When I eat celery my tongue and mouth go numb. Is this a common issue with people or is it just me? It happens any time I eat celery, and it's like I sucked on a tube of ora-gel.

*edit* I googled it but it doesn't seem there is a way to tell the difference in being allergic to it and just being affected by the chemical in it that numbs peoples lips :/

This post was edited by skyeye on Jun 17 2012 05:50pm

Celery has a high concentration of chemicals known as furanocoumourans. These are actually quite toxic. The main concentration is normally found in the celery root, but as the stalk gets older and starts to wilt/rot, the concentration in the stalk rises. Furanocourmourans are toxic by themselves, but when activated by UV light, they produce chemicals that can cause severe blisters and burns.


In other words, you're allergic to that chemical, as are a lot of people.

Ahh k, ty.

This, except it's furanocoumarins (a type of psoralen), not furanocoumourans

Furanocoumarins are defensive agents produced by certain plants to protect themselves against various types of fungus (brown rot on celery for example), bacteria, insects and mammals (yes that includes people).

To further check out if this chemical is a problem for you perhaps you may evaluate whether some other plants or fruits have the same numbing effect. I'd recommend a fruit like the fig, an herb like fresh parsley and a vegetable like parsnip. If they induce a similar tongue numbness, then perhaps you should avoid those as well. Note that you may act differently to fresh and dry parsley..

Lol, I just copy/pasted from a different site where someone asked the same thing. Had I actually looked it up myself, I would've spelled it right. I'm ocd about that, lol.

LOL This is np.

The most important is that you provided useful information. That's cool


/edit One point to be careful about. People are not always correct on other things either. Some people online refer to this type of agents as phytochemicals. Phytochemicals are agents produced by fungi (plural of fungus), which is actually incorrect here as the plant is the one producing furanocoumarins, not the fungi. Nonetheless, people are actually referring to photosensitivity feature of these chemicals. That would be photochemicals, not phytochemicals

This post was edited by Dmon_Hunter on Jun 18 2012 07:58am

How do you know so much about this?

I looked in the primary literature (scientific journals).

At first, I wasn't able to find furanocoumourans. In that name I recognized furano, like furan. Coumourans was bizarre to me, but I knew coumarins. Nonetheless, I googled it. Google suggested the correct term

Then I got caught up reading all sorts of cool stuff about these agents. In a nutshell, these plants produce that toxin to defend themselves against intruders. You're heard of this sort of thing, right? Like mold defending themselves by producing the toxin penicillin to fend off bacteria? These are slow wars in the wild we rarely hear about.

And the answer to your question is that I'm a scientist. I guess you figured that one out already.

This post was edited by Dmon_Hunter on Jun 18 2012 08:22am

You seem as passionate about that as my husband is with mathematics and physics.

I never really got into science, myself. Though, you made this sound very interesting.

Learning a little bit about what's going on out there is really cool. Perhaps this one thread is an example of that. I didn't know about celery, parsley, fig and parsnip secret until I checked it out. It's like booze -- a little wine is healthy, but too much is bad. Similarly, a little mathematics is healthy, but too much is ... well....

As for the small amount of foreign chemicals we eat, our liver takes care of inactivating them; then they're cleared out by the kidneys. That's what happens to the furanocoumarins

It has to make sense, somehow. This motivates me to try to figure out what's going on.