'Mad honey' that can stop your heart is being sold online

This is the original article and has better images IMHO.

https://theconversation.com/mad-honey-that-can-stop-your-hea...

>Eat a teaspoonful, and you might feel pleasantly warm and slightly lightheaded. Eat more than a few tablespoons, and your heart rate can drop to life-threatening levels.

Reminds me of the Futurama episode with the space bee honey. Wonder if the writers got the inspiration from this.

Old Vice documentary about it. This is where I had first heard about it. Used to be really hard to find the honey online, like only one or 2 places that sold it

https://youtu.be/wDOvmhqvIA8

I imagine the native also built up tolerance over generations, not just knowledge as the article contends . Dying from a specific action is quite the evolutionary motivator

If anyone's interested there's also this recently released documentary in french by Hit the Road, where they show the process of collecting the honey and also the ritual side of it.

https://youtu.be/r-jZyTP4K4g

They mention the toxin comes from the rhododendron flower. I remember camping in North Carolina once and one of the people I was with warned against burning anything from the rhododendron in the area, as supposedly the smoke would give you the runs.

I mostly thought they were joking, and I have no idea what specific type of rhododendron would be there (if any), but maybe there’s a glimmer of merit to it? Or maybe they were thinking of a different plant?

This was somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains, if I remember correctly.

> The problem is that the gap between a medicinal dose and a toxic dose is very small

What's this claim based on? I don't think it's the rat study linked nearby. I looked through it and they didn't really compare doses.

If it's a linear effect on dropping blood pressure, that seems like an overblown way to talk about it. If it's something else, I'd love to hear more.

I’m surprised it’s even legit. I’ve heard of aphrodisiac honey that’s just been laced with viagra.