Meal Kit company sued by customers whose gallbladders were removed

Is an interesting way to describe cooking lentils, too. I can imagine sautéing ones that are already cooked. Or you can put them in a pan with water for awhile, but that's gonna be 20-40 minutes, is pan-boiling a term? Not really sautéing.

Pre-cooked lentils typically are canned, and the canning process ostensibly includes enough heat + pressure to denature dangerous lectins. So, consumers aren't used to thinking of pre-cooked lentils as dangerous.

Consumer cooking equipment makes it hard to cook lentils without reaching a boiling temperature that denatures lectins. Think an instant pot, or even a stovetop cooking method. But, browse slow cooking subreddits and you'll see many warnings that beans shouldn't be cooked in a slow cooker without achieving a full boil for some period of time due to lectins.

It seems to me like these dangerous lentils were prepared in a slow-cooking method that never reached a boil. And, any food facility that routinely works with beans or lentils should already know the dangers of lectins. So, it seems that the food production facility wasn't used to cooking with these ingredients.

Lectins are in practically everything that we eat. If it were just lectins, it would be a lot more people than this.

This is likely contamination of some form.

We used to eat raw sprouted lentils fairly regularly in the 70s/80s with no ill effects, so unless sprouting reduces the lectins, I doubt that's what the problem was. EDIT: I just googled for "does sprouting lentils remove lectins" and got all sorts of conflicting information. Some sites say yes, other say no.

FYI, the green sprouts in raw potatoes are toxic too.

According to healthline.com:

"Sprouted potatoes contain higher levels of glycoalkaloids, which can have toxic effects in humans when consumed in excess. Eating sprouted potatoes during pregnancy may also increase the risk of birth defects."

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/sprouted-potato#dangers

I (and family members) have eaten copious amounts of sprouted moong and moth beans my whole life without cooking them. Just soak them in water for a night, then leave them alone to sprout for another day or two, and then eat them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigna_aconitifolia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mung_bean

Yeah, the fact that this even made it to the legal system says everything.

Gallstones are normally a gooey crystal. It's cholesterol that has "crystallized" slowly over time. It's one of the reasons why they don't have very good drugs to treat gallstones--any drug would have to "ungrow" that crystal which would take just as long.

If you present to the ER with pain in the upper right abdomen, with blood test results showing raised liver enzymes, meeting some or most of the "fair/fat/female/fertile/forty" risk factor mnemonic criteria, and have imaging that doesn't completely rule out gallstones, then the overwhelming probability is that you're suffering from gallstones, and that's the diagnosis you'll be given.

Since the gold standard treatment for symptomatic gallstones is gallbladder removal, that's likely what will happen. Under normal circumstances, far more aggregate patient harm would be caused by trying to make the diagnosis more certain than is caused to the few patients who undergo surgery but don't actually have gallbladder disease.

Unfortunately, these aren't normal circumstances: it appears that the liver damage produced by this lentil product produces similar pain and blood test results to gallstones, the risk factors for gallstones are very common in the US population, and it's actually quite hard to completely rule out gallstones by imaging. So more patients than expected are currently being harmed with unnecessary surgery.

It's important that this be publicized, so that doctors making these diagnoses know that asking "did you eat anything from Daily Harvest" is now a diagnostically relevant question when considering upper abdomen pain, and the answer may change those prior probabilities drastically.

Long story short I freak out and call her doctor, worrying she might be having a stroke or some other weird issue. The doctor can’t help, just says “Schedule an appointment.” So I call my old man who is an immunologist and he’s like “Oh wow, she can’t eat food? Says the water tastes like metal? That’s weird, let me think about this.” Then a minute later he’s like goddamned House MD, he says “you guys are moving right? Did you clean out your fridge?” I’m like “Well, yeah, of course.” So he says “Your wife is into baking right? You’ve got all kinds of shit in your fridge. When you were cleaning it out you didn’t happen to eat any pine nuts, did you?” I thought about it and then I was like “Yeah, we had a bag of frozen pine nuts and we both ate a handful of them.” He laughs and says “She’s got Pine Mouth, it’s a weird olfactory reaction to certain types of pine nuts. She’ll be okay in a day or so.”

I’d never heard of Pine Mouth before. And I guess neither had our doctor. Thankfully we had a drunk seventy five year old immunologist on tap.

Canned lentils are already cooked. You just need to warm them up.