Hi, and welcome to this podcast Will Kill You Crossover Edition.
I'm Aaron Welsh and I'm eron Aman Updank and this.
Week we are joined by our good friend and fellow podcaster Matt Kindaeus.
Say Hi, Matt, Hi, Matt, I should never have done that. I'm ashamed of myself already.
No, it's perfect. So Matt is a fellow grad student and host of the incredible podcast In Defensive Plants. You, Matt, can you introduce yourself a bit and talk a little bit about what your podcast does.
Yeah, I'm Matt Candeis and I host In Defensive Plants. It is a weekly podcast that essentially is there to cure what we call plant blindness. And by we, I just mean people that like plants.
We suffer from plant line.
Yeah, a lot of the world does. And it's not a fault. It's just the way our species is programmed. But that's why the podcast exists, and I think that's the niche it's feeling, is to celebrate plants and get people excited, maybe not obsessed. You don't have to become obsessed with them, but excitement and just appreciate the botanical world because really we wouldn't be here without it, So.
Yeah, that's very true.
It's awesome, and everyone go and check it out in Defensive Plants.
Well, especially because we're there's going to be another episode, yes, that will.
Exist, because this is a crossover.
Cross a reciprocal transplant where we're.
Going to be on that podcast.
That's what I do, that's what I study.
So Matt's joining us this week and then upcoming we will be joining Matt on his podcast to talk about.
Herbal lism things.
Yeah. Yeah, So there's a lot of i'll call it mysticism and folklore surrounding herbal remedies. And though I'm not a practicing herbalist, I know there's merit to some and a lot of misinformation about others. So who better to bring on than some disease ecologists to talk about the wild world of plant medicinals.
So totally in our wheelhouse. We're gonna try, we'll research it.
Yeah, we're smart people.
Right, Yeah, exactly, that's literally our job. So Matt is here because this week, as we said, we're doing something a little bit different. This is part one of a crossover series on poison. We have at least a four part series I feel like we could expand it eventually too. Yeah, but at a minimum, you've got a four part series and each week we're going to talk about a different
poisonous plant. It's used throughout human history, the effects it actually has on your body, and then the evolutionary ecology of the plant, meaning why does it produce the compounds that make you sick.
It's gonna be super duper fun.
Yeah, I'm so pumped. Yeah, I can't even contain. Like, we were messaging back and forth about this and I was like, I'm like, yes, I know.
It was really hard to not go, oh my gosh, I guess I just learned. You have to know about this. It's so cool. Yeah, so very exciting.
This allows me to stretch some muscles that I don't ever get to stretch. It's it's not a wheelhouse, I frequent. So thanks being open to this idea.
I love it.
We're pumped. Okay, So, because this is an episode of this podcast, will kill you. Guess what we have.
A quarantine any time? A quarantiney time.
What do we have this week?
This week we're drinking the wolf Spin potion. Yeah, because we're talking about what plant.
Well, it's a bunch of plants, but monkshood essentially in the genus acnodum.
Fabulous, which also contains the plant wolf spain, right, or is that a different plant?
Well? Was it the same plant?
Plant blindness at work?
Yeah, first, lesson common names are are kind of a pain In the end, a lot of plants can be called the same thing and be called many different things throughout different cultures. So essentially this is in the buttercup family. So the best example is a buttercup in the United States is different than a buttercup in England. But when you say wolf spain, you're generally referring to a group of plants in the genus acnodum. Or the monk SAIDs.
Okay, fabulous, awesome. So but what is in the wolf Spain potion this week? Yeah? Is it's basically an aviation Yeah, which if you haven't heard of it, it's a really delicious drink.
It's purple, it's beautiful, it's geuz.
I just thought we could nail the jakes too.
But yeah, and and so we'll post the recipe and all that online along with some cool pictures.
So what are chills we do need?
