Nightshade plants are funny. Apparently, repeated exposure to poison ivy can make you also react to cashews- my dad had to stop eating them for quite awhile after he'd had a few particularly bad exposures a few years in a row.
Aside from the notable tomato and potato, there's also cashew, eggplant, tobacco, chili and bell peppers, gooseberry, goji and huckleberries, and a few others.
Don’t forget bezoars from unripe persimmons, or hydrazine poisoning from improperly cooked morels, or hydrogen cyanide poisoning from fruit pits. There are endless ways to kill yourself by eating carelessly.
Then again, a lot of the foods we so enjoy are enjoyable precisely because they contain things designed to kill or discourage pests. Capsaicin, for example, or caffeine. And much of human history is owed to alcohol; when safe drinking water is scarce, there’s always beer.
Brassica plants, taste and smell, make me physically nauseous. I theorize that this is a genetic disposition.
Asparagus makes your urine smell of fresh mown grass, except that mine doesn't, and I cannot detect that odour in another person's urine after they have ate asparagus. We... uh... ran some experiments to determine this. I theorized for a few years that this was a genetic thing, and sure enough, research published recently (in the past three years) bears this out.
My wife thinks that cilantro tastes of soap. And I theorized this is a genetic disposition. Research in the past few years bears this out. But cilantro to me, is a mild hallucinogenic and also a skin irritant. Which I theorized was a genetic response. And sure enough, in the past few years, research indicates that cilantro on certain people can act as an hallucinogenic. I have gained an appreciation for Mexican food more so of late.
My first introduction to urushiol was as a kid... there was a Japanese rhus tree [1] near my local bus stop and I happened to play with some of the seed pods while waiting for a bus one day. I ended up looking like the elephant man for a few days, and it took a bit of time to figure out what was going on.
It turns out that Urushiol shows up in some surprising places, including mango skin, which I discovered later in life after peeling a bunch of mangoes to make a mango salad. Apparently the husks of cashew nuts are notoriously bad for the workers who deal with them too (although the nuts themselves are perfectly safe)..
I don't think I'm likely to deliberately eat anything with urushiol in it, but I must admit, the idea of being able to train my immune system to deal with it is kind of appealing.
Hum... That can't be a coincidence. Both plants are on the same family. Let me check...
Yup, Cashew produces urushiol also. Unlike pistachos, cashew shells must be removed before selling the fruits for this reason.
So cashew plants can trigger skin allergies. Is a common family thing. Harvesting this things burn the workers hands. My bet is that would be also unsafe for people allergic to poison ivy.
Was that raw mangos? Asking because I don't remember ever having such a problem with ripe ones (nor with raw ones, actually). And have eaten plenty of both, more of raw, in fact. But guessing the raw ones are more likely to have some irritating chemical.
As my late wife discovered a food sensitivity to Nightshade plants, that are common in our diets, can mimic the symptoms of both Lupus and Rheumatoid Arthritis.
When we cleaned up our diets and got chemical based products out of our house, we switched to Hemp based cleaning and body products, her Lupus and RA symptoms went away and never returned.
Common Nightshades are:
Potatoes
Tomatoes
Eggplant
Peppers (including bell, cayenne pepper, and paprika).
Gojo berries are also Nightshades, they are not a 'superfood'.
The list is far longer than just those common ones.
for me, it is grapes (but not things like blueberries), caffeine and cashews
I suspect w/ the grapes, there's maybe some microbes or fungi on the skins
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