Pokeweed: Only eat this if...

hey everyone today i want to introduce you to this plant they're called dragonberries or pokeweed they're both a deadly and a very surprisingly edible plant but you got to know what you're doing look how yummy these things look despite what you've heard is it edible or is it toxic you have to know a little bit about the basics of this plant and i am going to go so far as to eat one of them just for you but do not under any circumstances try this until you've watched the entire video very important in my quest to learn about this plant's toxins i filmed it many many times but let me start with my introduction from a week ago today i want to introduce you to everything you need to know about this deadly plant known as poke weed or poke salad you see that thing is so cool oh wow that smells a lot this plant is responsible for a lot of poisonings maybe the most poisonings in the u.s every year it can kill babies if they eat it and it can kill adults if you eat enough of it oh yeah oh that doesn't oh and i remember reading now you're not supposed to put it on your hands because it can absorb through your hands so i'm going to go wash my hands right now make sure you wash your hands after touching the pokeberry going to eat one all right here goes going to eat one i don't want to show you what happened just yet i think that might be a little irresponsible if i first didn't fill you in on the intensive research i looked up and the interviews i did with experts on it and if i didn't properly explain this conundrum let me make it even more simple for centuries native americans ate and used this plant then people in the south started eating it ask any old timer in the region and they'll probably give you a recipe elvis even sang about it [Music] and on youtube you'll find plenty of people who will give you recipes on how to cook up the leaves or maybe make some sort of herbal concoction but and here's the kicker if you go to the literature you'll find a lot of people that have actually died from it like the 21 campers who prepared the poke salad by boiling and reboiling the young leaves and then had to go to the hospital because of it and the camp counselor said he had done this many times before so was it how he individually prepared this plant or was it variation within the plant like maybe he just got a really bad plant of course one of the problems is there are so many toxic compounds in this plant there are thousands of chemicals and a few of them are really bad for you it seems like the main one is try terpenoid saponins which is the soapy substance you feel when you squeeze one between your fingers and on a plant like this the most toxic parts are the roots then the stems then the new leaves the old leaves and then the unripe berries and then the ripe berries turns out the berries are the least toxic part but the question is just how toxic and part of the problem is that you can't actually study the toxicity of this plant specifically on humans so you have to kind of do it round about by looking at the hospital records but you could actually experiment with it on other mammals like cats and mice and believe it or not people have actually done this so here you go the dose of seponens that killed 50 of mice that's the ld50 was about 0.065 milligrams per kilogram and with a little bit of math for me i'd need 5.4 milligrams to kill myself and death is from respiratory failure and just for reference this weighs about 29 milligrams but the cat study puts the whole thing in perspective a little bit better when cats were given the toxin they started to lose the ability to use their front and hind limbs they had diminished perception of pain they had a weak heartbeat and death eventually occurred from respiratory failure they found the ld50 for counts was about one gram per kilogram of pogweed root and again i did some math so for me i'd need about 85 grams of this plant and for reference that's about 17 grapes or for a two-year-old it's about two grapes now if this doesn't scare you it probably should but what i really wanted to know was what kind of toxin is this exactly like what is the analogy was it more like alcohol where at low doses it just kind of like makes you a little bit loopy medium to high doses over time really kill your liver or at high doses in one particular setting can just kill you outright or was it more like aspirin which we get from willows this plant important medicinal we use it all the time this is willow in small doses aspirin is the medicine we all know and in high doses you take 100 pills for instance it'll totally kill you you see if it's more like aspirin then the claims that this plant cures things as far-ranging as arthritis and cancer might hold a little bit of water so i called up someone who got their phd in pokeweed toxins and despite nerding out on pokeberries for about a half an hour i came out of it with this i mean there's all sorts of stuff in pokeweed so like the dose makes the poison pokey doesn't have thorns it doesn't have spines it doesn't have anything like that so it's only got its chemicals and so it's making all sorts of chemicals maybe some of them work against caterpillar x and some of them work against deer and some of them work against caterpillar y and what was so neat is she studied the gradient of toxicity from north to south so i think it's kind of a mystery like why do people eat pokeweed in the south because my work shows that like the southern pokeweed is more toxic but also the caterpillars eat it more in the south now we still don't understand this maybe it's just cultural in the south or maybe in the south it's the least toxic of the toxic things i don't really know i also know that with thousands of chemicals in this plant some of them might actually be good for us we just don't know enough about them yet and the way modern medicine works is you take each individual chemical you isolate it and then you test it and you have to test it on humans and for pokeweed most of the chemicals have not been fully studied especially on humans so maybe this plant does something i'm not exactly sure what i did know is that the lethal dose is more like this entire stalk and not just one so i thought i would try one individual one and report back to you [Music] this is probably a really bad idea turns out i was okay but it tastes terrible oh that was not a good idea oh it's very strong very strong and i actually think that's probably a good thing because it means you're not going to take one of the berries and start eating a whole bunch of them and it probably also means your kids are not going to do the same thing do you eat it yeah no but the take home is that you need to learn to identify this plant i mean it is found all over the country look at all the places it grows and this plant has relatives worldwide now before i go i wanted to tackle one last legend and that was that the ink from this plant was used to sign the declaration of independence first things first i had to see if i could make ink from it i picked the right fairies used a strainer added a bit of salt and vinegar to it then tested it out and turns out it does really well in watercolor and i made this card with it and when i brought this up to the expert here's what she said coke read was ink was used to write the declaration of independence and i've dug into it enough that it actually is a myth that it's not true um but people say that often and knowing this plant will also mean you're not going to mistake this as a grape or you're going to dig up the roots and eat it as a tuber or something and the silver lining is look how pretty this beautiful plant is i mean as long as you don't eat it or let somebody else eat it you'll be fine and it's a neat plant to have around the house here's some footage of me geeking out about it when i found it in the garden because i want you to see this beautiful red stem i kind of like that it's a deadly plant that's in the yard so if i take these off like those just crumble in my hand look at that oh so whether you're cooking up this plant to try to eat it or maybe you were looking it up to try to figure out if the berries are edible and you want to try them for some herbal remedy look you just ate it in the video or some kid ate one and you're trying to figure out what to do how toxic is it i hope this video was a little bit useful for you now let me give you a couple of things that you can leave with and continue your education the first thing is that you could pick up the new book that haley and i wrote called mother nature is not trying to kill you it just came out yesterday the box just came i'm so excited hot diggity poke weed is in here along with a lot of other plants and animals the whole thing is a wildlife and bushcraft survival guide the other thing you could do is you could head over to our patreon site you're actually doing a lot to help sustain the work that we're doing on wildlife education because let's face it youtube doesn't pay a lot for these kind of videos in fact nobody else really pays for them but i think it's really important for people to continue this outdoor education uh no kids can eat it because it's poison you can get discounts on the book you get to meet my family come over here august and we do behind the scenes stuff that nobody else gets to see and you get discounts also on the courses and different things that we do and i'm going to send out autographed copies of the book maybe august you want to sign one too and send it out to people anyways uh click on this video it's our most popular one it's the deer video that's a good one right oh yeah yeah or click on this one which is the one youtube thinks you would like either way make sure you're subscribed to stoneage man because we have a lot more videos about wildlife around us coming out soon you want to say anything is it the mosquito video by the way oh maybe is it

Channel: StoneAgeMan

Views: 827,843

Keywords: ecoarmy, rob nelson, untamed science, pokeweed, poke, poke salad, poke salat, poke weed, Deadly plants, poisonous berry

Id: Hog_LTN5K0I

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020