POISON PANTRY
The raw foods you didn’t know were filled with toxins
KIDNEY BEANS
Dried beans, such as kidney beans and soya beans, are toxic. Uncooked kidney beans contain something called phytohaemagglutinin (PHA), a type of protein called a lectin. Lectins play many different roles in the body, but some, such as PHA, can be toxic at high levels. Symptoms of PHA poisoning include violent diarrhoea and vomiting, which ease after around three to four hours. Simply soaking the raw beans for at least five hours and boiling them for at least 30 minutes destroys the toxin.
CHERRIES
Sitting in the centres of many fruits are toxins. Stoned fruits, also known as drupes, such as cherries and peaches contain a central seed or pit surrounded by fleshy fruit. Within the seed is amygdalin. Similar to almonds, when ingested it’s converted by the body into cyanide. Around 200 raw cherry seeds contain around 117 milligrams of cyanide – a lethal dosage of cyanide ranges from 0.5 to three milligrams per kilogram of body weight.
RHUBARB
Similarly to potatoes, rhubarb also has toxic leaves. Although the stems are delicious, their leaves are packed with oxalic acid – around 0.5 grams per 100 grams of leaves. Some signs of oxalic acid poisoning include vomiting, abdominal pain, convulsion and even red-coloured urine. The acid is fatal when between 15 and 30 grams is ingested, which would be between three and six kilograms of rhubarb leaves.
POTATOES
Don’t worry, you’ve not been eating poisonous potatoes this whole time. Not unless you’ve been eating the leaves, stem or sprouts of the plant that is. The green parts of the potato plant are packed with toxins called solanine and chaconine. This toxic duo can cause intestinal issues such as diarrhoea, vomiting and abdominal pain when ingested. The white, edible portion of the plant has very low concentrations of the toxins, and cooking potatoes eliminates the solanine and chaconine.
BLACK LIQUORICE
This common sweet treat contains a compound called glycyrrhizin. Although harmless in moderation, when consumed in excess, liquorice root and sweets that contain liquorice root can be deadly. Glycyrrhizin lowers levels of potassium in the body, which can lead to high blood pressure and abnormal heart rhythms. Although cases of fatality are extremely rare, eating around 57 grams of black liquorice a day for two weeks can cause heart problems.