Honey and Onions

Bikewer

Penultimate Amazing
Bikewer
Joined
Sep 12, 2003
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Location
St. Louis, Mo.
My wife gets her nails "done" at one of those little shops that appear to be everywhere. The proprietors are Vietnamese. She overheard a conversation with a customer and the husband of the owner/proprietor.

The customer asked what he thought of traditional Oriental medicine, and the guy said he didn't use any of the herbal or traditional cures. However, he said he always avoided eating onions and honey at the same time. Claimed the combo was poisonous.
Hehe- he might have been pulling her leg, of course. Still, that's a new one to me. Anyone heard of that particular belief?

Hard to imagine a dish that would use honey and onions at the same time....
 
Bikewer said:
However, he said he always avoided eating onions and honey at the same time. Claimed the combo was poisonous.
Hehe- he might have been pulling her leg, of course. Still, that's a new one to me. Anyone heard of that particular belief?

Hard to imagine a dish that would use honey and onions at the same time....
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I used to make a sweet and sour sauce using honey. The stuff it was served with generally included onions. I'm still around. :)
 
Bikewer said:
... However, he said he always avoided eating onions and honey at the same time. Claimed the combo was poisonous.
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This stirs up lots of questions that woo's can never answer. For example:

What is the name and properties of the toxin created?

How long should you wait after having one before having the other?

If they were really that dangerous shouldn't you just avoid one of them, just to be safe?

What chemical in honey is the culprit (and more importantly what other foods is it in)?

I'm sure questions like these never even cross the mind of people who believe things like this.

LLH
 
GodMark2 said:
I regularly put honey and onions in my pasta sauces at the same time, but the all powerfull garlic must be neutralizing the toxin.
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Oh ye of little faith! It is His Noodliness who saves your life.

~~ Paul
 
Darn, I'd thought from the topic that this was going to be about something else. Sorry if this railroads it, but:
In medieval times, the "cure for the common cold" was to coat a clove of garlic in honey, put it in your ear (yah) and sleep with that side of your head up. In about seven days, the cold goes away.
And I can't help but think of that whenever anyone mentions "traditional medicine".
 
So a cold goes away in 7 days? Geez, I wonder how long it lasts if you don't take anything for it? Heard Rush Limbaugh today do a spot for some homeopathic cold remedy. Swore that he used it himself and that it works. I imagine that, in 7 days, the cold is gone. Great stuff!
 
Libertarian said:
So a cold goes away in 7 days? Geez, I wonder how long it lasts if you don't take anything for it?
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Exactly :D So very, very much of "traditional medicine" strikes me as a belief that you had to do SOMETHING for there to be a change, rather than just sit back and let your body do what it does best.

Heard Rush Limbaugh today do a spot for some homeopathic cold remedy. Swore that he used it himself and that it works. I imagine that, in 7 days, the cold is gone. Great stuff!
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I occasionally listen to Air America, and they have a spot for "homeopathic eyedrops". So, it's like, um, water? I guess we can't contest their claim that it helps get rid of dryness.
 
Betenoire said:
Darn, I'd thought from the topic that this was going to be about something else. Sorry if this railroads it, but:
In medieval times, the "cure for the common cold" was to coat a clove of garlic in honey, put it in your ear (yah) and sleep with that side of your head up. In about seven days, the cold goes away.
And I can't help but think of that whenever anyone mentions "traditional medicine".
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Traditional treatment for baldness... dung on your head. Yep, true sh*thead treatments.
 
You know, there is some WEIRD stuff that modern medicine does (for Crohn's patients, they're experimenting with ingesting pig hookworm because it really does work. For C. difficile infections of the gut, they're experimenting with gastronasal tubes feeding healthy people's dung into the patient's GI tract), but at the very least it is experimentally verified.
Speaking of which, anybody know if Gingko stands up to clinical testing? I could use a memory enhancer some days.
 
Has anyone tested if liver and fava beans are poisonous? :p (sorry, but you know that reference had to come up sooner or later)


Oh, and Betenoire: I don't claim to know this, but wasn't even the "common cold" capable of killing people back in the days? If so, when did it stop becoming life-threatening and gradually turn into something merely annoying as it is today?
 
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Hawk one said:
Has anyone tested if liver and fava beans are poisonous? :p (sorry, but you know that reference had to come up sooner or later?


Oh, and Betenoire: I don't claim to know this, but wasn't even the "common cold" capable of killing people back in the days? If so, when did it stop becoming life-threatening and gradually turn into something merely annoying as it is today?
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I've never heard of that. Got a source?
 
Betenoire said:
I've never heard of that. Got a source?
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Not really, that's why I tried (but not entirely succeeded, I see now) to take care to make sure I was speculating. The basis for such speculation are nothing more than faded memories from high-school lessons about how diseases that the Europeans had learned to live with (literally) turned out to be quite fatal for the native residents of The New World.

My point was merely to say that -if- the cold was a more serious matter in those days, or at least lasting much longer than they do now, then at least the claim of getting rid of it within 7 days would make more sense. To clarify, I am not saying said "cure" was effective, just that it wouldn't seem completely stupid to claim success within 7 days.

Of course, I might well still be trying to make excuses here, and that they were really pre-homeopaths (in that they only offer soothing, and nothing that actually does something to your body).
 
alfaniner said:
Possibly, but only if consumed along with a nice Chianti.
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Actually, those items are a legitimate threat to some people.

Liver, fava beans, and wine (as well as cheese) all contain a chemical called tyramine. For most folks, this isn't an issue, but for psychiatric patients taking MAO Inhibitors, tyramine can result in cardiac arrest (!). Thus, patients on MAO Inhibitors are absolutely forbidden from eating tyramine-rich foods such as these.

By consuming fava beans and chianti wine when he (allegedly) killed and ate someone in a mental institution, Hannibal Lechter was playing on this fact in a kind of "delicious irony." (Or at the very least, a somewhat flavorful irony; I'll bet a steady diet of Long Pig gets boring after a while.)
 
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