Welcome to How To Cook That I'm Ann Reardon and today we're talking about poisonous foods! Let's
start with one you may be familiar with apple seeds. The seeds of the apple contain a substance
called amygdalin and when you eat that it gets broken down and one of the by-products is hydrogen
cyanide. As you may know cyanide is one of the most rapidly lethal toxins known to man, meaning
if you are exposed to enough of it you will die very, very quickly! We're talking within minutes
to hours of being exposed to a toxic dose of it. Fortunately apple seeds have a hard outer shell so
if you eat them whole they're actually just going to go right the way through your digestive system
and out the other end and you're not going to be exposed to any cyanide at all but that's not the
case if you chomp on the apple seeds and chew them up. So then that begs the question how many apple
seeds will give you a toxic dose of cyanide? If you try and Google that you you will find such
varying answers they're wildly different to each other and when I looked at the calculations used
to figure it out the main thing that was making that difference was the difference in what people
estimated an apple seed to weigh and how many seeds are in an apple. So we can just measure that
for ourselves and find out a more precise amount. This apple had five seeds and together they
weighed 0.36 grams now if we repeat that a bunch of times you can see it varies but on average each
apple had 0.393 grams of seeds in it. The study that tested the amygdalan content of different
types of apple seeds found that the amygdalan content of apples varied depending on the breed
of the apple. The one that had the highest amount was Golden Delicious apples so that's what we're
going to use for our calculations today. Now the amount of cyanide that is toxic to a human
is between half and three and a half milligrams per kilogram of body weight, so if you weighed 60
kilos or 130 pounds you would need to eat between 382 and 2625 apples and chew all the seeds so that
they were all open and so that's a huge amount of apples. It's very unlikely and understandably
that's why there are no reported cases of people dying from eating apple seeds. The reason the
study was being done though was because commercial apple juice is often produced by crushing the
whole apples including the seeds and they wanted to know how much of the amygdalin ends up in the
juice and are we getting concentrated amounts of it which could be dangerous? When they studied all
the different juices there was a range of amounts in the different ones depending what apples they
use but after crunching all the numbers they concluded that a man would have to have between 10
and 40 litres of apple juice in a day and a child would have to have eight litres of apple juice in
a day for it to be dangerous so that's unlikely but because there haven't been any studies of the
long-term health effects from having a low dose of amygdalin and therefore cyanide they recommend
that these seeds should probably be removed. So if you're making your own take the seeds out before
you process it. Now despite apples having a lot of attention over the years something that probably
needs a lot more attention is flax seeds. Now just like the apple seeds these contain amygdalin and
if you eat them whole it's going to pass right through your system, no cyanide no problem,
but if you buy them milled or if you grind them up or blend them yourself then you're exposing
yourself to that amygdalin and there's plenty of YouTube videos that instruct you to do just
that ... if you're gonna reap the full benefits of your flax seeds even as often as possible in the
ground form. Grind for a few seconds good, so you see it's now in powder form. A tablespoon of this
in my smoothie or my porridge every day. Two tablespoons per day the amount of amygdalin and
flax say it's just like in apples varies according to the variety of flax seed and even where it's
grown in the conditions it's grown under so if we take the highest amount that's been measured
in flaxseed just so that we have the worst case scenario if you've got that one in your house
then if you weighed 60 kilos and you ate between 70 and 160 grams of milled flaxseed that would be
enough for a lethal dose of cyanide! The European Food Safety Authority recommends that adults don't
have more than a tablespoon of ground flaxseed in a day. Sweden however suggests that you should
avoid milled flaxseed altogether because we don't know the safe level of it and with symptoms like
dizziness headaches nausea irregular heartbeat difficulty breathing and if it's high enough
dose then death it's not really worth the risk. Now this is an air area we're unlikely to get any
clarification as to what the safe dose is because if a scientist says I want to do a study and give
people doses of amygdalin to see what level of dosage they're going to get a toxic dose
of cyanide, no Ethics Committee is going to pass that as a study. You can't say let's just see how
much kills someone shall we you just wouldn't be able to do that so if you're an adult and you want
to risk it then that's your choice but if you have children I'd suggest just leaving it out
of their diets. Moving on to Fugu. Fugu is famous in Japan it is a type of puffer fish and there are
lots of different types of puffer fish and not all of them are suitable for this dish. When I
say suitable this dish is not particularly safe because it has to be prepared very carefully by
a qualified chef to remove the liver the internal organs and the eyes without piercing them because
they can contain a neurotoxin called tetrododoxin. Now that neurotoxin is very powerful it will start
to act within 30 minutes to three hours and it basically shuts down your nerve communication
from your brain to your body so it paralyzes you starting with your fingers feeling numb and your
tongue feeling numb and then progressing from there to the point where the person's completely
paralyzed they can't talk but they're still conscious and then eventually they can't breathe
and their heart stops beating. The only thing they can do for you because there is no antidote to
this toxin all they can do is give you activated charcoal to bind up any of the toxin that's still
in your gut and stop it being absorbed and put you on life support to basically breathe for you
and make your heart beat for you until the toxin wears off. I remember one time in Perth when we
were swimming in the ocean with a group of friends and some of them were scuba diving and one of the
guys who was scuba diving found this beautiful shell and he threw it to me and I caught it and
