Dishes that can interrupt not only the holiday, but also life

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Tradition has it that Julien de La Mettrie, a French physician and ardent supporter of hedonism, died of a truffle pâté at a feast in his honor. They also say that Empress Catherine I undermined her health due to revelry at feasts.

Today, the tradition of feasts and feasts is no longer honored, but once a year even adherents of a healthy lifestyle have a hard time. In the week of New Year's holidays and culinary frenzy, it will not be superfluous to find out what delicious (and not so) dishes can interrupt not only the holiday, but also life - and how many of them you need to swallow in order to make yourself trouble

Caviar

Caviar is an extremely nutritious and useful substance, since in fact it is a fish egg cell with a supply of substances for the growth and development of fry. It is rich in various amino acids and unsaturated fatty acids, which, according to various sources, can improve vision and save from a heart attack. However, it also follows that it is dangerous to overeat it - an excess of fats and amino acids can backfire with stones in the gallbladder or salt deposits in the joints.

But sometimes a much more modest portion of caviar is enough for poisoning - especially if you come across barbel caviar. In Russia, it lives in the Crimea and Krasnodar Territory, and is also found in the southern part of Europe. For example, in 2011, 11 people poisoned themselves with barbel caviar in Moldova. And in 2018, doctors reported a case of poisoning with this delicacy in Italy. A 32-year-old woman who ate caviar a few hours before hospitalization complained of vomiting and diarrhea. Due to the similarity of symptoms, such poisoning is sometimes called "barbel cholera", but unlike ordinary cholera, it quickly passes - after nine hours all the symptoms of the Italian have disappeared.

It is noteworthy that only barbel caviar is toxic to humans: the woman's husband, who got only fish fillets, remained absolutely healthy.

But what exactly is poisonous is contained in the caviar, but not in the body of the barbel itself, scientists still do not understand. Russian researchers talk about the “poison of a non-protein nature,” while their Slovenian colleagues believe that unsaturated fatty acids are to blame for everything. It is known, at least, that they also cause poisoning in mice. Probably, at the concentrations in which they are stored in barbel caviar, unsaturated fatty acids cease to be useful.

Quail

Quail, which was once one of the main dishes at most feasts, unwittingly, have poisoned people from time immemorial. Even the Bible (Numbers 11: 31-34) mentions a case when the Israelites got sick after eating quail at Sinai.

And the French military engineer and cartographer Guillaume Levasseur de Beauplan, who served in the Polish-Lithuanian army, in the second half of the 17th century described "a special kind of quail with blue legs and deadly for those who eat it", which was found in the territory of the modern European part of Russia and Ukraine.

And although zoologists have not yet met any blue-footed quails, today it is known for sure that these birds can be poisonous: during the period of seasonal migration, they accumulate alkaloids from the seeds of the field weed pikulnik in their muscles.

Safe for poultry, in humans, they can cause rhabdomyolysis - the breakdown of muscle tissue. After three to four hours, the person weakens, later there is acute pain in the calves of the legs, then in the lower back, back and chest. Then the pain spreads to the neck and arms - and it is so strong that it is impossible to bend or straighten the arms. But after one or two days, the person usually recovers. This short disease has a name of its own - cooturnism, after the name of the quail Coturnix coturnix.

People are poisoned with quails to this day, since it is impossible to distinguish a poisonous bird from a seemingly safe bird.

So, in 2014 it happened to a 58-year-old man from Turkey: he ate a quail, and four hours later noticed that his urine had darkened. After another 12 hours, he was hospitalized with all the characteristic symptoms. It is not known exactly how much he managed to eat, but since the medical history does not indicate that it was his daily diet, it can be assumed that one quail is enough to send a person to the hospital.

Pepper

Since 2011, Edinburgh's Kismot has been running a traditional fundraising event for the Children's Hospice Association of Scotland. Visitors to the establishment are invited to eat a portion of Kismot Killer - a meat or vegetable dish with a spicy curry seasoning. If a person manages to eat a whole portion, he may not pay for it.

In 2011, for two visitors, the attempt ended with hospitalization - according to witnesses, the unfortunate ones writhed on the floor in pain until they were taken by emergency doctors. The restaurant has promised to "chill" the dish by next year (but according to the menu, the chefs still consider it the spicy curry in the world).

In 2018, a 34-year-old participant in another competition turned to doctors. Two days earlier, in a red pepper-eating contest, he had eaten one pod of Caroline reaper - the hottest pepper in the world - and was now complaining of a severe headache. Computed tomography showed that the lumens of his carotid and several cerebral arteries were narrowed - and he was diagnosed with a syndrome of reversible cerebral vasoconstriction.

Before that, doctors had once accused cayenne pepper of causing a spasm of the coronary vessels and myocardial infarction, so this time the doctors decided that it was the pepper that “pinched” the cerebral vessels. Fortunately, the patient recovered completely after five weeks.

Despite the fact that doctors have not yet described a single lethal outcome after overeating hot peppers, they have been trying to estimate their lethal dose for a long time. So, in 1980, Thai scientists calculated that in order to kill a 60-kilogram person, he needed to feed two kilograms of dried chili peppers.

