Friday Favorite： Is It Safe to Eat Raw Mushrooms？

There is a toxin in plain white button mushrooms called a garotene, which may be carcinogenic

And plain white button mushrooms grow up to be cremini mushrooms, the brown mushrooms

and cremini mushrooms grow up to be portobello mushrooms. They're all the exact same mushroom

It's like how green bell peppers are just unriperipe red bell peppers

But you can reduce the amount of garotine in these shrooms through cooking, frying

microwaving, boiling, or even just freezing and thawing lowers the levels, is therefore

recommended to cook mushrooms before consumption, something I noted in a video that's now

more than a decade old. But if you look at the various cooking methods, the garotine isn't completely destroyed

Take dry baking, for example, 10 minutes at about 400 degrees Fahrenheit, basically how you'd

make a pizza, only cuts the agarotine levels by about a quarter, so 77% still remains

Boiling looks better, appearing to wipe out over half of the toxin after just five minutes

but it's not actually wiped out. Instead, it's just transferred to the cooking water

So, yes, levels within the mushrooms drop by about half at five minutes and 90% after an hour

but that's mostly because it's leaching into the broth. So if you making soup or something five minutes of boiling is no better than the pizza and even after an hour about half remains Frying for 5 to 10 minutes wipes out a lot but microwaving is a more healthful way to cook

and it works even better. Just one minute in the microwave reduces the garotine content of fresh-slice

by 65 percent, and only 30 seconds wipes out about half. So microwaving is probably the easiest way to reduce the garotine levels in fresh mushrooms

I do with dried mushrooms is throw them into pasta water when I'm making spaghetti. Between the

20-ish percent drop from the drying and the 60 percentish drop from boiling for 10 minutes

in straining, more than 90 percent is wiped out. Should we be concerned about the residual

garotine? Should we skip mushroom pizza? If you're eating pizza, mushrooms are probably the last

thing you need to worry about, but seriously, should we be concerned about agaritin? According to

review paid for by the mushroom industry? Not at all. The available evidence to date suggests

a guaranteeing from consumption of mushrooms poses no known toxicological risk to healthy humans

The researchers acknowledge it's considered a potential carcinogen in mice, but then you have

to extrapolate that data to human health outcomes. For example, the Swiss Institute of Technology

estimated the average mushroom consumption in the country would be expected to cause about two cases

of cancer per 100 people That actually similar to U consumption so one could theoretically expect about 20 cancer deaths per million lives for mushroom consumption

Now, typically with a new chemical pesticide or food additive, we'd like to see less than one in a million cancer risk

By this approach, the average mushroom consumption would be 20-fold too high to be acceptable

To get it down to one in a million, and you could only eat about a half-cup serving once every 250 days or something

to remain under the, quote-unquote, tolerable limit. But to put that into perspective

even if you were eating a single serving every single day, the resulting additional cancer risk would only be about one in 10,000

In other words, if 10,000 people consumed a mushroom meal daily for 70 years

then, in addition to the 3,000 cancer cases arising from other factors

one more case could be attributed to consuming mushrooms. But again, this is all based on the presumption that results in mouse models are valid in humans

This is all just extrapolating from mice. What we need is a huge prospective study to examine the association between mushroom consumption

and cancer risk in people. But there weren't any such studies until now

mushroom consumption and risk of cancer in the two large Harvard cohorts and no association between mushroom intake and cancer Eating raw or undercooked chitaki mushrooms can cause something else though

Shataki mushroom flagellate dermatitis. Flagellate as in flagellation, whipping, flogging. Check out this crazy rash

You break out in a rash to make it look as if you've been whipped

Doesn't it look wild? That's just how you break out. It's thought to be caused by a compound in shataki mushrooms called lentinin

but because heat denatures it, it only seems to be a problem with raw or under-cooked mushrooms

Now, it's rare. Only about one in 50 people are even susceptible

and it goes away on its own in a week or two. Interestingly, it can strike as many as ten days after you eat them

which is why people may not make the connection. One poor guy suffered on and off for 16

years before a diagnosis. Hopefully, a lot of doctors will watch this video

and if they ever see a rash like this, they'll tell their patients to cook their shataki