Lychee identified as cause for mystery deadly childhood illness in India
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
Background for others: Most people in keto are running on mostly fatty acids and some ketones (for the things that can't use fatty acids) and a small amount of glucose from gluconeogenesis for the obligate glucose tissues (retina, small percentage of brain, etc).
If you take away the ability to use fatty acids then you have to run off ketones, which should work, but I don't know if the body can make enough (and maybe that is impacted too?). And if your body is using gluconeogenesis to make your essential glucose from protein, and that is inhibited, I would think those tissues would be in trouble (its called essential glucose for a reason).
In most cases of sickness (and nearly all cases of death), the lychee was the bulk of the food eaten by the child. The children were already somewhat hypoglycemic because they weren't eating much, and due to their diet weren't ketogenic (minimal fat or protein in their diet). When the hypoglycin blocked the oxidation of the minimal fatty acids and protein in these children, they eventually ran out of usable glucose, resulting in seizures.
For someone who is merely ketogenic, the hypoglycin would block some but not all of the oxidation of fatty acids, and [edit] generally would not effect the liver production of glucose from glycogen. The amount of dietary fats/proteins in a ketogenic diet would overcome the effect of the hypoglycin, and someone on a normal non-ketogenic diet might not even feel any symptoms due to the body's heavier reliance on the liver-glucose pathway.
Thank you so much for this, that was driving me insane.
No, litchi orchards are usually sold well before they ripe and people protect it. So most of the litchi is consumed after it's ripe and from the market unless someone has their own orchard.
The owners of lychee trees, however, had tons of issues. It's such a loved fruit that if you had such a tree, it was pretty much guaranteed that praedial thieves would strike. It got so bad that I remember one nurse in the community cutting down her tree when the sight of strange men roaming her yard became too much.
What the parent says is about people eating mostly or just lychees -- out of poverty etc. Not the general "I eat lots of X".
(I'm sure there are other successful businesses built that way, too)
To a larger point, the imprecision of the rule would have been dictated both by customs and limitations in knowledge of the time: culture inasmuch as there would be no need to restrict eating omnivores that nobody ate anyway, and knowledge would dictate how precise you could be while still being safe: we now know that pork is ok to eat, but only because we have the tools to reliably determine whether pork is tainted, and build processes and supply chains that minimize that. For civilizations that didn't yet have that insight, much safer to avoid the whole thing.
I know there was an HN article about this, but I can't find it.
I would also argue that boiling water still has its place in China. Not every country has the luxury of tap water that wouldn't kill you (except Flint...).
Even if the Chinese have a preference of cold vs warm water, they prefer warm.
It depends on the province, the city, and generation of people. Sure this doesn't happen in Shanghai or even Beijing, but China isn't just Shanghai and Beijing.
2 - religious practices: I don't say that this was said in the article. I'm conjecturing that "religious practices" could arise, in the past, when people could relate, for example, that children eating those fruits could fall ill, and then could create some religious practice about it.
>The children's age and state of nourishment were also factors.
Caption also mentions malnourishment.
lychee is a relatively new fruit in this region/country, and there wasn't enough transmission over this short period to establish traditions/practices around it.
In other words, given enough time without attention and information and so on, would a new belief arise in that population, one strong enough that would prevent kids from eating the fruit? And few of those who eat them anyway would perish, reinforcing the "tradition" that it was a cursed fruit (or something like that) ?
Of course, if you consider that the same constraints that were present 3,000 years ago still persists: lack of a good knowledge about chemicals and biology and how the human body behaves.
It probably did happen, but we're talking about children who are already malnourished to begin with. Establishing a specific food as the cause of their low glucose levels as opposed to the effects of malnutrition is not as easy as simply checking for their glucose levels.
Being able to come into some new biome, figure out through trial and error what can be eaten when and how, and then transmitting that information reliably to the next generation is what let humans spread all over this planet.
I highly recommend the book The Secret of Our Success covering this and several other topics.
1. don't eat lychee, tamarind, unripe mango in empty stomach, always eat them after rice or bread.
