diagnose.me.

For as long as i can remember, certain foods have made my mouth sting. Spinach and walnuts were always culprits, but over the years, new foods were added to the list including bananas (particularly the stringy parts), raw broccoli and cauliflower, grapes, pineapple, tomatoes, and plenty more i can't think of right now. Everything has its own level of stinginess. Walnuts are the worst (so i never eat them), pineapples in the middle, and bananas (if i remove the stringy parts), broccoli, cauliflower, grapes, and tomatoes are more mild. I'll still eat most of them (except walnuts), but have recently noticed things starting to bother me more. Tomatoes, for example. I love tomatoes. I grow them in the garden, eat them with fresh basil, add them to a sandwich, etc. Wednesday night i had one with dinner and my mouth stung horribly. It makes me quite sad to think that i'll soon be limiting so many of my favorite foods. Why is it that the healthy stuff has to bother me? It would be much nicer if i reacted to tostitos this way.
So, my assumption (and what i've been telling people all these years) is that i have a mild allergy to certain foods. After talking about my latest issues last night, i started to wonder what exactly i was allergic to- what the foods had in common. After some time on the internet, my best guess is that i have oral allergy syndrome. Basically, it has to do with pollen proteins and similar food proteins. Though i've never seen an allergist (and it looks like tests for these food allergies are not very accurate), i'm definitely allergic to pollen. And since i can eat fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes and still get the stinging, i know it's not a pesticide reaction. However, there are still some things that don't fit 100%. For example, i definitely experience stinging on the roof of my mouth and on my tongue (it feels like having a thousand irritated taste buds)- not an itching or burning as is usually the case with oas. Also, the symptoms don't go away as quickly as they're suppose to with oas, but slowly diminish over about 20 minutes. Finally, my foods don't line up with specific pollen allergies (for example, allergy to ragweed pollen can result in reactions to banana, cantaloupe, cucumber, honey dew, watermelon and zucchini. I can eat everything but bananas without a reaction). Regardless, i can't seem to come up with something else that fits my symptoms. So, if anyone is looking for a way to kill some time (work's not that important), go ahead and do some google-ing, and make sure to let me know if you come up with something more likely. Until then, i'm going with this one.