The Menace of Pine Nuts

I was on vacation with the family last week and one of the wife's friends met us at the beach with her two girls.  Last Friday night, the wife's friend made a great little appetizer by spreading cream cheese and topping it with pesto, dried cranberries and pine nuts.  It was a very tasty appetizer and I ate a shitload of it.  Later that night I got hungry and had a few handfulls of pine nuts to calm my growing stomach.

All was well until this past Sunday night when I began to notice that no matter what I ate, it left a bitter taste in my mouth.  I first noticed it after I ate green grapes so I thought there was something wrong with the grapes.  On Monday I noticed that everything I ate left that foul bitter taste in my mouth- I mean everything including water!  The bitter taste would go away after about 10 minutes but only to return the next time I ate something.

So I did some research on the net and found bitter taste in the mouth can be attributed to tooth decay, sinus infections, acid reflux, brain tumors, and rectal lice.  I really didn't think I had any of these.  Then I ran across a forum where hundreds of people had posted about the same symptoms of the bitter taste from anything they ate that later went away.  It seems that pine nuts are the culprit.  It is being debated wheter the origin of the pine nuts might have something to do with it.

I have eaten pine nuts a lot in my lifetime but this is the first time that I ever experienced this.  I think I will try Pine nuts again but only if they are from Italy and not China, Korea or Vietnam.