Octopus

One tentacle and that's it

The Korean delicacy Sannakchi can be tasted by the ocean, where the octopus Octopus minor is found. The main feature of this dish is the wiggling cut-off tentacles. Since there are quite a few neurons in each tentacle, they retain some reflexes even after separation from the body, and sometimes continue to move. And if their eater is not lucky, then from the esophagus they can accidentally crawl into the larynx, and from there into the respiratory tract.

For example, on January 21, 2008, a 60-year-old worker at a shopping center in Guangzhou felt that he was breathing heavily while eating a meal, the main dish of which was a live octopus. The doctors who arrived at the scene managed to remove a moving tentacle from his larynx, but the victim still required cardiopulmonary resuscitation. And in 2018, Korean pathologists described two more deaths when the victims of the "live" dish could not be saved.

Water

The minimum lethal dose is unknown, but eight liters will definitely be enough

In 2007, California-based radio station KDND hosted the Hold Your Wee for a Wii competition live, in which a winner could receive a Nintendo Wii if he drank the most water without emptying his bladder. Some radio listeners from the very beginning suspected that something was wrong and called the radio station, reminding them that drinking large quantities of water can be life-threatening. But the presenters laughed it off - a person, they say, mainly consists of water, so there is nothing to be afraid of.

In fact, water is not all that safe. When there is too much of it, water poisoning develops: the salts in the tissue fluid are no longer enough to hold it, water rushes into the cells, and they swell. It is most dangerous in the brain: swollen cells press on the brain stem, disrupting the work of the respiratory and vasomotor centers.

This is exactly what happened to Jennifer Strange, who came in second in the KDND competition. After drinking nearly eight liters of water in three hours, she reported that she felt pain in the abdomen. By this time, according to eyewitness reports, she looked as if she was pregnant. A few hours after the last call on the air, the young woman was found dead in her own bathroom. The radio station was closed after the trial.

Carrot juice

4 liters a day is too much

Here, as in the case of water, it is important to stop on time. This is exactly what Basil Brown, a 48-year-old healthy lifestyle advocate, failed to do in 1974. When he told his doctor about his plan to drink almost 4 liters of carrot juice a day, he tried to stop him. At that time, doctors already knew that with an excess of vitamin A, which is especially rich in carrots, fat cells (Ito cells) and connective tissue begin to grow in the liver, and the walls of blood vessels, on the contrary, are destroyed.

Excess vitamin A (in Brown's case, more than ten thousand times the norm!) Could irreversibly damage the liver. And since the man did not listen to his doctor, this is exactly what happened. Less than ten days later, Brown developed jaundice and toxic cirrhosis of the liver, from which he died a few days later. And doctors now have undeniable evidence that large doses of vitamin A are indeed toxic.

Liquorice

You will need 30 packs - to be sure

In 2020, a 54-year-old American was admitted to the hospital with a heart attack with no apparent health problems. It turned out that the potassium in his blood was almost two times lower than the norm, and the doctors failed to make up for its deficiency. And since the heart muscle cannot contract without potassium, the man died a day later.

Later, recalling the circumstances of his death, relatives said that during the last three weeks of his life, the man ate one or two packs of licorice a day. After that, the doctors immediately understood what had happened.

The fact is that the concentration of potassium in the blood is regulated by the adrenal hormone aldosterone. But another hormone of the adrenal glands - cortisol - can act on its receptors if there is especially a lot of it in the blood. And this happens when the enzyme that destroys cortisol does not work in the body - and it is glycyrrhizic acid, which is contained in licorice root and licorice candies, which blocks it.

After the publication of the report on this case, doctors turned to the FDA with a request to oblige manufacturers to indicate on licorice products how much glycyrrhizic acid it contains and how it could be dangerous. The agency refused, citing the fact that it does not deal with individual medical cases - but now there is an article on their website about the dangers of licorice for people over forty: the FDA warns that abuse of the product can lead to heart problems.

Cola

You can get drunk to death, although you will have to drink for years

Doctors dislike cola for a long time. There are several reasons for this: for example, with it, people get too much sugar, and along with it, caffeine. And if you abuse it for a long time, you can bring your body to such a state where it will not be able to cope with cola.

An excessive love of soda led to the death of 30-year-old New Zealander Natasha Harris in 2010. Among her friends, she was famous for her great love for cola: her husband later recalled that her wife could drink up to ten liters of soda a day.

Moreover, it harmed not only her: not only did she begin to experience anxiety and show all signs of withdrawal without cola and removed several teeth damaged by the drink - one of her eight children was born without tooth enamel at all (at least, the pathologist who subsequently performed the autopsy and this the effect was attributed to the acidity of the soda).

It is not known how long such a diet lasted, but a few months before her death, the woman began to feel severe fatigue and nausea. Both she and her family attributed it to stress. But later, the pathologist who performed the autopsy after Natasha's heart stopped, calculated that every day she consumed twice the recommended dose of caffeine, and sugar - 11 times more.

"If she hadn't drank so much Coca-Cola," he concluded, "she would hardly have died in this way and under such circumstances." The Coca-Cola company refused to admit its guilt in this story: according to its representatives, there is no evidence that soda is to blame for the death of the New Zealand woman.