PSA: tomatoes are not spicy. Tomatoes and tomato products should not be spicy. Pizza sauce isn’t inherently spicy. Tomato-based pasta sauce is not spicy. Ketchup is NOT spicy.
If tomatoes are spicy, you have an allergy to tomatoes.
This announcement brought to you by my almost 29-year-old husband learning for the first time in his 2.8 decades of putting food products into his mouth that spaghetti and saucy pizza aren’t spicy foods
Seeing the tags on this as it’s going around again, so I have returned to say a few things:
If your mouth hurts, feels raw, or itches when you eat something, please don’t eat it! It might not be a full-blown allergy, could be something like a sensitivity to the acid content or maybe even Oral Allergy Syndrome, but also, you might very well be allergic. Unless it’s explicitly designed to be sour or spicy, it’s not supposed to do that.
Bananas are not spicy, prickly, or tingly! Kiwi is not unbearably sour and tingly! You people probably have an allergy! Stop eating the death fruits!
Mango and pineapple are a little odd. A lot of people react to pineapple because of an enzyme it contains which breaks down proteins; depending on your sensitivity level, it can make it feel like your mouth is being dissolved, because that’s kind of maybe what’s happening? You might not have a full-blown systemic allergy, but if it hurts, listen to your mouth and respect its stopping point. Mango has a compound super similar to urushiol, which is the stuff in poison ivy. A lot of people get oral allergy symptoms with fresh mango. Again, not necessarily a systemic allergy, but also, your body doesn’t like that. Please listen to your body.
Honey is not naturally spicy, sour, or tingly. (Spicy and infused honeys do exist, but I’m talking plain honey.) It might be a bit rich/overly sweet, but no, it should not make your tongue funny, ‘prickle,’ or otherwise hurt your mouth. You are probably allergic to honey. (insert “ghost bees” post here lol)
Many peppers are spicy, but bell peppers are not. Repeat after me: Bell Peppers Are Not Spicy. If they are spicy, you are probably allergic! This is yet another one my husband learned recently. Bell peppers/capsicum are also called sweet peppers, because they are sweet.
On that note, here’s a handy metric: If you find yourself wondering how people just looooove this food, or how they always fail to mention the weird sensory feature about it–primarily the spiciness, ‘fuzziness’ in mouth, or pain it causes–your experience is probably out of the ordinary and could very well be some kind of allergy.
And now, an update on my husband’s journey of allergen discovery, because I’m sensing from the tags and comments this might be relevant to a lot of y’all.
Yes, he is definitely allergic to tomatoes. Went and got him allergy tested to confirm it, and it came back pretty darn high on the list. Along with a crapton of other foods he’d been eating his entire life. We immediately got rid of all of those things in our diet, and wouldn’t you know it, his lifelong “IBS” went away.
So here’s a further PSA.
If you have “IBS” or a “sensitive stomach,” try to get tested for food allergies, too. Not all food allergies send you into anaphylaxis. Sometimes they give you smelly gas, diarrhea, constipation, acid reflux, recurrent tummyaches, nausea, and headaches. And it doesn’t always happen right away, sometimes taking several hours or most of a day to produce the unpleasant results, so you might not be noticing what your specific triggers are.
Also, I see all you people in the tags talking about how you’re gonna eat your allergens anyway. Please don’t do that, unless you’re 100% medically sure it’s just something like a surface sensitivity to enzymes or an oral reaction that’s not actually an allergy. Eating your allergens all the time inflames your whole system, and it can cause a lot of damage that takes a long time to heal. Be kind to your body, friends. You live there.
Also, if you realise you’ve been having a reaction to a particular food or ingredient, and you have a history of anaphylaxis, even if it’s only been induced by medication or other non-food substances in the past, please don’t keep eating it to test it or whatever see a doctor particularly soon. They really need to check that stuff out and get it documented in your medical notes.
As OP said, don’t keep re-exposing yourself “to test it”, and if you’re seeing an escalation in the symtpoms you get when you eat it over time, particularly share that info with your doctor.
Also if you have a “picky eater” child…
Ask them what is up with food when they try it.
Like… My kid decided raw broccoli was evil. So we assumed he was being a kid and cycled it out of rotation for a while, but he still made faces when we brought it back in…
Found out he doesn’t like it because his mouth gets all “static-y.”