Clink? There we go it was an okay sound, it wasn't quite crystal. But you know, now that that's out of the way, yep. Intro is over, I'll get started. So since we're doing a four parter on this topic, I figured I would kind of split the history of poisons into four parts, so Ancient, Middle Ages, Victorian, and modern. I don't know if that's going to be how it
ends up being. The boundaries are a little bit fluid, but in any case, this week I'll be talking about the ancient history of poisons, So who first decided to use them, how were they used, what was their reputation? And then I'm going to talk specifically about the history of the chosen poison of the week wolf Spain aka Aconite, aka Monkshood, et cetera. Turns out this beauty is not just the name of the werewolf Preventative and Harry Potter
and are quarantiny. So what's the difference between a physician, a pretender, a magician and a poisoner? Ooh, The answer is that it depends. Those lines have always been blurred in the history of medicine and medicinal plants, many of which have a dual nature of healing. And harm, and those lines continue to be blurred in modern times, which is something we'll get to talk a lot more about in the herbal Medicine crossover episode. Yeah, but this week
we're here to talk about poisons. The poisons have been around for I thought this was really cool, all of written human history dang d so Yeah, and also probably millennia before.
That, I wouldn't done it. Yeah, I mean, you got to respect the fact that there's something there in human nature. You don't just invent writing and then start poisoning people.
Yeah, exactly. That's the really interesting part because like, in order to determine what plants are poisonous, what plants are are helpful, what plants are food, it's going to involve a lot of trial and error, a lot of barfing, a lot of numb mouths, hallucinations and death along the way, and.
A big plug for rampant Diary.
I can't believe, thank you. How is anyone alive? Really the big question. Imagine that you're one of those early humans. You can't resort to Google like you can nowadays to tell you everything about a plant. You can't just watch what you eat, but you have to remember how it made you feel, and you didn't just rely on firsthand experience for this knowledge. If you saw a cluster of dead birds or foxes or something next to a bush filled with red berries, maybe you'd make a note not
to keep those berries. We would hope, we yeah, one would hope and yeah. And then also, you know, if a friend told you about a digestive experience after feasting on a new salad creation, maybe you'd ask them to point out which plants they use, just like which taco bells to avoid, because there are good ones and bad ones, and the answers you should avoid them all. Yeah, I mean we're.
Weak, yes, yeah.
And before written language, this knowledge couldn't be stored in physical form. It had to be disseminated in a much different way through storytelling, from one village to another, from one generation to the next. And slowly this knowledge spread. But one person's knowledge is another person's weapon, and it wouldn't have been long before someone would have snuck some
parsley looking hemlock into their rivals side salad. The first written record words we have of the use of poisons comes from just a little bit after writing itself was thought to be invented so around five thousand years ago. Wow, And we see around that time descriptions of poisonous and medicinal plants pop up all over around the same time, which is kind of weird in Egyptian papyri, Chinese and Indian texts, and Mesopotamian clay tablets.
I mean, is it weird or is it just humans were doing that? And then they well, we might as well write this down.
Well, and like what's more important than like we we need to eat every day a certain amount. We need to eat the things that we collect.
And this is how you kill your enemies.
Well, and this is.
How you mean there's two families and enough food to support one of them.
Yeah, so sorry, you guys are going straight to the how to poison someone's section of that tablet, so our heads, I mean yeah so. And also, poisons featured prominently in Greek and Roman mythology, where it seems like the reputation of poison as a woman's weapon had taken hold, which is really fun. So Dianeira, the second wife of Heracles aka Hercules, killed him with a poisoned shirt for being
unfaithful to her deserved it. Yeah, file that under stuff Disney left out of the movie, along with the fact that Hercules driven mad by Hara I Love I Love like. Disney did not tell you Hercules killed his first wife and children as you do. We'll get to that leader anyway. Side note hercules second wife, the one who killed him. Her name Dianira means man destroyer or destroyer of her husband.
Okay, if I ever have kids, that's their name.
Also in the Odyssey, Circe, which you know, she's got to be evil, right, we know everything, a goddess of magic uses mind altering drugs to turn all of Odysseus's men into pigs. Although to what end I have no idea.
Just for fun, I'm bacon.
