Raw Organic Apricot Kernels | Hacker News Reader

Raw Organic Apricot Kernels

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73 pointsjessaustin36 comments

Weird. In Ladakh, I ate bags of apricot kernels (which are grown locally and sold in large quantities without any kind of warning, shelled and ready to eat. It hasn't caused any mass poisonings AFAIK). Judging roughly from the picture, I'd sometimes eat at least 1/3 of this bag in one day.

I don't remember experiencing any poisoning symptoms. I love the slightly bitter taste, though at some point I do get a kind of "too much" feeling and that's where I stop. Directly comparing the Amygdalin content of the kernels to the LD50 of raw cyanide is probably an oversimplification (digestion and metabolism are often a more complex story than a simple transformation). That being said, I'm not going to advocate that you should go ahead and eat them like chips as I did.

EDIT: Google turns this up: "Cyanide poisoning caused by ingestion of apricot seeds", which covers 13 cases in a region that also cultivates apricots. I can't access the article so I'm not sure about the quantities involved.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20196932

Oversimplification is the root of most medical evils! As commented earlier, I ate tons of raw kernels as well, my friends did - everybody eats them in much greater quantities than 8 and we were kids, i.e. much lower body weight. So, anecdotal evidence of those being safe outweighs the oversimplistic "scientific" one!

I've eaten apricot kernels as a kid, along with most of my family, certainly much more than 8 seeds a day, and we never had any issues. I've also seen them sold in stores in China, cheaply and in bulk. I am guessing that either (a) they're just trying to be over-cautious to protect themselves from potential liability, or (b) perhaps some people have a heightened sensitivity to this, or (c) perhaps it's some special, more poisonous type of apricot - which makes me question why they wouldn't just pick a less poisonous variety for the product. EDIT: Researching this more, I'm seeing that the danger is much more real than I thought. Not sure how to reconcile this with my very vivid childhood memories of consuming these things in pretty large quantities (though like the other poster in this thread, we've had to break apricot pits with a hammer to get at the seeds, we didn't have the seeds conveniently pre-packaged).

I wonder if the raw quality is the important part? Did you eat them raw? I'm curious if maybe roasting them would make them safe

I ate mine raw as a kid - maybe 25-30 kg of body weight and ate maybe 20-30 kernels at once.

I've eaten tons without any issues. By the way, the amygdalin is omni-present - from apple seeds to almonds.

In fact, stressors make us more resilient. So, to broadly discount this as a form of therapy is also unscientific. Often, we oversimplify things and make mistakes this way. How this gets matabolized in our bodies and under what conditions, it's not so simple to know.

Amygdalin, also referred to as "Vitamin" B17 and Laetrile, has been a common medical con for a long time [0]. As a young teenager, after a relative had just passed away from cancer, I remember I engaged heavy confirmation bias and sought out materials that would tell me there were ways to cure cancer.

I came across the book "World Without Cancer" by G. Edward Griffin, who also has written books and produced documentaries purporting to show conspiracies in the formation of the Federal Reserve. I'm just very lucky that I was able to see it for the quackery it was as I got older.

Even now, just look how highly rated the book is on Amazon [1] (yet another reason why you absolutely cannot trust large numbers of positive reviews on Amazon as a reflection of underlying quality).

[0] < http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Cancer/lae... >

[1] < https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-Cancer-Story-Vitamin/dp... >

Apricots kernels don't cure cancer, and there's no such thing as B17, but if you've had Lazzaroni Amaretti cookies, you've eaten apricot kernels.

In many cuisines, they're an ingredient in sweet treats. The sugar will probably kill you faster than the amygdalin.

That's right. Several Italian sweets and liquors contain apricot kernels and/or bitter almonds as the main flavor. Most have the word "amaretto" somewhere in their name. (Amaretto is a diminutive of our word for "bitter")

As you said, with most of those recipes you'll be sooner killed by the alcohol or sugar than by the cyanide.

Moreover, the modern products usually contain benzaldehyde (the actual substance that tastes like bitter almonds, which is non toxic) instead of whole bitter almond or apricot kernel oil, which is heavily regulated due to its unpredictable toxicity.

Selling drugs and supplements that're a bad idea to use is fine. As long as the package is truthful about the product's composition, dosage and purity, I say people can (and should) do their own research.

But this is a drug mislabeled as a food. It literally says "food" on the package ("Sunfood Superfoods"). That creates a very large risk that people will treat it like a food, and try it without reading the wikipedia page first. That's really not okay.

"Do your own research" The classic dunning-kruger trailhead.

