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Mmmmm, mushrooms. Great on burgers, in pasta sauce, on pizza, and in salads. The ones we eat are safe for us, right? It’s not like we’re going out and just grabbing any mushrooms off the side of the road and eating them.
A new study, covered by the Wall Street Journal, says that this may not be the case.
A new study done on patients with mushroom poisoning found that it’s the edible ones that are the ones most responsible for mushroom poisoning, not the toxic ones.
The real culprit, it seems, is in the way the mushrooms are stored.
Mushroom foraging, which is popular in a lot of countries, is safe in theory, especially if you’re aware of which mushrooms are edible. But if stored incorrectly or not eaten soon after picking, these wild mushrooms can grow toxic microorganisms that can remain in the stomach for up to three days.
Storing mushrooms in plastic bags and harvesting them in temperatures of 77 degrees Fahrenheit or higher is what contributes a lot to their toxicity, as well as keeping them in bags for three hours while foraging.
The study found that 87.5% of illnesses related to mushrooms were from edible ones, with the rest coming from poisonous ones. The sickness caused by these mushrooms could last anywhere from one to three days.
These dangerous mushrooms could be found at farmers’ markets where wild mushrooms are sold, as well. Most of the mushrooms consumed in the study were foraged, but several of them were founds at markets.
This is bad news for mushroom lovers, as now we don’t just have poisonous mushrooms to look out for. So store your mushrooms correctly, and hopefully we can all keep enjoying them!
Will you still eat mushrooms after reading this?
Photo Copyright © 2013 pavlinajane/Flickr
