some everyday foods can kill you! Yea, you read that right.
hope your favorite isn't among:
here are top 10 foods that can kill you :
1. Rhubarb If your culinary skills aren’t up to speed, rhubarb is a vegetable with bright ruby leaf stalks similar to celery that’s mostly used in jams, pies, and other desserts. The key is only to eat the stalks. The plant’s leaves contain a chemical called oxalic acid, which is used in bleach and rust removal, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Eating rhubarb leaves induces a slew of bad side effects like burning in your mouth and throat, nausea, vomiting, convulsions—even death. Cooking doesn’t break down these harmful compounds, either. Talk about a two-faced vegetable: Rhubarb stalks can be turned into pudding, and a naturally-occuring compound in its leaves can be turned into corrosive acid.
2. Cherries
Cherries seem harmless enough, but these little guys—their pits, actually—can do a lot of damage. Aside from being nearly impossible to chew, or crack with your teeth, the stones of fruits like cherries, apricots, plums, and peaches contain cyanogenic compounds that turn to cyanide when crushed. If you accidentally swallow a cherry pit, don’t sweat it; they’re rarely poisonous when eaten whole, according to the British Columbia Drug and Poison Information Centre. Just be sure to avoid the broken pits. Just one or two of these seeds can do you in. And that’s not a very triumphant way to go out now, is it?
3. Puffer fish The good thing about puffer fish (also called blowfish or fugu) is it already looks inedible and dangerous. Its skin and organs are incredibly poisonous. When eaten, the toxin called tetrodotoxin can paralyze your muscles, and cause death due to asphyxiation, according to information from the National Institute of Health. What’s worse is there’s no miracle shot, or antidote, and cooking doesn’t negate its toxicity. Even though specially trained chefs remove the liver, ovaries, and skin from the fish before serving the Japanese delicacy, we understand if you want to stick to safe, nutritious varieties of fish like salmon.
4. Ackee
One funny-looking fruit, ackee is a member of the soapberry family. You may be more familiar with its sister fruit, lychee, but ackee is a pear-shaped fruit native to tropical West Africa, and it needs to ripen fully before consumption. And this isn’t one of those you-need-to-wait-because-it’s-hard deals; you need to wait for it to ripen because it contains toxins that can literally kill you, which is why importation of the raw fruit is banned in the U.S., according to the FDA. If you are curious about ackee, though, you can buy it canned and frozen. This is your best bet—especially since it killed 23 Jamaicans and sickened 194 in 2011, according to a report from the Jamaica Observer.
5. Castor oil Castor oil comes from the castor bean, and the reason it’s not a household oil like coconut or olive is its beans are loaded with the poison ricin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Actually, one single bean has enough ricin to kill over 1,000 people if the purified toxin is injected or inhaled, according to research from the journal Analytical Chemistry. And eating five to 10 of the whole beans would prove to be fatal, too. The oil is used as a food additive and flavoring agent (as well as an ingredient in skincare products, cosmetics, plastics, varnishes, and lubricants), and is void of ricin, so if you wish to buy it, just make sure it was produced adhering to safety guidelines. And stick to The Joint Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization Expert Committee on Food Additives recommended daily castor oil intake (for men) of 0 to 0.7 mg/kg bodyweight.