I don't know. It's really weird though, yeah, I couldn't find a reason for that. But jumping from myth into history, we see poisons play a huge role in the legal and political system of ancient Rome, which isn't as boring as it may sound. Poisons were widely used to carry out death sentences, and that's what happened with the famous philosophers Socrates. So he was convicted of moral corruption and impiety, and he was ordered to drink a hemlock infusion, and
there's great paintings of this. There's one where he's like angrily in a I don't know bath sheet or toga.
I assume same difference.
I mean, my experience with toga is frat party only, so yeah, it's gotta be a bath shoot. Yeah. Yeah, So I'll post some of those paintings because they're really fun.
That's amazing.
But from this time, which is around three hundred and ninety nine beasts see around that exact date, poisons seemed to become increasingly popular in ancient Rome. The Hippocratic oath.
And I'm looking at you Someday.
Written around then, includes the phrase neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Interesting. Yeah, it's pretty clear that poisoning was a problem in physicians.
But even then it goes back to what you originally said about blurred lines.
Right, I mean, how do you define meety poisonous?
But it is it intent defines the poison.
Really, this is philosophy question.
I mean, too bad. Socrates was killed by a poison. Galen, who was another famous Greek physician and scholar, instructed doctors to collect herbs and prepare potions themselves rather than bying them at the market, where one plant could be sold under the wrong name, leading to a deadly quote mistake, and to protect themselves. Also, the wealthy hired tasters, which is one of the odder status symbols.
They like to taste their food, right, Yeah.
So it became such a popular practice that there grew to be an official society of tasters. I don't know what union they did.
Awesome?
Yeah, did they protect your family if you died, that'd be great.
Oh, good question.
I don't know which.
You're going to you've signed up for that.
Well, But the thing is, like having a taster wouldn't have done much good, probably because if you were going to poison someone, you wouldn't choose a fast acting poison because that would be very obvious, particularly if someone had a taster, and you would also probably be more accumulative poison.
Well, you could do fast acting poison as long as no one knew it was you that put it in the food, right.
But the thing is, if your intent was to kill your target and the person had a taster, yeah, yeah, you're right, they had to have a delay because the person is going to be way too hungry.
They don't. I mean, come on, if your poison subject has a taster.
We're not telling you how to poison someone.
But we're just telling you.
But if we're talking hypothetical to here everyone. So anyway, poisonings happened frequently, and as per usual, the law had to catch up with the popular trends. Eventually, cultivating certain poisonous plants became a capital offense, really a capital offense, and entire legal institutions were responsible for dishing out punishments for poisoners.
Wow, as a gardener, that upsets me.
Why the cultivation side of it?
I want to get arrested. Well, I guess there's still our plants. I could get arrested, but.
In Illinois no one should come after my mom.
Said, don't tread on my monk's hood.
Don't tread on my monk's head.
Oh my god, that's funny. So yeah, these entire legal institutions were responsible for dishing out punishments for poisoners, and those punishments weren't far from the crime itself. At one point, in three hundred and thirty one BC, a whole slew of women one hundred and seventy actually.
Were the unit of one hundred and seventy women is one slu It's kind of like sorry, I'm sorry.
Three pecks. No one and a half bushels were Anyway, these these poor Slough were accused, tried, and convicted of mass poisoning of men, husbands, lovers, people who stood in their way, et cetera. And during the trial some were told to drink their prepared potions as proof of innocence. As I've said, there's a line between poison and medicine, with dosage as one of the deciding factors. And all the women died whoops, or were put to death.
Yeah.
So, though poisons continued to be used in battle, whether through poison tipped arrows or intentionally contamining water supplies, which did happen multiple times, they maintained their reputation as a woman's choice for murder. And in fact, the star of today's episode, Aconite, was referred to as stepmother's poison or the mother in law's poison. So poison has his reputation for being a woman's weapon, right, and some women leaned
into this, making lives for themselves as professional poisoners. She's a witch or poison consultants.
Oh oh, yeah, it's a good business card.
