Cannot Eat Fruit (Kara, would really like your advice!)

[Revan]

Hey everyone, so once again I'm back with another issue but frankly this one in a way is a bit more of a dire importance type problem. Basically here's the scoop. Back in about 1117...err I mean 1997...that's right...I went to this camp away from home and basically one of the days we decided to have a sort of "olympics" like many youth camps like to do. One of the stations was a fruit station, in other words a rest area, and it had tons of great fruit. Before this I'd eat fruit I believe fairly often, I mean sure I'd have cookies now and again but I still had fruit and loved it, specially pears . However something changed that day. I ate a grape and got what I thought felt almost like heartburn. I went to the nurse's office because water wasn't even doing anything, and she gave me a Tums which made it go away for the most part.

Now I know what you're probably thinking. It's probably just a case of hyper-acidity. Or maybe the grape wasn't ripe enough. However ever since that day, I cannot eat fruit without getting that pain. It happens in the centre of my chest though, not over my heart, so clearly not heartburn. And what's more, it's not just acidic fruits like apples, oranges, etc that I can't eat. I can't eat non-acidic fruits either like bananas. They all cause the same problem.

Now to be clear, I've never been 100% healthy per se. Every Thanksgiving or Easter from age one to age seven, I was in the hospital generally with croup. In Grade 7 (May 2001) I had issues with my...erm...bowel and still do every so often. And also in Grade 7 I(I think, might have been 8 so 2001-2002) I had what my doctor called a chest-muscle spasm. Where I eat food and it doesn't get stuck in my esophagus but it seems to almost stop midway down (again in the middle of my chest :S where I guess you'd say my sternum is?). Often this happens too when I'm drinking milk or choc milk and swallow it the same time I swallow the food. (I may be partially allergic to dairy too as my forehead feels slightly clammy when I say have a cheese cube). So yeah I'm wondering if anyone has any idea what the problem is with the fruit.

Please also note that in regards to the chest-muscle thing, I took a bromine test and they found nothing. And my doctor in regards to the fruit thing basically suggested conditioning myself to the fruit. And it's like...that's easier said than done. You can't/don't want to exactly eat something that causes you pain every time you eat it. Even if it may indeed eventually go away, it's still...pain.

Let me know what you guys all think.

[Ridiculous]

You say you get the reaction from all fruits, which I find surprising because they are vastly different. The only linking factor that I can think of off-hand - I'm no botanist - is fructose content, so do you also get the reaction from eating honey? (honey also contains fructose)

What about fruit juice? You may have some aversion to the texture or sensation of eating the fruit, which juice would bypass.

A great deal of bought products also have fruit as ingredients (i.e. ice cream, muesli bars, cereal); do you have symptoms with them?

Heartburn doesn't have anything to do with the heart by the way, and does typically happen in the centre of the chest as it is caused by gastric acid entering the various tubes leading to the stomach. So it probably is heartburn.

[Pseudojim]

how soon after eating fruit does it occur?

With regards to lactose, intolerance to it increases with age. You may be exhibiting an emerging intolerance to it. My best friend developed severe lactose intolerance at the age of 27.

[browneyedboy]

Is it just actual fresh fruit, or what about fruit juices/ fruit smoothies or dried fruit?

[KaraBulut]

What you're describing sounds a lot like two very common phenomena:

Esophageal spasm.

Tyramine sensitivity (aka "cheese effect")

[Revan]

Well no I don't have it with fruit juice, and I mean apple juice is a friend of mine lol. And I mean generally any kind. whether it's the Rougemont kind, Allen's, Simply Apple, they all generally are fine for me...and I've never heard of a fructose allergy for example, which is why I don't understand my problem. As for honey, well I don't actually like honey to be honest. I don't think I had a problem the one time I had it in tea, but it's personally a bit too sweet for my liking. Even though I love honey nut cheerios lol (which I don't know how much actual honey it has ). I do love cereal and ice cream, but generally only vanilla ice cream. Also had some of those President's Chocie fruit juice freeze pops (freezies more or less) and had no reaction.

Kara interesting info about the esophageal spasm, as it does sound quite similar, though it never feels like it's stuck in my throat but more in my chest, while I do realize that I believe is still part of your esophagus, yeah the pain winds up in my chest. Often when it happens, I wind up spitting out whatever food i might still have in my mouth if I do, because if I continue swallowing hte food it often just causes more buildup of gas I suppose? I've actually had different lengths of episodes. Two of my worst, one happened back just prior to Christmas in my first year of university (2007) where I had just had a dental procedure and then swallowed and ibuprofin (not Advil, but straight up ibu, that was a huge honker of a pill) and I've had problems with swallowing pills in the past. I actually thought I was fine as it went down, but then I got home, ate an After Eight mint and next thing I knew I felt like the esophageal spasm again, but it also made me dry heave too. It didn't go down for about two hours.

Another time I was taking another pill and it stopped halfway down causing quite substantial pain and when drinking tea, it would feel like it just was coming back up but stopped before it made me heave. This one took almost four hours to finally go down....

To be honest Kara, I forgot to mention that when I was young I had a throat virus, and it got to the point where I could still breathe but my swallowing reflex shut down. I couldn't take my medication (Amoxicillin liquid, the banana flavored medicine) and while I could be wrong as I can't recall if it was my doctor who said it, or just my own thought that the doc said it, but my esophagus I think is thinner or smaller than most people. I mean I barely take pills properly for fear of getting a spasm, I wind up having to chew them, and I always request for pills not capsules as I can't chew them. There was a short period back in first year prior to the spasm in Christmas where I was able to take pills whole, but the spasm thing scared me back into not swallowing pills whole.

[Revan]

Still no advice?