'Mad honey' that can stop your heart is being sold online
Grayanotoxin-laced 'mad honey' from Nepal and Turkey, which can cause severe cardiac issues, is increasingly available for purchase online. Despite its dangerous effects, including bradycardia and potential cardiac arrest, the honey is marketed for its purported medicinal benefits. Experts warn that the unregulated sale of this product poses serious health risks, as consumers may not be aware of its potency or the proper dosage.
This is not a food product; it's a drug, and it should be regulated as such.
- pigbearpig
This is the original article and has better images IMHO.
https://theconversation.com/mad-honey-that-can-stop-your-hea...
- robotnikman
>Eat a teaspoonful, and you might feel pleasantly warm and slightly lightheaded. Eat more than a few tablespoons, and your heart rate can drop to life-threatening levels.
Reminds me of the Futurama episode with the space bee honey. Wonder if the writers got the inspiration from this.
- AstroNutt
For you guys that watch YouTube. The channel is Mass Spec Everything. Here are a couple of interesting videos he did on various honey brands and regions. Pretty interesting stuff.
- kjellsbells
Discussed in a 2017 National Geographic article[0], archived here[1]. Notice the article text's description of the honey being sold on the black market. Seems that now everyone is shopping there.
[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/honey-hu...
That said, clinicians have been writing about this for some time, eg [2] from 2007:
- NDlurker
Old Vice documentary about it. This is where I had first heard about it. Used to be really hard to find the honey online, like only one or 2 places that sold it
- liaym
If anyone's interested there's also this recently released documentary in french by Hit the Road, where they show the process of collecting the honey and also the ritual side of it.
- nkrisc
They mention the toxin comes from the rhododendron flower. I remember camping in North Carolina once and one of the people I was with warned against burning anything from the rhododendron in the area, as supposedly the smoke would give you the runs.
I mostly thought they were joking, and I have no idea what specific type of rhododendron would be there (if any), but maybe there’s a glimmer of merit to it? Or maybe they were thinking of a different plant?
This was somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains, if I remember correctly.
- daedrdev
I imagine the native also built up tolerance over generations, not just knowledge as the article contends . Dying from a specific action is quite the evolutionary motivator