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Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

The effectiveness is hotly debated in literature [0], but I recommend everyone keep activated charcoal in their house. At the first sign of food poisoning take a couple tablets. It’s commonly used in Asia and has saved my life at least twice. For some reason it’s not as popular in the western world, but you can find it on the shelf in many pharmacies.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34424785/

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Valuable point, but um.. it has saved your life twice? What the heck are you eating?

Exactly. Binarymax, spill the beans.

LOL fair question so story time I guess.

First incident. In late 2005, I'm in Bangkok for business. On the 3rd or 4th night I ventured to an outdoor restaurant, and ate their "specialty" which was raw shrimp, garlic, and crushed chili. Yes, I was an idiot. On the walk back to the hotel I started to feel it. Broke out into a cold sweat, doubled over, and realized my meal was bad news. I managed to get back to the hotel and asked for help. I thought they would call an ambulance but instead they gave me some charcoal, which I had never even heard of before - but they convinced me to take it. I started to feel some relief after 30 minutes or so. I still felt terrible for a day or two, but I could tell it would have been far worse had I not taken it.

Second incident. In 2012 I'm in Madrid on Business, and a colleague and I met up at a somewhat empty restaurant. We split a paella, because we were foreigners and forgot we weren't in Barcelona. We went back to our separate hotels in different parts of town. I had some charcoal with me, and realized I needed to take some. I got back home fine, my colleague went back home and ended up in the emergency room - took her about 10 days to recover.

It's not something I take often (maybe once every two or three years). But I swear by it and always travel with it just in case an adventurous culinary experience ends poorly.

I'm not a doctor or anything so I could be mistaken, but my understanding was that activated charcoal is helpful for treating poisons/toxins, not pathogens like you might find in bad seafood.

Unless there was a poisonous mushroom or something in your Thai food or your paella, would activated charcoal be expected to help?

Activated charcoal is just a high adsorption material with a lot more surface area (100-1000x or so) than stomach lining so anything floating around is more likely to be trapped by the charcoal than get absorbed by your digestive system.

It works with pretty much anything, good or bad, since it exploits a basic physical process of molecules sticking together.

@why_at your comment and @throwup238's (thread name checks out) are IIRC the source of the debate. There is a porous surface area and tests/arguments of the type/size of the particle that can attach - perhaps they are inconclusive because there are lots of other things at play in the stomach and gut like biomes and various substances and surfaces and reactions. In my experience it worked and, based on my recollection I'm pretty sure in both scenarios above I would have been f*cked if not for the treatment.

I'm definitely open to the possibility that it might work differently on different people - we're not all clones.

So maybe not "life-saving" but certainly seemed to help. Fair enough.

> we were foreigners and forgot we weren't in Barcelona.

What does that mean? Is Barcelona a cleaner place than Madrid?

Eastern Spain is on the Mediterranean sea and is home to Paella. Madrid is farther from the sea and not known for Paella. It's like ordering oysters in Iowa.

As a general rule: if you aren’t by the sea, seafood may not be as fresh as you expect.

I avoid any/all fish dishes when not in a coastal region due to repeated bad experiences.

These days, in large non-coastal cities, I've heard that it is often other than you would expect. In cities where there are large international airports, fish is flown in daily, to the point where the fish served in nicer restaurants will not be much less fresh than on the coast. The Denver Post article linked below goes into how fish is flown to Denver within hours of being caught, every day.

https://www.denverpost.com/2009/01/26/how-does-fish-get-from...

Shouldn't you be able to expect any restaurant in spain to follow food safety guidelines?

Most seafood in the US is frozen at some point, regardless of if you are near the coast or not. And, yes, this includes most "fresh" fish, which generally just means recently thawed.

There may be exceptions if it is caught locally and in season, but the vast majority of seafood eaten in the US is not local, no matter how close you are to the coast.

You ate raw seafood from a street stand? That's a whole new level of "brave". Close to playing Russian roulette with all the bullets in the cylinder..

You say this, but it's perfectly normal in heavily populated parts of the world to do this. It's not like he found some street stand that popped up for one night only and no one else ever did it again.

I've had plenty of raw seafood from food stalls across the world and never had an issue.

My grandpa told me that when he was POW in WW2 he got sick. He charred wood and ate it. He lived to be 95 years old.

Its not popular because it is about as effective as a sugar pill, and cant be trademarked.

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