From the responses, the team learned that the ALS patients were not the only mushroom foragers in town, but they shared an affinity for a particular species that local interviewees without ALS said they never touched: the false morel.
The false morel contains gyromitrin, a toxin that sickens some number of foragers around the world every year; half of the ALS victims in Montchavin reported a time when they had acute mushroom poisoning. And according to Spencer, the human body may also metabolize gyromitrin into a compound that, over time, might lead to similar DNA damage as cycad seeds.
Fascinating.
Bruh, Gyromitra esculenta has been known to be toxic for decades. These people have literally been poisoning themselves. You might think they’re tasty, but they’re not so tasty as to be worth ALS.
Sure it’s toxic, but not to ME
I can change her
The morel of the story is…
Yeh, there’s not mushroom for interpretation.
You seem like a fungi
That’s nice to hear. Usually I need to grow on people.
I know what you mean, can be a real truffle sometimes
Amanita minute to get ready for some real talk in this thread.
I lichen you guys.
Underrated
False, there is no morel
I feel like nothing good comes from mushroom foraging yourself unless you’re an expert. Seems very risky.
My mycology professor in university told us he had a doctorate in mushrooms and still wouldn’t ever forage for wild ones
I still remember that X-files episode where they were investigating a mind controlling fungi that released a mind altering spore if you inhaled it.
If you know what you’re doing, you get incredible deliciousness.
There are plenty of forageable mushrooms with no look-alikes. If you’re cautious and thorough, it’s not particularly risky.
And by thorough, I mean:
- actually learning to properly identity mushrooms before you ever consider eating them
- learning from someone else with experience
- verifying that what you’re learning is correct in a book (for your specific region) and on the internet
And these days, that means making sure it’s a book written by someone who knows what they are doing, rather than AI auto-generated bullshit.
It’s the same as using wild herbs. You have to really know what you’re doing. It’s not impossible to learn, though. First you need to know an expert and learn some basic species that are hard to misidentify. Then you can just stop there or continue.
False morel, despite the name, is not really something you’d confuse for a morel. If the only description I gave you of a morel was 1 sentence long, maybe you’d grab a false morel by accident, but if you’ve ever seen a picture, or any longer description than that, you wouldn’t confuse them.
These people know which mushroom they are foraging.
I’d be surprised if this was the case, but:
Does this mean that ALS is entirely caused by external factors like the chemicals found in these mushrooms?
Better still, is it entirely caused by these mushrooms?
If so, that’s amazing news for humanity.
Definitely not 100% external. A chunk of cases are known to be genetic.
And these people were eating a mushroom known to be mildly poisonous.
Scary stuff! 😱
