anything though the glands in my throat are up a little an infection of some kind would be a good candidate.
It is amazing how trivial a thing this to write about but I am fascinated and imagine some one else with the same taste sensation would find it fascinating. To anyone else this must be horrendous!
“To anyone else this must be horrendous!” – actually it is quite amusing reading mate!
Just stumpled across this blog after trying to figure out what that horible taste is!!
Any more progress on the investigations?
Was wondering if you’re still investigating ‘Pine Mouth’…? As a fairly long-term resident in China, I’ve eaten pine nuts for years out here and never had a problem, but this week, having tried baby pine nuts for the first time, Pine Mouth has struck. I am interested in any botanical explanations (and not any typical China-bashing food standards comments as per most other blogs on this subject) as I think you have a unique academic approach to this. Hope to hear more…
Hi – your comment about saliva amylase makes a bell go off in my head. I had “pine mounth” this last Christmas here in Australia. Salads are common Christmas fare here, and the weather was stinking hot as usual. I never bothered blogging my experience, once I found out what happened, as I assumed the problem could have been rancidity. But back to your comment. The interesting thing, to me, was was triggerered the taste each time. An empty mouth, with plain saliva, was just fine. Swallowing was fine. It was only when I tried to swallow anything else that the taste flooded into my mouth. Anything else. Water, even. Anything more solid (eg coffee with milk in it) was intolerable. But not my own saliva. Which suggests that that the flavour was the result of the saliva mixing with whatever I was eating. The other interesting thing was that as long as I kept the bolus of food being chewed in the mouth, everything was fine. It was when I tried to swallow that the bitter flavour came. So I suspect that the receptors for the flavour are located on a patch right at the back of the tongue. Now I do know that not everyone has all the same patches of tastebuds – for example lots of people cannot taste Phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) – the ability to taste this bitter compound is an hereditary trait. So, I could hypothesise that the reason this whole pine mouth thing is so resistant to being solved is that you have several issues that work together to cloud the issue: only some pine nuts may cause the problem (rancid ones?), maybe not all of us react by producing whatever is in our saliva that reacts with the bolus and maybe only some people can taste the after effects.