The story doesn't discuss what's causing this, but another story in Rolling Stone has a plausible lead:
> “They [company] were kind of implicating the customer in not cooking them correctly, but I definitely did because I cook a lot of vegetarian stuff,” says Aarts, who is a vegetarian and allergic to gluten. She says she sautéed the lentils until they started to crisp and even blacken a bit because she knows they need to be cooked thoroughly.
It turns out lentils contain lectins, a class of molecules with some alarming chemical characteristics:
> Lectins are carbohydrate binding (glyco)proteins which are ubiquitous in nature. In plants, they are distributed in various families and hence ingested daily in appreciable amounts by both humans and animals. One of the most nutritionally important features of plant lectins is their ability to survive digestion by the gastrointestinal tract of consumers. This allows the lectins to bind to membrane glycosyl groups of the cells lining the digestive tract. As a result of this interaction a series of harmful local and systemic reactions are triggered placing this class of molecules as antinutritive and/or toxic substances. Locally, they can affect the turnover and loss of gut epithelial cells, damage the luminal membranes of the epithelium, interfere with nutrient digestion and absorption, stimulate shifts in the bacterial flora and modulate the immune state of the digestive tract. Systemically, they can disrupt lipid, carbohydrate and protein metabolism, promote enlargement and/or atrophy of key internal organs and tissues and alter the hormonal and immunological status. At high intakes, lectins can seriously threaten the growth and health of consuming animals. They are also detrimental to numerous insect pests of crop plants although less is presently known about their insecticidal mechanisms of action. This current review surveys the recent knowledge on the antinutritional/toxic effects of plant lectins on higher animals and insects.
Hmm, lectins don't typically affect the liver to this degree though... I know they said their toxicology came back negative, but this sounds like toxin contamination of some sort.
At least for those who had their gallbladders removed for gallstones, it's more likely this meal happened to trigger a gallbladder attack (whether from the lentils or something else in it). The lentils being undercooked could have triggered gastrointestinal issues in the other people, and maybe some of the ones with gallstones whose gallstones and gallbladder issues were then discovered by coincidence.
Yeah, the gallbladder removal part seems odd to me as well. I had gallbladder trouble a few years back and an ultrasound showed that I had a stone. Surgeon wanted to remove my gallbladder, but I found that moving to a vegan diet completely ameliorated the symptoms so I did not have the surgery done. When researching this I found that many people are found to have gallstones in the course of imaging for other issues and they often never have had any gallbladder pain or issues. The conclusion was that the presence of gallstones does not in itself indicate gallbladder removal. As you're saying, I suspect that the docs were having trouble figuring out what was wrong, noticed there were gallstones present and decided to remove the gallbladder to see if that would help.
This is a possibility. The mere existence of gallstones does not necessitate the removal of gallstones[1]. In this case, it is likely the pain, because it was similar to the one experienced with those having gallstone issues, was wrongly linked to the presence of gallstones.
I know nothing at all about the chemistry or nutritional aspects but I do cook my own dog food and know that many canine nutritionists are recommending <10% of a dog’s daily calories come from legumes because of a (still, I believe, poorly understood) link to heart issues: https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/outbreaks-and-advisori...
My understanding was that initially most vets assumed it was the “grain free” thing causing a problem but then it was discovered that the heart issues have only been associated with certain grain free brands. I can’t help but wonder if it’s something to do with both the volume of lentils in the brand recipes and also how the brands are preparing their lentils.
I know some people feed raw meat but it’s not recommended and so I don’t. But a lot of dog food ingredients besides meat require cooking, too: eggs, rice, pasta, oats, yams, chickpeas, black beans, etc.
Other ingredients could be eaten raw but they’re either difficult to eat (asparagus) or can cause gastrointestinal upset/gas (broccoli).
I do feed a lot of raw or already prepared foods as well: yogurt, cottage cheese, pumpkin, carrots, applesauce, bananas, peanut butter, blueberries, watermelon, etc. The ingredients all need to balance out for the day to make sure they get the right nutrients and to make sure the fats/protein/carbs are with appropriate ranges so how much dog food cooking I do varies each week. Sometimes it’s more and sometimes it’s less. I’m always cooking at least a meat and pasta/rice though.
Yes, many common types of beans are toxic. But, as you note, the thread is dealt with via boiling. We are typically so habitual in boiling (and often pre-soaking larger) beans that their toxicity - some of them rather spectacularly so - that most people are entirely aware of the fact.
Yea, I had no idea. The other day, I soaked dried chickpeas overnight to use for dinner the next evening and munched on the soaked beans throughout the day. TIL...