swam into shore with it and then as I was walking along the beach this little thing started to crawl
out of the shell so I dropped it understandably and then saw it was this cute little octopus
which was now covered in sand so I picked it up by the shell and continued walking all the
way back to where we had all of our stuff, got a bucket filled it with water dropped the shell in
and then I could see the iridescent blue rings of a blue-ringed octopus! Now they contain the
same toxin that is found in the fugu fish. One bite from a blue ring octopus can kill 26 men
people were hospitalized and 31 of them died from eating Fugu in Japan. Over the last decade though
those numbers have dropped quite dramatically down to six people dying and most of those were
people who went fishing and caught a puffer fish and prepared it themselves to eat, so there's
been lots of education posters like this one discouraging people from eating puffer fish saying
to throw it back in and explaining that different varieties have the toxin in different places with
some of them even having the muscle meat being toxic as well. So just don't eat them and prepare
them yourselves if you really want to try it try it in Tokyo or Kyoto because there the chefs have
to be qualified in the qualification process is very rigorous and run by the government and
they can't even buy the fugu fish if they don't have their license. Poison, poison, tasty fish 😂
On to the next one, lentil crumbles. Last year hundreds of people got very sick and had to be
hospitalized and 30 of them had to have their gallbladders removed after eating Daily Harvest's
lentil crumbles. Nearly 100 people have been hospitalized and hundreds more became sick after
consuming Daily Harvest French lentil and leek crumbles frozen meal. Some of the victims say
they have suffered serious liver and gallbladder problems. You have the same exact symptoms as what
I was having in elevated liver levels with no explanation. There was of course a recall
on the product and the FDA started testing straight away and so did the company itself
and some independent testers all trying to figure out what it was that was in this product that was
making people so very sick. They started testing for all the usual suspects like bacteria so they
tested for Listeria, Ecoli, staph, clostridium but all of those came back clear so then they started
testing for toxins that could possibly have got into to the food and again it came back negative
as well. So then they tested for heavy metals and all of those came back as within the acceptable
limits. So then finally they started trying to isolate what ingredient was in this one product
that the company sold that wasn't in their other products and they came up with Tara flour. Now in
case you're wondering why didn't they start with what was on the ingredients list? It's because
it's incredibly rare to have a food outbreak problem where it's something that the manufacturer
has specifically put into the food and declared on their food label that it's in there, usually
it's something that's accidentally made its way into the food and contaminated it. So this was a
very rare case indeed. Now Tara flour is a high protein flour made by grinding the seeds of the
Tara tree found in South America. Currently in the EU Australia and New Zealand tara gum is approved
as a food additive e417 which is a thickener and it can be used in foods. It was re-evaluated for
safety in 2017 and this document shows you what the panel looked at and all the different studies
that have been done on Tara gum all that data is taken into consideration in order for it to
be approved for the specific use as a thickener in foods but that's tara gum that's not what was
in this product which was Tara flour. Tara gum is made from the pods Tara flour is apparently made
from grinding the seeds and I could not find any studies on humans as to the safety of using Tara
flour in foods. Certainly in Australia it's not an approved food additive you wouldn't be able
to use it in any foods here. The US has a slightly different system though where you can have things
that are approved by the FDA and you can add them into your food product or you can have things that
are generally regarded as safe or GRAS. But for it to come under the GRAS ruling the primary body of
evidence and the studies have to be publicly available and as I said I couldn't find any
studies on the safety of consuming Tara flour, well at least none that predated this outbreak
anyway. Professor Neil Fronten from Michigan State University said that because it isn't
GRAS for any use in food in the U.S any food that contains it would be considered adulterated. Daily
Harvard CEO Rachel Drury said they were looking for a protein source that they could put in their
products that didn't contain nuts soy or wheat and they were introduced to Tara Flour by one
of their suppliers. Apparently according to Daily Harvest their supplier told them that Tara flour
was GRAS so they thought they could just put it in their food they didn't do their own checks
and they're now suing their supplier. Because so many people got sick there are now studies going
on trying to find out what it is in Tara flour that made people so ill. The first studies that
were done in vitro (oops) so in glass when they tested for toxins and all that sort of stuff came
up with nothing in the Tara flour at all however when they tested in vivo (double oops) so with
live animals they tested with mice when they gave them Tara flour there was an increase in
the levels of markers in their blood that showed there was toxicity happening with their kidneys
and their livers. So that would suggest that there's something in the Tara flour that once
you eat it it either gets digested or metabolized into a toxin that is then toxic for your liver and
your other internal organs. What that is we're still not sure the study is hypothesizing that
it could be Baikiain which is a non-protein amino acid which is present in high levels in Tara flour
but more research is needed to confirm that but it's just a working hypothesis at this stage.
So the takeaway from that is don't eat anything with Tara flour in it it is not good for you it
is the opposite of healthy and if you are a food manufacturer be careful what you put in your food,
check your local area to see what is approved and in what amounts and what uses it's approved
for before you put it in and don't assume that because it is natural that it is good for you
or safe because that is certainly not always the case. If you can get to a hospital fast
enough is to give you activated charcoal to bind up what's still in your stomach ... (🥋ninja sound)
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