It should probably be cleared up that she suffered left ventricular dysfunction from eating too much wasabi - I had originally read the title thinking she was emotionally distressed from not getting her avocado, but instead it's more like a nervous system shock from the wasabi/wasabi poisoning(?) itself?
But even in Japan you don't really get it served in quantity. That stuff is expensive.
Luckily, he said, he really likes hot things, so while it was quite a surprise, it wasn't as nasty a shock as it could have been.
But yeah, I don't see how you could be confused after the first bite.
Edit: Somewhere else quotes the article as saying that the amount she'd eaten was "about a size of a teaspoon". That sounds similar.
Either we are dealing with a psychiatric patient with some strange food addiction or an idiot using wasabi to who knows, burn calories, clean the nose or rotten tooth/whatever.
The wasabi-avocado mistake sounds bogus to me.
Chilli and wasabi doesn't make you cry in the emotional sense. They stimulate the sinus and lacrimal glands to dilute and flush the irritant. There are other non-emotional triggers such as cutting onions. In that case we 'cry' to dilute and flush the sulphuric acid formed on the eye.
In fact, we apparently have (at least) four different types of tear! 'Basal' tears that keep our eyes wet have much higher lipid levels than any other type, and a higher fraction of their lipids are nonpolar. 'Reflex' and 'flush' tears are similar, they're both responses to irritants, but there seem to be differences between tears produced to remove solid/physical and liquid irritants. And then 'emotional' tears (which include pain) come with a host of hormones and other proteins basically absent from the general tear responses.
Close relatives of the horseradish include woad (the ancient indigo source), turnips, rapeseed, cabbages, weeds (thale cress) and flowery shrubs & al. "Close relative" is not an indication of "not a lot of difference". You might as well say that mustard (also a close relative) is no different from wasabi.
You may well be right that there is no big difference between wasabi and horseradish, but them being "close relative" is not an actual argument for that unless they're much closer relative than just being in the same taxonomic family.
I didn't pick anything, I just looked up what the qualifier you picked meant. They're not the same species, they're not the same genus, they're the same taxonomic family, which also includes all the stuff I listed in my original comment.
>There's not a lot of difference between real and fake wasabi. One is horseradish and the other is a close relative of horseradish.
There was no strawman. Being a close relative does not imply "not a lot of difference."
> Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is a left ventricular dysfunction
> that typically occurs after sudden intense emotional
> or physical stress and mimics myocardial infarction.Though I don't get how you'd eat "a large amount of wasabi", surely the first spoonful would tell you it's not avocado unless you don't have nerve endings, or a nose?
> In our case report, the amount of wasabi our patient consumed was unusually large, about a size of a teaspoon ...
That's a lot of wasabi.
I use about a tablespoon (3 x as much) when I eat sushi (~6 pieces) but I like it spicy.
To this day, I can't do wasabi. My body decided it was poison at that moment and I'm very sensitive to the flavor.
If you drink a shot of liquid LSD thinking it was vodka you don't die because "you didn't get some vodka?". She died because of the effect of wasabi, not because of the lack of avocado.