Latino here I eat a lot of beans and lentejas, I had no idea they were toxic. My mom and wife boil them and serve them like that. I guess if you eat them raw, they are very dangerous?
>She says she sautéed the lentils until they started to crisp and even blacken a bit because she knows they need to be cooked thoroughly.
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.
In my eyes (I live in the US) “boiling” seems to only refer to boiling something in a pot. Like boil a pot of water (cause it to reach boiling point and bubble) then put in noodles.
A pot is used for boiling water, or cooking stews and soups. They typically have two small handles on each side.
A pan has short, usually curved sides, and is suitable for simmering small amounts of liquid, searing or frying. It will almost always have a single long handle.
Woks are the exception- the look halfway in-between a pot and a pan, though the design is more geared towards the same uses you would use a pan for. Although there are two small handled varieties, the thinness of the metal makes it much less effective at stews and soups because it doesn't hold heat well.
"Saucepans are round, vertical-walled vessels used for simmering or boiling. Saucepans generally have one long handle. Larger pans of similar shape with two ear handles are sometimes called "sauce-pots" or "soup pots" (3–12 litres)." [1]
US resident here. To me, a "pan" is usually a shallow cooking container usually for frying/sauteeing. Not something you would boil pasta in for instance. For pasta/beans/soup i eould use a "pot."
It looks like most of the sibling responses view "pan" as mainly referring to a "frying pan", there is also a "sauce pan" that is likely what you are referring to.
Rough disambiguation:
Frying pan - shallow with single long handle
Sauce pan - deeper with single handle
Pot - deeper with two loop handles
That's still wacky because you (or the manufacturer) boil them first. The only reason to heat fakeburger to 165 (like the manufacturers all tell you do to) is to give you the psychological feeling of cooking meat, and to cover up hygiene failures of manufacturing, transportation, or storage.
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.
I've heard of food poisoning before, but not too many cases of people losing organs over it. At any rate, lectins (and other antinutrients) are evolutionary defense mechanisms (poison) to prevent insects from devouring plants wholesale. When they become a large percentage of your own diet, you'll probably experience digestion issues and inflammation as well.
But it sounds like she did cook them enough to have destroyed the lectins.
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.
What I heard is that the sprouts can contain high concentrations of nasty stuff, I'd always assumed that those were created during the sprouting, that might be something different as well, should probably check. But I think the consensus is that if you fry sprouts just the right amount (to denature the toxins but not the other nutrients) they're a lot healthier than cooked beans, otherwise they may contain toxins (or not many nutrients at all). It was never a gamble I felt comfortable making, so I sort of abstained from them.
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."
In addition, eating a diet that primarily consists of chickpeas can cause a non-reversible neurological disease... usually not seen except during famines.
You had me scared for a moment. As far as I can tell, neurolathyrism is caused by plants of genus Lathyrus, which is different from (though the same family as) actual chickpeas of genus Cicer. I sure hope real chickpeas don't cause neural damage.
Incorrect. It's chickling peas, not chickpeas, that cause illness. Chickpeas are fine to eat, as evidenced by the billion+ people who are eating them every day, particularly in the subcontinent.
>It appears that lectins are degraded by heat, thus the importance of proper cooking.
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.
Once the toxins appear, it is difficult to get rid of them. If not (which is what is true in most cases), soaking them and then using enough heat for enough time should be enough.
What the heck? This is completely bizarre. Gallstones don't develop overnight from eating one weird food, and I'm not aware of any other reason gallbladder removal surgery would be performed..
Cholecystectomies can also be performed in cases of cholecystitis (inflammation of the gallbladder) which can of course be caused by gallstones but also by infections of the bile tract, reduced blood flow to the gallbladder and other nasty things like tumors. Not sure how exactly this product caused the inflammation though..
Also anything that affects gut motility, so anything that messes with the nervous system in the gut.
If the signalling controlling eg the sphincter is messed up, the bile won’t escape to the intestines, and if the bile stops flowing you’ll get liver and pancreatic inflammation.
It might be that some toxin in the food could cause such an effect?
I’m not sure how easy it would be to tell if this was the case in an acute setting though. It isn’t exactly common, and is usually chronic and intermittent. Gall bladder removal would seem to be the wrong treatment in this case, but it might be hard to establish? My amateur medical knowledge is insufficient to know, just hypothesising other potential mechanisms.
You're spot on about bile not flowing. I'm very interested in the final verdict on this. I'm also not an expert, just someone who parted with their gallbladder a while back and became a major consumer of information on gallbladder pathology.
Acalculi cholecystitis (cholecystitis not caused by gallstones) is rarely treated with surgery, it is usually just antibiotics. Cholecystectomies are indicated in cholecystitis, gallbladder tumours and gallbladder perforations (rare).
