Excess Mucus

I have had excess mucus for twenty years and it is getting worse.   Have given up all caffeine in drinks and food.  Am using a nasal spray and Ayers ointment to line my nose.   After I eat or drink the mucus is more.    I am taking allegra once a day but it does not help.     I have given up all dairy and trying to cut down on sugar.  
I have an internist who has not solved this problem.   Is there a specialist I should be seeing?   This is disgusting and I need to find an  answer to this problem.

Conrad T Nettemeyer
EveCon Nettemeyer


This discussion is related to Eating food causes excess mucus.

[Desperate_wife]

Try seeing an ENT and ask him to check for LPR, which is like GERD, only the acid comes up higher in the Exophogas.  There is an excellent article regarding this in  the JAMA by Dr. Charles Ford.  There is a specific test that can be done (Bravo 48 hour PH Monitoring) that will help with the diagnosis.  I have to warn you that not a lot of Dr.'s are familiar with this problem.  Hope this helps.  If you have any further questions, pleae feel free to contact me, my husband has the same problem and was finally diagnosed.  

[nmealy]

I have very similar symptoms. Generally quite high mucus production, that spikes after eating certain foods.  
the reactions can be quite bad, and often leave me so sleep-deprived and my throat so torn up that I catch a cold as well.  
I've been to one ENT, and one allergist.  Overall i've had 2 skin tests and one pretty big battery of blood allergy tests, all confirming no allergies, including tests for all the foods below.   (Also full blood work making sure there's nothing big and scary in there, and a chest x-ray.)
It's been getting worse for years, but fortunately and with a great deal of effort, I've managed to track it to a couple foods in particular. (see below)  If I didnt know to avoid these foods my life would be very unpleasant.  Conversely, following a diet avoiding these foods, I do basically ok.

So here they are, for what it's worth:

-- Dairy.   Anything with even small amounts of milk or cream, even whey powder.  Also processed cheeses have an unusually strong effect; american, processed cheddar, monterey jack, etc..   I can occasionally eat some harder fancy cheeses and get away with it, but one slice of american on a cheeseburger is enough to ruin my afternoon.   Also I saw some people posting about chocolate, but since all forms of chocolate contain milk as a key ingredient, I have to completely avoid it, so this is no mystery to me.

-- Beer. Usually will start cranking out mucus and making my nose run within 15 minutes.  The real fireworks come the next morning though right after I get out of bed. Watery mucus from the nose for a couple hours, unpleasant postnasal drip all day.

-- Carbonated water.  Yea, i dont understand this either, but any sodas will make my nose run while im drinking it.  Also I learned the hard way, some apple ciders cheat and sneak some carbonated water into it for the head.   I know this because ive had to learn to like hard ciders since I cant drink beer any more.

a couple others:
-- I suspect citrus, and I avoid it, but more cause it has always caused a lot of mucus production, even when I was a kid and none of this other stuff did. And also cause it's really not that hard to avoid.
-- And just for completeness, I have a very clear reaction to tater tots, and I know its silly but I've run relatively controlled experiments on myself, on several occasions to confirm. (weekends where apparently i had nothing better to do =)  Since none of these foods are listed as being in tater tots, there might be some weird preservative in there thats doing it too.  

Large intestine involvement -- whenever any of those foods are in my system, I'll get a short-term burst of mucus production whenever I move my bowels, so i've come to think of this as a set of digestive intolerances that somehow cause lots of mucus production.  

Joints - took me a long time to notice this one,  but my back and my legs used to get extremely stiff after dinner.  For years I thought this was just old age, or a normal effect of sitting motionless at a table for a while.  However when I figured out the dairy thing, i found that if i went out to dinner, and avoided everything with no slipups at all, after dinner I wouldnt be sore, and it was really weird cause i'd gotten so used to it.  
Anyway, i notice a very clear and correlated soreness in joints, particularly my back, if I have a meal where I have some dairy or beer or something.

n

[nmealy]

forgot to mention a couple things.

I get quite bad acid reflux while this is going on too.  Lots of coughing and throat irritation, but almost never any direct heartburn symptoms. My doctor figured that one out for me some years ago.  To paraphrase him, reflux can go undiagnosed when there are no heartburn symptoms, and often the only noticeable symptom is persistent coughing, particularly at night.  
Anyway, he gave me some samples of Nexium, which worked wonders, and told me to be careful with what I ate for dinner and late at night.  
However nexium being stupidly expensive and not covered by my insurance, I avoid the reflux by just avoiding the foods now.
(since this was several years ago, my beer reaction wasnt so intense, so i was still drinking beer, and i would usually drink a beer or two at night, and put up with what was then just a mild runny nose.  Once I tied the reflux symptoms to it as well, I had to say bye to beer)

Beans - they dont seem to ever cause mucus directly, but because they can easily upset my digestion, they can trigger the reflux seperately, so i avoid them.

and thirdly, all this probably sounds like someone older, and I forgot to mention im only 34.