Trying to stay healthy can seem like a full-time job sometimes, especially during a pandemic.

But I'm here to make that goal a little easier.

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

It's time for the Nutrition Facts Grab Bag where we look at the latest science on a whole variety of topics,

starting today with pine nuts.

Did you know that some pine nuts can cause a bad taste in your mouth that can last for weeks?

The reason I make my pesto with walnuts, instead of the more traditional pine nuts,

is not only because walnuts are probably healthier, we're talking 20 times more polyphenols,

but also because of a mysterious phenomenon known as PMS.

Nope, not that PMS, pine mouth syndrome.

Characterized by what has become my favorite word of the week,

kaka-jujja, meaning a bad taste in your mouth.

You can get it from heavy metal toxicity, seafood toxins, certain nutritional and neurological disorders,

or from eating the wrong kind of pine nuts, termed pine mouth by the public.

A few days after eating pine nuts, you get this persistent metallic or bitter taste in your mouth

that can last for weeks.

Thousands of cases have been reported, raw versus cooked pine nuts doesn't seem to matter.

Could the claws be some unidentified toxin present in some varieties of non-edible pine nuts

out of more than 100 different kinds of pine trees that nuts have only about 30 are considered to be edible?

So pine nut samples from stricken consumers were analyzed and indeed they all contain nuts

from Chinese white pine, which is not reported to be edible.

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