While certain foods (high fat content) can trigger biliary colic, I’m not aware of any specific foods that would trigger this more than any other with a similar fat content
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.
> Yeah, the fact that this even made it to the legal system says everything.
A lawsuit was filed. That’s it. Just about anyone can file a law suit alleging just about anything. Now Daily Harvest will have the opportunity to get it tossed. That’s how the system works. That’s how the system is supposed to work.
The argument isn't “Daily Harvest's product caused gallstones”, it's “Daily Harvest's product caused liver damage with symptoms strongly resembling gallstones, and as a result plaintiffs received irreversible surgery with a risk of life-long side effects”.
There are several questions here, and the legal system is the right place to unpick them. From the top of my head:
- did DH's lentils cause liver injury?
- is that injury permanent or temporary?
- were gallstones misdiagnosed because of the injury inflicted by DH's lentils?
- was unnecessary surgery performed due to misdiagnosis?
- did the doctors misdiagnosing gallstones/performing unnecessary surgery meet the standard of care?
- did the unnecessary surgery cause permanent/temporary harm?
- was the direct harm (temporary liver injury) caused by DH's lentils reasonably foreseeable?
- was the indirect harm (surgery, surgical complications, lifelong side effects) caused by DH's lentils reasonably foreseeable?
A lawsuit is the right way to get answers to these and determine who, if any is liable for damages and in what amount.
Medical diagnosis isn't a perfectly exact process, and is strongly driven by prior probabilities.
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.
At least in the UK, this if not the case. The number of people presenting with RUQ which is not caused by gallstones (even in the presence of deranged liver function tests in an obstructive pattern and with risk factors) is significant. This means USS +/- MRCP is used to diagnose the gallstones before considering surgery. Indeed, in most trusts (hospital areas) funding for surgery can only be acquired with imaging evidence for gallstones due to this issue. Furthermore, approximately 30% of cases of assumed biliary colic do not improve with cholecystectomy, as the pain has been falsely attributed to the stones or gallbladder. Sometimes it’s actually sphincter of Oddi Dysfunction, which is difficult to prove and treat.
I am an internist in the US. It's the same here. I would never call the surgeon without an image. They would (rightly) refuse to operate without visual confirmation of gallbladder inflammation and/or a stone. Usually I wouldn't get an MRCP unless there was specific reason to suspect cholangitis. My first test would be ultrasound for right upper quadrant pain or CT for poorly localized pain.
Yup, I'm wrong in the specifics here. I think I'm conflating the stats for negative appendectomy and the willingness to go to surgery without positive imaging in that setting with the ~30% of cholecystectomy cases that don't improve with surgery. (Of course, the risk/benefits of missing an infected appendix vs taking out a healthy one are very different to gallbladders with stones.)
That said, I do think the underlying point I'm trying to make is still accurate. Most of the audience here are software engineers. Unlike debugging software, where we can often eliminate possibilities with 100% accuracy through objective tests and come to a conclusion with complete confidence, or at least run experiments with no consequences, humans are messy, poorly observable, and heterogeneous. A relevant history helps speed things up when trying to fix software, but it can be vital when fixing humans.
Given the rate of asymptomatic gallstones visible to imaging in the population, if these lentils are causing acute liver injury, I think it's reasonable to expect that some people have had unnecessary surgery as a result. If you knew your patient had eaten these lentils, would you still send to surgery with positive imaging, or wait a few days and see if things improved?
I'm surprised it isn't higher... feels like many people over about 70 that I know have theirs removed kinda along with getting knee and hip replacements, prostate surgery, etc. I honestly thought it was something every older person needed to have on their radar as a possibility.
I am one of the people affected by the daily harvest lentils. I did not need major surgery but ate them after Daily Harvest sent an email saying they were perfectly safe and to make sure they reached 165F.
Daily Havrest has offered me a $10 credit towards future orders even though I became very ill from their negligence and have spent thousands of dollars with them in the past on their service.
$10 is terrible. Reminds me, I had a Lyft driver. Took me from the airport, absolutely FLEW, tailgated an ambulance with its lights on for 2 miles, literally nearly hit two pedestrians, ran through a couple red lights just late enough after they turned that other cars were starting to enter the intersection from other sides. I was scared with my very visibly pregnant wife in the car, but it was a 15 minute drive and much of it was quick highway turns so didn’t feel comfortable telling the driver to stop.
I left my first bad review on Lyft writing a detailed account similar to above. Lyft messaged me “are you ok we take safety paramount” and the resolution was a scant “we won’t match you with this person again, $5 off your next ride.”
