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Salicylates in food: where they are, and how much they really matter

Salicylic acid is a plant hormone. Plants make it to signal infection and to coordinate their own defences, which is why the concentration is highest in the parts most exposed to attack — skins, seeds, herbs and spices — and effectively zero in meat, fish, eggs, dairy and plain grains.

This is general information, not a diagnosis. A low-salicylate diet removes a large share of the fruit, vegetables, herbs and spices in a normal diet, and done unsupervised or long-term it carries real nutritional risk, particularly for children. Aspirin-exacerbated respiratory disease and chronic urticaria are diagnoses a clinician makes, and their management is not dietary. If a food reliably causes breathing difficulty, swelling or collapse, that is an emergency and an allergy assessment, not an elimination diet.

The scale problem, which the food lists never mention

Salicylate content in food is usually tabulated in milligrams per 100 grams, and the highest entries are spices — curry powder, paprika, thyme, cumin, oregano, turmeric — which top the table by a wide margin but are eaten a teaspoon at a time. Fruits, particularly berries and dried fruit, come next; most vegetables are modest; and animal foods and refined grains contribute essentially nothing.

Published estimates of what a person actually consumes in a day differ by more than an order of magnitude between studies, because the analytical methods differ, the food tables differ, and diets differ. What every estimate has in common is the comparison that matters: even the highest of them is small next to one low-dose aspirin tablet, which is 75 to 100 milligrams of acetylsalicylic acid taken deliberately, every day, by millions of people.

That comparison does not prove nobody reacts to dietary salicylate. It does mean the framing of “salicylate load” as a large chemical exposure is misleading, and it explains why controlled challenge studies have been so much less impressive than the food lists imply.

Aspirin-exacerbated respiratory disease is a drug reaction, not a food one

The condition most often invoked to justify low-salicylate eating is aspirin-exacerbated respiratory disease — the triad of asthma, nasal polyps and reactions to aspirin and other NSAIDs. Its mechanism is well characterised and it is pharmacological: these drugs inhibit cyclo-oxygenase-1, which in susceptible people shifts arachidonic acid metabolism toward leukotrienes and provokes the airway reaction.

That mechanism requires meaningful COX-1 inhibition, and dietary salicylate does not deliver it. Specialist guidance for the condition centres on avoiding COX-1-inhibiting drugs, on treating the underlying airway and sinus disease, and in selected patients on supervised aspirin desensitisation. A low-salicylate diet is not a standard part of it.

The same applies to chronic spontaneous urticaria, where dietary “pseudoallergen” elimination has been studied, produces inconsistent results, and is not first-line care.

Elimination diets: how they go wrong

The structured elimination protocols that include salicylate — the best known was developed at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney — were designed as short diagnostic tools, run with a dietitian, followed by systematic challenges to identify what, if anything, actually matters for that person. Used that way they are a legitimate investigation.

What happens in practice is different. The food list escapes the protocol, the challenge phase never happens, and someone ends up years into a diet that has removed most fruit, most vegetables, all herbs and spices, tea, honey and most of the interesting parts of eating — on the basis of a list rather than a result. That is a nutritional problem in its own right, and in children it is a growth and feeding problem.

The Feingold diet, which combined salicylate restriction with removal of artificial colours and preservatives for childhood hyperactivity, is the historical version of the same story: the salicylate component has not held up, while the separate question of certain artificial colours and children’s activity levels produced enough signal in a large randomised trial to put a warning label on those colours in the EU.

Salicylatespor grupo de alimentos

Faixas, não decimais. Onde uma quantidade publicada para um alimento concreto não pôde ser verificada contra um documento, esta superfície imprime a faixa em vez de um número — e cada alimento abaixo liga à sua própria página de nutrição para ver o que mais há nele.

O que muda o número

• Peeling removes a lot: the skin and the layer under it carry most of a fruit’s salicylate.
• Ripeness lowers it — under-ripe fruit is higher than fully ripe fruit of the same kind.
• Drying concentrates it, so dried fruit sits well above the fresh version per 100 g.
• Cooking and canning reduce it somewhat, since some of it leaches into the liquid.
• Herb and spice figures are per 100 g of dried powder, which is never the serving size.

Onde mais estes alimentos são assinalados

Alimentos elevados nesta página que também se sentam numa faixa elevada em pelo menos duas das outras quinze. Faixas tranquilizadoras não se contam, então uma linha aqui significa que o alimento realmente acumula rótulos mais do que meramente ser mencionado muito.

Vale a pena ler antes de remover qualquer coisa. As listas nesta superfície foram cada uma escritas para uma pessoa diferente com um problema diferente, e convergem no mesmo grupo pequeno de alimentos densos em nutrientes. Satisfazê-las todas de uma vez produz uma dieta que ninguém desenhou e ninguém testou.

Falar com alguém que realmente pode testar

Nothing on this surface is personal medical advice. If a food genuinely makes you ill, if you have had a kidney stone or a gout attack, or if you are considering removing a food group from your diet, the person to talk to is your doctor, pharmacist or a registered dietitian — they can test for the things that can be tested for, which a table cannot.

Fontes:Swain AR et al. Salicylates in foods. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 1985 — the analytical survey most later food lists derive from. · Specialist guidance on aspirin-exacerbated respiratory disease, which identifies COX-1 inhibition by drugs, not dietary salicylate, as the trigger. · The Royal Prince Alfred Hospital elimination-diet protocol, designed as a supervised diagnostic sequence with a challenge phase.· Nomes de alimentos e ligações: a base de alimentos do sítio. Verificado2026-09-06.

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