It’s all about the dose

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Slightly Toxic Lunch

Among all the nutritional nonsense we encounter, one fact is rarely, if ever, mentioned: the dose. How many blueberries must we eat daily to restore our mental sharpness and eliminate arthritis? Do we need a kilo of kale or just a few spoonfuls to experience its life-changing benefits? Is eating lion’s mane mushroom every day necessary to achieve its renowned nootropic effects, or is an occasional meal enough to jog your memory of the kids’ names in preschool? The reason this information is so scarce is that it has never been scientifically studied in humans.

The food, supplement, and nutraceutical world follows a very simple model. Find a molecule that shows an effect in tissue cultures or rats and then assume it benefits humans. On the other side are toxicologists and chemists who isolate toxic molecules, claiming the food is harmful. Both are completely wacky.

In the 15th century, the Swiss physician, Paracelsus, who shortened his name from Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, revolutionized medicine by thinking critically and observing nature. One of his key ideas is captured in this quote: ‘All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.’ Although this made him the father of modern toxicology, the principle has been conveniently forgotten by today’s nutrition world, even after 500 years.

As an example, the porcini (Boletus edulis), the most widely eaten and highly prized wild mushroom, contains amatoxin, the same molecule that is present in the death cap and the destroying angel. No one thinks of it as a poisonous mushroom because the concentration is so low that it has no physiological impact when eaten by humans. In other words, its presence is irrelevant as far as being a food is concerned.

The same is true the other way around. A food containing a molecule that is thought to have medicinal effects probably has little to no benefit because the dose is too low to be effective.

Welcome to the wonderful world of edible chemistry, where every meal is a game of molecular roulette and your grocery cart doubles as a portable pharmacy/poison cabinet.

Many foods considered everyday staples contain natural toxins or can produce harmful compounds if not grown, stored, or prepared properly. Over the centuries, humans have acquired the knowledge to breed safer varieties with lower toxin levels (e.g., lima beans, cassava), learned to use only the safe parts of plants (e.g., rhubarb stems, not leaves), and discovered proper methods for storing and preparing certain plants. Your kitchen is essentially a low-security chemical weapons facility, and you’re the unwitting lab technician. Consider these daily dose dilemmas:

Potatoes: Leave them in the light too long, and they turn green with spite, accumulating enough solanine to ruin your weekend. They may be protesting their impending fate as French fries.

Kidney Beans: Raw ones contain enough phytohaemagglutinin to send you to the hospital faster than you can say “three-bean salad.” Boil them properly, and they become the harmless foundation of your virtuous vegetarian meal, with a little gas for emphasis.

Apple Seeds: Contain amygdalin, which releases cyanide when chewed. Mother Nature’s way of saying, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but the seeds might bring him running back.”

Cashews: These “raw” nuts you pay premium prices for? They’re actually roasted or steamed because truly raw cashews contain urushiol—the same compound that makes poison ivy memorable. Raw cashew vendors would quickly become former vendors of cashews.

Kale: Consuming too much kale or other brassicas may affect your thyroid function.

The supplement industry has turned this dose confusion into gold. They’ve discovered that consumers will pay extraordinary amounts for concentrated extracts of compounds that exist in trace amounts in regular food.

1. Find a molecule that does something interesting in a petri dish

2. Extract it from its natural context

3. Concentrate it beyond any reasonable dietary level

4. Market it as “nature’s secret weapon”

5. Profit while customers wonder why their $50 bottle of concentrated whatever doesn’t deliver the promised transformation

Plants didn’t evolve to be our personal health consultants. They developed their chemical arsenals specifically to avoid becoming lunch. We’ve spent millennia playing a sophisticated game of “how can we eat this without dying?” through selective breeding, careful preparation, and the occasional brave hero who discovered that soaking cassava removes the cyanide.

The result is a delicate dance where timing, preparation, and quantity matter more than the scary-sounding chemical names that make headlines. Too little of a “superfood” compound, and you might as well be eating expensive dirt. Too much of anything, even water, and you’re in trouble.

Every time you sit down to eat, you’re conducting a complex chemistry experiment. The difference between medicine and poison isn’t the substance—it’s the dose. Your morning coffee contains hundreds of compounds, some beneficial, some potentially harmful, most completely irrelevant at normal consumption levels.

The real miracle isn’t that certain foods contain magical healing molecules. The miracle is that humans figured out how to turn a planet full of things trying not to be eaten into a global cuisine that’s (usually) more delicious than deadly.

So the next time someone tries to sell you on the life-changing power of consuming industrial quantities of kale, remember Bombastus and his timeless wisdom: It’s not about the molecule—it’s about the dose. And sometimes, the most radical thing you can do is eat a normal amount of regular food and call it a day.

Now, excuse me while I go carefully measure out my daily ration of exactly 0.73 blueberries for optimal cognitive enhancement.