That was honestly worse than no response. I spend hundreds of dollars on rideshares monthly and this was a first.
It's an insult. Xfinity pissed me off when I contacted them regarding the 3rd or 4th service interruption within a month where each lasted ~5 hours, and they offered me $10 credit.
My ex was a nurse... she did home visits. A patient had a life threatening injury. She understood the situation, stabilized him and got him to a hospital. The company awarded her a $5 gift card.
Everyone involved here has a good incentive to find out what was wrong with the food.
Yet nobody seems to have done so. There are 28,000 jars of it, and only one needs to be found to test. Is it that hard to figure out what in food causes a violent reaction?
This sort of reminds me of Lupin Beans that I discovered and started eating in large quantities before (thankfully quite quickly) finding out are actually very dangerous if not properly prepared, and that even properly prepared (as they probably were) they may be ill advised for regular long term consumption due to their effects in the nervous system. Their acute toxic effects sound a little different, but I wonder if some similar issue occurred here.
I also don't eat lentils very often, I'm not a vegan. When I do cook them my self instructions are "make hot". I by canned, from dry is too much arsing about.
I eat lentils because they are cheap, easy to prepare, nutritious and taste great. I have eaten them for many decades with no ill effects. There are several packages of lentils in my pantry right now, and none of them indicate a requirement for cooking at a temperature above boiling water.
This story is nuts. I don't know what crazy poo-poo Daily Harvest was selling, but it sure as hell wasn't lentils that caused this problem.
There’s some weird stuff out there with beans and nuts. One time my wife and I were moving from WI to NY and we stopped in a Denny’s to get some food. We order a couple of breakfast skillets and when she takes a bite of one she instantly spits the food onto her plate. I was freaked out because I’d never seen her do something like that in public. I’m like “What’s wrong?” and she says “This is poisoned. It’s contaminated.” I didn’t believe her so I took a bite of her food and it was fine. Then she drinks some water and spits that up as well. I try it and there’s nothing wrong.
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.
The strongest speculative case I've heard so far (somewhere on Reddit, from someone who survived this) was that it was caused by aflatoxin from mold growing on the dry lentils. Aflatoxins cause severe liver damage and are not broken down by cooking.
Daily Harvest says their testing (done by third parties) has ruled out Aflatoxins[1].
Looks like they are testing their own existing samples (from their supply chain or from their stock), which may or may not be contaminated. I will place more trust on FDA's testing at this point, which is done with the kits obtained from those who actually suffered symptoms.
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[ 8.9 ms ] story [ 2376 ms ] thread> “They [company] were kind of implicating the customer in not cooking them correctly, but I definitely did because I cook a lot of vegetarian stuff,” says Aarts, who is a vegetarian and allergic to gluten. She says she sautéed the lentils until they started to crisp and even blacken a bit because she knows they need to be cooked thoroughly.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/daily-...
It turns out lentils contain lectins, a class of molecules with some alarming chemical characteristics:
> Lectins are carbohydrate binding (glyco)proteins which are ubiquitous in nature. In plants, they are distributed in various families and hence ingested daily in appreciable amounts by both humans and animals. One of the most nutritionally important features of plant lectins is their ability to survive digestion by the gastrointestinal tract of consumers. This allows the lectins to bind to membrane glycosyl groups of the cells lining the digestive tract. As a result of this interaction a series of harmful local and systemic reactions are triggered placing this class of molecules as antinutritive and/or toxic substances. Locally, they can affect the turnover and loss of gut epithelial cells, damage the luminal membranes of the epithelium, interfere with nutrient digestion and absorption, stimulate shifts in the bacterial flora and modulate the immune state of the digestive tract. Systemically, they can disrupt lipid, carbohydrate and protein metabolism, promote enlargement and/or atrophy of key internal organs and tissues and alter the hormonal and immunological status. At high intakes, lectins can seriously threaten the growth and health of consuming animals. They are also detrimental to numerous insect pests of crop plants although less is presently known about their insecticidal mechanisms of action. This current review surveys the recent knowledge on the antinutritional/toxic effects of plant lectins on higher animals and insects.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15302522/
It appears that lectins are degraded by heat, thus the importance of proper cooking.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/gallstones/sy...
My understanding was that initially most vets assumed it was the “grain free” thing causing a problem but then it was discovered that the heart issues have only been associated with certain grain free brands. I can’t help but wonder if it’s something to do with both the volume of lentils in the brand recipes and also how the brands are preparing their lentils.
Other ingredients could be eaten raw but they’re either difficult to eat (asparagus) or can cause gastrointestinal upset/gas (broccoli).