2. don't mix pineapple and milk, or don't take them one after the other, otherwise your stomach will get sick.
3. eating the raw batter of palmyra palm causes fever and stomach pain.
Looks like these are factual knowledge that have been gathered and retained over thousands of years came from observed causal relationships.
> "A study by the Indian Council of Medical Research concluded that a toxin from kasaundhi trees, being transmitted to humans through insects, caused the disease. The trees were cut and the disease subsided. Litchi trees and mosquitoes present in the region should be studied for this disease," suggested Shah.
A casual search on the causative agent (hypoglycin) suggest its presence and mode of action has been well studied since the 1970s, and I wonder why this connection has not been made sooner.
How has this link not been made before?
The researchers said the lychee's potential toxic effects were noted in ancient literature from China, where the fruit originates, however the commercial lychee industry in India is relatively young and has expanded quickly.
"This knowledge has been slow to reach certain parts of Asia where the so-called mysterious lychee disease has been attributed to various causes (fruit colouring, heat stroke) in Bihar, India, to an unidentified pesticide in north-west Bangladesh and, after an exhaustive negative virological search, to a yet-to-be-discovered neurotropic virus in northeast Vietnam," Professor Peter Spencer and Dr Valerie Palmer wrote in a Lancet paper discussing the research.
Interesting. As a kid my only experience with Lychees was the canned variety (often found as a desert at Chinese restaurants).
But now days, fresh ones are pretty common, and you can often buy them really cheaply at London fruit stalls: I bought a big 2kg box for £4 recently! Very tasty and we felt no ill-effects despite gorging ourselves on them.
He said he knew it when he was young. I was amazed that my dad, as an impoverished and uneducated boy in China would know this. A lot of people easily discount Traditional Chinese Medicine as anecdote, but somethings should be investigated scientifically (I'm not going to get in an argument here about TCM, but those are my thoughts).
He also mentioned if you soak lychee in salt water you can eat more of it - I would be curious what the scientific backing is, if there is any at all.
I read sometime ago about India (?) releasing lots of ancient documentation about old medicines, as a knowledge base, exactly to protect the population from those kind of problems.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/chinese-herbal-therapy-m...
"Tu was appointed director of Project 523 in 1969, and rather than sift through modern chemicals for a treatment, she scanned ancient Chinese texts for possible herbal remedies for malaria. The earliest description for the parasitic blood disorder comes from Chinese medical texts dating to 2,700 BCE. She found one promising candidate in a 2,000-year-old document that described how sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) could heal malaria."
> The researchers also said there were now studies looking at how to put the lychee's glucose-lowering properties to good use in treating metabolic syndrome.
This would be bad for diabetics as low glucose levels can't be helped by burning fat.
And it's the opposite what dieters want, because fat doesn't burn.
I got the impression that the symptoms of the sick/dead children were not unlike a low glucose shock from diabetes once the sugar from the fruit had been consumed.
Perhaps there are other medical uses, but not these two cases.
It was illegal to import canned ackee to the US for years, due to risk of hypoglycin poisoning.
When I was in mainland China, near Guangzhou, I remember a woman trying to sell me lychees by the pound -- or whatever unit of measure -- if only I could understand the price she had wanted.
If I understand correctly, these are children from impoverished regions, who only eat Lychees? and they get a type of food poisoning?
I'm not the "check your white privilege" type but c'mon...
And I'm not sure it would affect you negatively anyway unless you were doing it right after a high protein/fat meal.
"Hey are people sick at a hospital somewhere not in australia, like india ?"
"Is it the season for lychees ?"
"Was there once a scientific study where they found this fruit was not perfect?"
"Google says so"
"Thanks I have an article to write. This will be useful for australians, and other folks importing lychee from southeast asia"
"I did something, and it would be valuable to me if people knew about it (or –less frequently– it would be valuable to the world if people knew about it)."
"Let me see who I can spam about this."
"Oh look. Here are 100 people that have written something about health. Let me send them a pitch that makes this seem mysterious and newsworthy"
Overworked reporter: "Oh man. I need to get a story in or my editor will yell at me. I wonder what I should write about?"
Etc.