I know from dunning-kruger, but can you explain what you mean by that?

Not just anyone off the street is qualified to be a pharmacist or a doctor. So in this context "Doing your own research" means allowing dunning-kruger biases into your medical decisions.

A fool doing research may conclude this to be a healthfood, given the sources they take in. For example, the packaging of the product.

"That's silly, who could ever trust the packaging?" -- well, someone who also suffers from that dunning-kruger effect right?

I'd guess they mean that the kind of people who think they are competent to do their own research are exactly those who are not.

Exactly. "Don't eat more than eight in a day" is less like something you'd say about a food and more like the advice my doctor gave me about what constitutes an Adderall overdose.

Neither a drug or supplement. B17 is a made up vitamin name.

They're all made up.

All words are made up. "Vitamin" is generally accepted to mean "an organic compound that an organism requires in small amounts, and which it can't replicate itself".

The accepted mapping of vitamin names to actual chemical substances changes over time, and sometimes substances are removed from the accepted list of vitamins. Researchers will choose a name. As more evidence is gathered supporting that substance as an essential nutrient, it becomes a more widely-accepted name.

Amygdalin was apparently investigated as Vitamin B17. Insufficient evidence was found for it as a "vitamin". Its most obvious effect is that it's metabolized into cyanide. It's not widely accepted as a vitamin (by nutrition researchers), but it's still marketed as one because it's easier to sell as a food than if it were marketed as a poison.

Who coins a word, why they coined it, who rejects that definition, and why they reject it are important points.

Yea, you're right.

This is nothing new, the Laetrile crowd has never gone away. A good rule of thumb is that a good crackpot idea never dies, it just finds fewer adherents over time.

This happens occasionally, like in 1993 [1] and 1998 [2].

The labeling seems off, though. 'Sweet' varieties stonefruits (almonds, apricots, plums, peaches, etc) are supposed to have small amounts of cyanide, while 'bitter' varieties are supposed to have unsafe amount amounts. Is the issue here the volume of an entire bag's worth?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/26/nyregion/imported-bitter-a...

[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196064498...

The post covers this and does the math. 'Sweet' varieties do have less, but still enough that eating the bag would be a lethal dose to the author of the article.

I grew up eating these (as a byproduct of being around lots of apricots). The seed is a huge pain to get into--we would use a hammer and half the time it would smash the whole thing to bits. We were always told not to eat too many. I certainly would not recommend getting them in this easy to overdose packaging.

I am also sometimes worried that legitimate almonds are being contaminated with apricot seeds. Often when I eat almonds I'll taste that old cyanide bitterness of apricot seeds. The two nuts look almost identical.

Well supposedly, cyanide gas smells like bitter almonds, so maybe that's the relation you're tasting?

(I say supposedly, because it's the kind of thing I've never desired to test...)

Hydrogen cyanide smells like bitter almonds, methyl cyanide smells like cherries.

Almonds and cherries both have CN sources in them.

Methyl cyanide, the very common and not particularly toxic laboratory chemical usually referred to as acetonitrile? I've worked with it and never noticed any particular cherry smell, although mostly in a fume hood. Wikipedia also makes no indication of a cherry smell.

Almonds contain amygdalin as well, quantities depending on the variety. Not a good idea to eat the bitter varieties in large amounts.

I ate bitter almonds is decent quantities without issues. I always eat and chew the apple seeds as well.

I've eaten these as a kid on a regular basis (we had lots of apricots where I'm from) and distinctly remember my parents not allowing to eat more than 3.

P.S.: Amygdalin being a vitamin is bullshit, but they're pretty tasty regardless.

This is worth it for the tl;dr alone.

Selling these for their positive health effects is terrible but amygdalin is generally considered to be safe in small quantities.

Cyanides are a common byproduct of many organic chemical reactions and biological processes. There are quite a few foods that contain trace amounts of different cyanides. Almonds, cherry seeds, apple seeds, etc contain a source of cyanide.

Bitter almond extract is used in baking, for example. It comes in a bottle that has a warning about cyanide poisoning symptoms in it.

What if this product isn't for the benefit of the individual end-user, but for that of society.

Who hasn't felt looked down upon by a smug health-nut before?

I struggle a bit to find a difference between these and alcohol. It's also offering the same options - either drink too much and die immediately (directly or indirectly of intoxication), or kill yourself a bit, day by day.

Well, nobody's claiming that ethanol is a vitamin or that you can drink yourself free of cancer, for a start.

Only run an untrusted kernel in a VM.

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