Roger Hyam

Here is a story on the BBC about a USB device that you plug into your PC to enable it to be put to sleep at the touch of a single button. It is incredible that some one is selling a product to do that. For starters my Macs do it by default. Just close the lid of a laptop or touch the power button on a iMac and they go to sleep. They come back pretty instantly as well. The other point is that I am sure my old Dell desktop used to have the option to set the power button to do precisely this behaviour with Windows XP though of course it used to take hours to come back and used to crash on me etc. One could always set the PC to power down gracefully as you stop using it i.e slow the disc then the screen then the processor and full sleep after a few minutes of non-use but that would take more thought.

There is nothing like a gaget to fix bad design and sloppy thinking. They’ll make a fortune with it.

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!

The bitter taste in my mouth continues so my investigation goes on. The suspect ‘baby pine nuts’ came from Julian Graves store in Livingston a couple of weeks ago. I remember they had both regular and small pine nuts and we bought the small but as I quickly discarded the packaging I don’t have any information about them beyond my memory.

So off to the Edinburgh Julian Graves to see if I could find some more but this is a small store and only had the regular pine nuts. I bought them for comparative purposes. Here are the pictures of the two types of nuts.

Baby Pine Nuts from Julian Graves Livingston

Regular pine nuts from Julian Graves Edinburgh

The smaller ones appear to be more oily - they stuck to the scanner lid when the others didn’t. Perhaps they are just lower grade and off?

The new packet I have does not state the country of origin which we need if we are going to track down the species. I did think this had to be listed for legal reasons in the UK.

Next step write to Julian Graves and ask them.

I started to get a bitter taste in my mouth after eating. At first I thought I was going to die so I Googled on it - how many people a minute go through that process! My scatter gun approach to diagnosis came up with a series of suggestions. I either had jaundice or I was diabetic or I had eaten pine nuts (possibly from China) in the last few days. My skin isn’t yellow and my pee isn’t orange and I am not thirsty all the time but I had eaten a new kind of pine nut in the last few days so the third option looks like it warrants attention. After Googling start blogging.

There is a very short scientific-like paper out there Taste disturbances after pine nut ingestion. In the initial case the pine nuts were oxidized and not fit for consumption but six other cases are mentioned and it is not clear if these were oxidized. A test subject also consumed two portions of nuts which I guess they wouldn’t do if they were oxidized. Importantly there was no fungal contamination, no pesticide contamination and they didn’t know what species of tree the nuts were from but they had come from China.

The wikipedia pine nut page currently summarises and has a few links to discussion groups where the effect is mentioned.

Now I eat pine nuts a lot (I am a veggie) and this is the first time this has happened. It is also the first time I have had ‘Baby’ pine nuts which were sold as being small. My theory is that these are actually a different species of pine nut. This would be fun to investigate.

What candidates do we have among commonly eaten pine nut species ( according to Wikipedia)

Pinus gerardiana, known as the Chilgoza Pine, ‘noosa’, or ‘neoza’, is a pine native to the northwestern Himalaya in eastern Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northwest India, growing at elevations between 1800-3350 m. It often occurs in association with Blue Pine (Pinus wallichiana) and Deodar Cedar (Cedrus deodara).(Wikipedia) - This is a possible one. Are its seeds smaller than P. koraiensis I wonder?

Pinus koraiensis is Korean Pine. It is native to eastern Asia, Manchuria, far eastern Russia, Korea and central Japan. Korean Pine differs from the closely related Siberian Pine in having larger cones with reflexed scale tips, and longer needles. The seeds are extensively harvested and sold as pine nuts, particularly in northeastern China; it is the most widely traded pine nut in international commerce. - Very likely. (Wikipedia)

Pinus pinea Stone Pine (or Umbrella Pine) Native of Southern Europe in the Mediterranean region (Wikipedia) - not likely contender.

Pinus edulis Colorado Pinyon or Two-needle Pinyo is native to the United States and so not likely contender.

Pinus cembroides Mexican Pinyon - mexican so not likely to bother us.

Pinus monophylla Single-leaf Pinyon - USA native so not likely to bother us.

Looks like there are two contenders. Common things happen commonly so I have probably been eating P. koraiensis for years as it is the most commonly traded. Perhaps these new seeds are P. gerardiana?

I will investigate further.