Orange juice worsens reaction to bisphenol-A in dental fillings

7:02 AM 5/19/11

I've been talking to someone about problems with plastic dental fillings recently, so I am more aware of them right now. She said that she had more symptoms from the fillings after eating an orange and a banana.

I recently bought a whole carton of orange juice. Normally, I buy orange juice in the small, individual sized bottles instead of the entire carton. When I buy orange juice in a whole carton, then I will do nothing but drink orange juice all day every day until the whole carton is gone.

That is exactly what I did this time. I drank tons and tons of it the first day. After that first day, my craving was mostly satisfied, and I drank less of it in the next couple days.

I am having a Feingold reaction to the orange juice. The Feingold Diet, created by Ben Feingold, is a diet that reduces the amount of artificial flavors, colors, preservatives, and salicylates in your diet.

Salicylates are in orange juice. They are a naturally occurring chemical in many fruits and vegetables. 'Eating FEWER fruits and vegetables' is politically incorrect right now, but if you eat fewer fruits and vegetables, you reduce the symptoms associated with salicylates.

Salicylates trigger hyperactivity. When you eat or drink salicylate-containing foods, and when your body cannot produce enough of the enzymes to metabolize all the salicylates, you become hyper and restless, agitated, impulsive, and unable to think clearly about anything. You also hear a lot of ringing in your ears, and become less able to hear people talking. Salicylates cause temporary reduction in hearing ability - not a total loss of hearing, just a little loss of hearing for a while. I experience this every time I eat a lot of fruits.

I did something impulsive which was unlike anything I've done in a long time. I went out walking because I was so restless and uncomfortable I didn't want to sit down. This was the day when I first got the OJ and was drinking tons and tons of it. I then suddenly decided on impulse to go looking for a 'path' that one of my neighbors had told me existed near one of the yards next door. I had remembered the existence of this 'path' for over a year, and had vaguely imagined going and looking for it, but hadn't actually done it. All of a sudden, I did it on impulse. So I wandered around on a couple people's lawns and around the edges of the woods, and didn't find any actual path, just a big space of mowed grass in between the houses, a no-man's-land. A couple of the neighbors talked to me and asked me what I was looking for, and I explained to them that someone had described a path around here, and they said that maybe she was referring to the buffer zone between the houses (there was a word they used for that no-man's-land, but I can't remember what it was. A leeway, or something like that.)

I don't normally walk around on other people's lawns on impulse. But I used to do that kind of thing all the time when I was much younger. I was a lot more impulsive back then. I started using an informal version of the Feingold Diet in the year 2000 and have been much less impulsive and less disorganized ever since.

Well, now I am noticing other symptoms. The orange juice has triggered breast pain from the bisphenol-a in the composite resin dental fillings. I am also having the 'stupid brain' feeling and headaches. The 'stupid brain' feeling was how I felt for weeks and weeks after getting the fillings, and they say that exposure to xenoestrogens lowers IQ. (I'd have to google that and make sure that I'm saying the right thing.) I also had severe headaches for weeks, and I never get headaches, so this was unusual, and I'm getting them again now (mildly).

Someone might theorize that the acid in the orange juice was leaching the BPA out of the fillings, and yeah, that's possible, but I personally believe the problem is a 'drug interaction' caused by a constant exposure to BPA from my fillings, and a greatly reduced ability to metabolize toxic chemicals (and BPA), caused by excessive intake of salicylate. When you eat or drink lots of salicylate-containing foods, you use up all of the enzymes that are used to process salicylate, and then, you become unable to metabolize anything else that requires those enzymes, too. So when you can't break down other toxic chemicals like BPA, then you react badly to small amounts of those chemicals.

The Feingold Diet is on the web at www.feingold.org. They want people to buy their materials and join the organization - and I actually did back in 2000 - but it's not really necessary. Ben Feingold's book is probably available for free from the library. It's outdated, and Feingold Diet users have discovered a lot more things that trigger reactions, and have kept lists of them, but you can still gain a lot by reading the book. There are probably forums online too where people will give away a lot of the information that was on the papers they sent me when I joined.

For anyone who hasn't been reading this before: A chemical called bisphenol-a, in plastic dental fillings, causes a lot of symptoms including breast pain. Breast pain is one of the most noticeable symptoms. It will start immediately after you get the fillings, and it never completely goes away (unless you completely remove the fillings). It will get worse if you use other drugs that make you unable to break down the BPA and get rid of it. St. John's Wort will trigger the breast pain again (at least, it did for me), and now, I'm observing that drinking very large amounts of orange juice is also triggering this problem again. You will also take in bisphenol-A if you have a plastic retainer in your mouth to straighten your teeth.