Just cracked open the bag of wasabi peas I bought earlier, thinking to console myself about my hearing woes with a deliciously masochistic snack. As the thought occurred to me (doubtless inspired by the current, wild panickiness of my imagination) that the last time I indulged in a bag of these burning little blighters had been, as far as I can recall, around the same time my hearing began to worsen, I idly thumbed the words "does wasabi cause deafness" into Google.
I discovered a prominent thread on a deafness forum on the topic, with several people claiming that eating spicy foods, including wasabi, had given them bad cases of tinnitus.
What. What!!
Something like two-thirds of the meals I eat are spicy to some degree! And last time I doggedly scoffed a whole bag of these pellets of pain in a single afternoon! Now, I hate to be the type who grabs some obscure, unreferenced factoid off the internet and breaks down into a hysterical frenzy over it, but this is deeply concerning, damnit! And also quite exciting, I must confess.
I had never heard of such a thing as spicy foods causing hearing loss, temporary or otherwise. Enough people seemed to be weighing in on the subject that perhaps there's a grain (or a pea, even) of truth there. Could my recent troubles in the ear area be not, in fact, caused by a sudden sharp decline from moderate hearing loss to extreme, but simply by my careless and sometimes bizarre snacking habits?!