'Pine Mouth': How Pine Nuts Can Ruin Tastebuds for Weeks

Jul. 7, 2010— -- It's a chef's worst nightmare: to wake up one morning to find that food has lost its flavor -- that every morsel to cross your lips tastes bitter, metallic, and inedible.

This was the fate of San Francisco-based chef and food critic Jenna VanGrowski, 30, who suffered from a bizarre taste disturbance last month known as "pine mouth."

Though she didn't know it at the time, the bitter aftertaste that came with anything she ate was due to a rare and seemingly random reaction to eating pine nuts. She snacked on some two days before.

Various "palate cleansing" foods failed to get rid of the metallic aftertaste, known medically as metallogeusia.

When even the taste of toothpaste was "almost unbearable," she says she started to worry.

"I'm a chef, so I started getting really scared and frustrated because I need to be able to taste to do what I do. I had no idea what the heck was going on."

Van Growski works for ChefsBest, an organization that judges food products.

But as she soon found, she was not alone.

A quick Google search uncovered dozens of others on blogs and Facebook reporting her same symptoms and calling it "pine mouth syndrome."

The cause? It seemed the handful of pine nuts she snacked on days prior was the unlikely culprit.

Fortunately, she also discovered that the reaction is temporary; most cases go away on their own in one to four weeks.

One of the most interesting things about pine mouth is that it's a recent phenomenon," says Dr. Marc-David Munk, an emergency physician at the University of New Mexico who wrote about his own ordeal with pine mouth as a case study in the Journal of Medical Toxicology last year.

"It has really come onto the scene in the last two years," he says.

Though it was first documented in Belgium in 2001, there has been a surge in the number of cases reported since 2009, both in the U.S. and the U.K.

Since the Food and Drug Administration began tracking this affliction in February of 2009, over 50 cases have been reported, says FDA spokesperson Ira Allen.

"We're collecting information on this where we can and we count on the public to help [by reporting cases to the FDA]," Allen says.