Interestingly, that very irritant is now the key to the widespread success of some pepper species by the way of a specific species of mammals.
Edit: DERP duh you mean humans. :D Literally made the comparison without recognizing it, too. /Edit
Not challenging you, just curious and not immediately finding the answer myself with a quick search.
The capsaicin receptor is TRPV1, which is a critical protein for thermoregulation and detection of being burned. In other words, it's not just a quick and easy evolutionary path to have a mutation break the receptor for capsaicin and now be immune to the taste. Obviously the animals could evolve behavior or even simply learn as juveniles to tolerate or even enjoy the taste (as many humans do).
There are some other interesting things that happen with avian carriers, like reductions in fungal infection and attractiveness to other predators (ants). https://www.washington.edu/news/2013/06/21/airborne-gut-acti...
https://youtu.be/dutpBSKj8JY?t=196
It looks at a couple non-competing (iirc) theories
You see a long time ago, someone at a tomato. Could've been a slice in a cold sandwich. Could've been a fresh one, maybe with A little cheese and pepper. But chili just won't do. Neither would spaghetti.
Then, before we had such regulations as we do today, they deposited that tomato seed, post digestion, in the train lavatory toilet. Being back then as it was, the tomato seed and associated fertilizer was dropped from the train car to the track ballast below where it germinated.
It's the same process where researchers deposit tomatoes on new volcanic islands.
You know what they say: when you gotta go, you gotta go.
After writing all that I did a search about people with low TRPV1 receptors and found an interesting study done on a couple people lacking functional TRPV1 channels. They were insensitive to the application of capsaicin to the mouth and skin. Furthermore they had an elevated heat pain threshold as well as an elevated cold pain threshold. Why I found this interesting is because my same son who barely reacted to this insanely hot pepper I can never get to wear a jacket to school. He does not mind the cold at all. He will if we were up a mountain or something but he always complains the car is too hot when I am cold. Anyways not sure he lacks function TRPV1 receptors but still interesting to think about. Article linked below.
Capsaicin is a nonpolar molecule that is fat soluble and hydrophobic, so running water over your tongue either has no impact on the problem or makes it worse.
You want to consume anything with fat like milk or sour cream or even pure olive oil which will dissolve the capsaicin and carry it down your digestive tract. For something as strong as a reaper challenge, you’ll want to gargle olive oil because the mechanical action of the bubbles helps break up anything coated on your tongue like soap does when washing your hands. Alcohol based mouth wash also works as does ethanol (Everclear) in general. Edible surfactants and emulsifiers work best but unless you like drinking blended raw eggs or mustard, that might not work for you.
To help when it comes out the other end: drink lots of dairy because the casein helps and eat a bunch of starch (rice, potatoes, bread, etc) and bananas, and stay well hydrated.
If you go extreme enough humans can even walk barefoot through the snow without a problem all day without a real problem, where as someone who wears socks and shoes when it is freezing cold will get serious frostbite on their feet in like 30 minutes or less if they tried it without adapting themselves over time.
For a direct application of this, ice climbers will soak their hands in ice water for 45 minutes every day in the weeks leading up to a climb so that their hands don't freeze and maintain blood flow when on an ice climb, because obviously you can't just stop and warm up your hands by a fire when you are halfway up a frozen waterfall and having stiff or frostbitten fingers makes climbing more difficult/dangerous.
Same for corn (maize). There is no naturally occurring plant that looks like what we’ve turned it into.
Also I had lots of wild berries (of various species) in forests, and they look pretty much like the berries you can find in a garden. (Though probably not like the berries you can get in a supermarket?)
Wild grass also looks pretty much like some of the domesticated variety. (Well, some varieties do.)
Wheat still generally looks like wild grasses, but like maize its seeds are much larger than you’ll find on wild grasses.
In Mexico, our ancestors cultivated corn despite not knowing fungicides to prevent mycotoxin contamination. Somehow they discovered nixtamalization, which is boiling corn in an alkaline solution that destroys mycotoxins and improves nutritional value. Guess they really loved corn.
that one always amazes me. How did they figure it out? it's not exactly intuitive, especially when they wouldn't have known about the chemistry underneath.
It would probably take weeks or months to notice if doing A instead of B was making people sick or not
In particular, lots of civilizations learned to strengthen the basic clay pot by the addition of lime-y things, eg burnt mussel shells. If all your pots are made in this manner then you dont so much discover nixtamalization as experience it only by its absence when you meet settlers that have pellagra and dont use your style of pot.
See [0] for a technical write up on this and many other pot themes.
My guess: boiling water purifies it and makes it safe to consume... how about put things in boiling water to see if it makes them safer?
There are other animals humans can observe instead of impulsively risking their lives.
> Nine young backpackers were rushed to hospital in the west Australian city of Perth after snorting a drug they mistook for cocaine. Three remain in critical condition after *ingesting the mystery white powder which arrived in the post addressed to someone else*
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-42563523
> The bystander states that the older man is a “death with dignity” patient who invited loved ones to be present while he consumed the [Medical Aid in Dying] medication. After his first swallow, he remarked, “Man that burns!” The younger man said, “Let me see,” and then also took a swallow.
https://www.jems.com/patient-care/emergency-medical-care/dea...
