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.
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.
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…
False, there is no morel
Yeh, there’s not mushroom for interpretation.
You seem like a fungi
I lichen you guys.
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.
Underrated
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.
Your mycology professor sounds like they’ve not really experience outdoors as much as in a city (and specifically a classroom).
I was picking shrooms around the same time I got my first puukko, so idk, four to five years of age.
Or maybe he thought that was the wisest thing to tell a group of 18-20somthings. Not a demographic known for cool deliberation or self preservation. There’s a reason the draft starts at 18 but you can’t rent a car til you’re 25.
So they decided to lie about not foraging for mushrooms?
Doesn’t really make sense to me.
Honestly, a professor of mycology not being able yo to forage mushrooms? Just where do these people live that there’s no solid edible shrooms which have no fatal similar looking ones, like chanterelles or winter chanterelles?
Idk, maybe in the US there’s similar species in areas with them so it’s kind of a gamble, but we don’t, so foraging is a-okay.
As long as you know how and what to forage for in the specific area you are, you should know whether you can or can’t forage edible shrooms easily.
I wouldn’t be certain I’ve found penny buns although I know how to ID them, roughly, but because of the phenotypical variation and not remembering all the strains which are similar, I wouldn’t confidently forage those. I don’t recall there being anything too poisonous that’s close to it, but still.
Murica
The implication was that some of the lookalikes are impossible to identify and wildly dangerous
If an edible variety has any lookalikes that similar that can be found in your climate zone, you need to steer clear from it. This isn’t the case for all varieties and all areas though. General mushroom foraging may be dangerous, but certain species can be safely selected, due to not having lookalikes you need to be worried about.
Which these are requires learning specific to your local area though. The skills do not transfer to other regions, and everything you know would need to be reconfirmed if you moved anywhere new.
Exactly. There’s a reason I won’t eat any Amanita: the similarity of edible and deadly species in that genus makes them the main source of mushroom fatalities in North America.
By contrast, messing up a bolete ID is likely to result in a meal that is too bitter to eat. That’s a much more acceptable risk.
Well A muscaria is rather easy to identify, but it’s not really a cooking shroom.
What the earlier dude is what I meant, and why foraging for shrooms is safe as houses if you get taught by a person who has foraged mushrooms in that habitat and knows what’s safe to pick and what isn’t.
Which is why it’s easy enough to teach to pre-school children in certain places. Like here.
It’s not the same everywhere, ofc.
Looking at the wiki page for gyromitra, it looks like it’s sold for consumption in Finland. Were you taught it was safe to eat?
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.
If you know what you’re doing, you get incredible deliciousness.
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.
Scary stuff! 😱