I do feed a lot of raw or already prepared foods as well: yogurt, cottage cheese, pumpkin, carrots, applesauce, bananas, peanut butter, blueberries, watermelon, etc. The ingredients all need to balance out for the day to make sure they get the right nutrients and to make sure the fats/protein/carbs are with appropriate ranges so how much dog food cooking I do varies each week. Sometimes it’s more and sometimes it’s less. I’m always cooking at least a meat and pasta/rice though.
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.
Confused. What else would you boil them in? (Brit here so maybe there's a language difference at play)
A pan has short, usually curved sides, and is suitable for simmering small amounts of liquid, searing or frying. It will almost always have a single long handle.
Woks are the exception- the look halfway in-between a pot and a pan, though the design is more geared towards the same uses you would use a pan for. Although there are two small handled varieties, the thinness of the metal makes it much less effective at stews and soups because it doesn't hold heat well.
"Saucepans are round, vertical-walled vessels used for simmering or boiling. Saucepans generally have one long handle. Larger pans of similar shape with two ear handles are sometimes called "sauce-pots" or "soup pots" (3–12 litres)." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookware_and_bakeware
Rough disambiguation: Frying pan - shallow with single long handle Sauce pan - deeper with single handle Pot - deeper with two loop handles
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurolathyrism
Anyway, I found this for chickling peas (aka grass peas and cicerchia ):
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-69083-9_...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2010/07/why-do-po...
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
1: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/anti-nutrients/...
If the signalling controlling eg the sphincter is messed up, the bile won’t escape to the intestines, and if the bile stops flowing you’ll get liver and pancreatic inflammation.
It might be that some toxin in the food could cause such an effect?
I’m not sure how easy it would be to tell if this was the case in an acute setting though. It isn’t exactly common, and is usually chronic and intermittent. Gall bladder removal would seem to be the wrong treatment in this case, but it might be hard to establish? My amateur medical knowledge is insufficient to know, just hypothesising other potential mechanisms.
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.
A lawsuit was filed. That’s it. Just about anyone can file a law suit alleging just about anything. Now Daily Harvest will have the opportunity to get it tossed. That’s how the system works. That’s how the system is supposed to work.
There are several questions here, and the legal system is the right place to unpick them. From the top of my head:
A lawsuit is the right way to get answers to these and determine who, if any is liable for damages and in what amount.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.
That said, I do think the underlying point I'm trying to make is still accurate. Most of the audience here are software engineers. Unlike debugging software, where we can often eliminate possibilities with 100% accuracy through objective tests and come to a conclusion with complete confidence, or at least run experiments with no consequences, humans are messy, poorly observable, and heterogeneous. A relevant history helps speed things up when trying to fix software, but it can be vital when fixing humans.
Given the rate of asymptomatic gallstones visible to imaging in the population, if these lentils are causing acute liver injury, I think it's reasonable to expect that some people have had unnecessary surgery as a result. If you knew your patient had eaten these lentils, would you still send to surgery with positive imaging, or wait a few days and see if things improved?
I mean, to me 1/500 chance per year sounds like it's right along the lines of "every older person needed to have on their radar as a possibility".
The average person lives to 80, so 1/500/yr means a 16% chance per person of having to undergo that operation.
That definitely seems high enough to be "every person should have it on their radar as something that might happen to them".
Daily Havrest has offered me a $10 credit towards future orders even though I became very ill from their negligence and have spent thousands of dollars with them in the past on their service.
I left my first bad review on Lyft writing a detailed account similar to above. Lyft messaged me “are you ok we take safety paramount” and the resolution was a scant “we won’t match you with this person again, $5 off your next ride.”
That was honestly worse than no response. I spend hundreds of dollars on rideshares monthly and this was a first.
Buy you a Rolls-Royce and a chauffeur?
I would argue $5 is worth than nothing.
Yet nobody seems to have done so. There are 28,000 jars of it, and only one needs to be found to test. Is it that hard to figure out what in food causes a violent reaction?
Why is the top comment not two things?
A) How to cook lentils from can.
B) How to cook lentils from dry.
Canned lentils are already cooked. You just need to warm them up.
edit: shit I spelled buy wrong.
This story is nuts. I don't know what crazy poo-poo Daily Harvest was selling, but it sure as hell wasn't lentils that caused this problem.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aflatoxin
Looks like they are testing their own existing samples (from their supply chain or from their stock), which may or may not be contaminated. I will place more trust on FDA's testing at this point, which is done with the kits obtained from those who actually suffered symptoms.
[1] https://www.daily-harvest.com/content/french-lentil-leek-cru...