> She remarks that the older man “should be dead” and the younger one “should be alive.”
Great storytelling.
Some places are iron poor, some even resort to eating dirt, especially when pregnant when you need more iron. Some areas are salt poor and animals will go to extreme measures to get to salt. Some areas have poor bioavailability and require crushing, special cooking, soaking, or a narrow range of acidity to be available, which of course becomes the norm for cooking in those areas. Some even become religious standards, things like fish on fridays or avoiding pork (before trichinosis was controlled).
When we came out, we were initially incredulous but they clarified that the flesh of the berry was sweet, but the seed was disgustingly bitter. Which prompted the rest of us to quickly do some research on what this plant was. The mood was initially somewhat light-hearted, however articles with titles like “Why is the Yew Berry sometimes called the Death Berry?” had us on the phone with poison control pretty quickly.
Poison control was very professional, and once they confirmed that it was indeed a Yew Berry that had been ingested, things got pretty serious. Apparently even small doses can quickly cause irreversible heart failure, with death the earliest “symptom” in some cases.
My friend didn’t die— just experienced some terror and gastric distress— the latter likely exacerbated by the terror). No drugs or alcohol or involved, just an impulsive decision, and a sobering reminder about the fragility of life.
One of the other replies in this thread mentions mushrooms. Which reminds of the aphorism: _There are old mushroom foragers, and bold mushroom foragers, but there are no old AND bold mushroom foragers._
My friend has a running joke calling Yew poison berries, but I never looked up the effects before. Great that you called poison control.
The route that my kids walk to school took us underneath a large yew tree, and the road underneath is often covered in hundreds of delicious-looking pink berries. Since they were tiny they have had to know all about how yew berries look lovely but even one can kill you. What I didn't ever tell them is how apparently the flesh is actually not toxic and is tasty, and it's the seed that will kill you.
Apparently, there are others in North America, but mostly not in the Southwest. I lived in the Pacific Northwest about a decade ago which also has a yew (Taxus brevifolia) but I don’t recall if I ever saw the berries.
That said, most folks I know were raised with a baseline of “don’t eat random berries you don’t recognize.”
Folks visiting the desert and distractedly running straight into octillos is just good entertainment. There's not much on the east coast that prepares you for a random shrub to be so hostile. Poisonous berries though, they're everywhere. I'm surprised your fellows made it to adulthood without basic suburban survival skills.
I think it's understandable. I live in a city suburb and the foliage around me is pretty much all non-toxic.
I was raised in a rural community and went camping often so we had the lessons of "don't eat random shit, you'll die" drummed into us.
Where I'm at, particularly in the suburbs, there's a distinct lack of things that are tempting to eat (like a berry) and also poisonous.
I'm pretty confident with berries as I've got plenty of experience, but I don't mess with wild carrot or even elderberry as I don't feel I have the knowledge at this point to make it worth the risk. There are just too many lookalikes.
>I was in Cape Cod
it give me the chance to tell you, "we say on Cape Cod". There are a number of towns on Cape Cod that you could be in.
Fun fact: The danger in eating raw cookie-dough isn't primarily from fresh eggs (though they can have problems too) but rather from the raw flour, which before cooking may have a bunch of bacterial nastiness in it.
The eggs are a far more likely vector for illness unless you're making the cookies yourself from scratch.
At least where I live, only a minority are advertised as "ready to eat". It's more common to see the opposite, an explicit warning that it must be cooked.
* with the right equipment
Don't know about eggs, but some recipe sites claim it works for them too.
Perhaps on a low setting?
This isn't the default assumption?
("This cardboard is unlikely to kill me, sooooo...")
Yeah, but it ain't much fun to eat, either?
What else?
EDIT: and morphine!
side note: It kills you by making all your muscles tense so strongly that you can't breath any more. The muscles in your face tense in a way that it gives you whats called a "Strychnine Smile".
Can also be caused by Tetanus
Now thats a party!
(and as I said in another reply) Strychnine
So what kills some animals will have mind altering effects on others.
Cathinone, from khat (Catha edulis)
(Dear god, I'm showing my age there, aren't I?)
Whatever it is, I'm absolutely certain that it can be launched in a few seconds on archive.org, with no special software requirements besides the JavaScript interpreter that a web browser already has, and that all of this can happen even on your standard-issue pocket supercomputer.
(Every couple of years I fire up an Apple ][ version of Oregon Trail on archive.org because even though we had a PC at home way back when, that's the version I remember playing in school. That game is still hard and I'm not sure exactly what it is that it is supposed to teach except that dysentery is evil.)
Apple][ in my case. Very early 80s, definitely before 83.
(My peppers ferment just find using microbes.)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4643145/
https://www.ijrar.org/papers/IJRAR1944311.pdf
Antimicrobial doesn't necessarily mean it literally kills everything.