I mean, it's great. So Lacusta, I don't know if that's how you say her name. Lc Usta was a former slave turned consultant for Nero, Roman Emperor. Nero later emperor, who was so thirsty for the emperor physition seriously, and so she helped him kill the current emperor, Claudius's son, and then helped Claudius's wife to kill Claudius himself, clearing
the path for Nero. And with the fall of the Roman Empire, the field of poisoning, toxicology, and medicinal plants, both in research and practice, seem to retreat to the shadows in that part of the world, but it would continue to be built upon and much expanded by physicians and scientists like Avicenna in the Islamic Golden Age. Okay, all right, so early history of poisons check, we're done.
But where does aconite fit into all of this? Yeah? Well, to answer that, we're going to dive back into some mythology briefly. Are you ready for this?
Always?
Yes?
All right, Let's take a trip back to the summer before tenth grade. I don't want to do this my tenth grade. So in between doing really cool hip things like rereading Harry Potter one through five, I worked on my summer assignment, Edith Hamilton's Mythology. So Edith Hamilton's Mythology and Harry Potter is where my love for Harry Potter met my love for trivia and origin stories.
You do love those things. Every movie I've ever watched with this Aaron usually has a segment for trivia somewhere between halfway through, and.
That's why we love her, all right, So this is basically when I read Edith Hamilton, I learned about Cerberus, who was the three headed dog that guarded the entrance to the underworld and served as inspiration for all Yeah, you got a girl.
Fluffy was the dog that guarded the place where they kept the Philosopher's Stone, the Sorcerer's Stone.
Yeah, at least somewhere along that pathway exactly, you got it anyway, So I was really excited to see that crossover there. Okay, so it turns out that Hercules. Remember I was gonna I told you that we were going to circle back to this in order to repent for killing his wife and kids the first time. The first time his first wife and his five kids. I think five? Whoa, it was okay if you killed two. I mean five just seems extreme, doesn't it. He was crazy by Hara
who else? Yeah, Well, in order to repent for this, he had to perform various feats of strength, including capturing Cerberus and bringing him to the surface. While he was up there, Cerberus got off foamy mouthed because he wasn't used to sunlight. Rabies sound like rabies.
Teas and water spoilers, It's going to be our first episode of ease in two. Everybody get excited.
In any case, Cerberus's spit flew everywhere and where it landed, Aconite grew, and from these humble beginnings, aconite gained a reputation as one of the deadliest poisons in ancient times seriously forking, deadly wow, Yeah Heckeate goddess of witchcraft, and also in Shakespeare's Macbeth, one of the wishes discovered its use as a poison, and Greek shepherds would smear aconite juice on arrows or mix the plant with raw meat to protect their sheep from wolves. Hence, the name wolves Spain.
Oh, so they would put it on so that the wolves would die it with the Yeah. Interesting.
So like a lot of what I what I learned in some of this, like reading about ancients, is that anything with wood after it, if it was wormwood used to treat worms, Hen's bane wolf Spain. You are trying to kill whatever? So what ishood you trying to kill?
No? No, no, months.
Which we'll get to see. I haven't looked at any.
Pictures yet, which I'm so excited.
Yeah. Other species in the aconite genus have been used to poison arrows in Japan, in the Himalayas, in China, and in Alaska, so all over. Basically on one Greek island, aconite was put in the drinks of old men when they were quote no longer of use to the community. Early references to aconite emphasize it's extremely potent nature. If you were going to use aconite, you should be wearing protective clothing while gardening and avoid breathing in any of the aconite powder during preparation.
Wow.
Oh, preparation for poisons apparently continue to this day.
Yes, well absolutely, I can't wait to hear more about the plant. Itself.
Oh yeah, okay, I'll get to it. Then aaronski use me. That was just a I'm excited, okay, yeah, where the smell of the plant alone was thought to be strong enough to cause illness or death.
Whoa.
Somewhere along the way, though, the language around aconite changed. It turned from poison to medicine. You name it, aconite, will treat it, seemed to be the motto, and that happened around the mid seventeen hundreds. It was prescribed by many doctors when a good sweat was needed. This is back when the ancient concept of various bodily humors still
held sway in the medical field. Oddly enough, aconite didn't prove to be a particularly rely liable or safe treatment and gradually fell out of favor in the medical community after the treatment didn't agree with one too many patients.
And by agree, we mean like it killed one too many patients.
Thank you, exactly exactly. But that didn't mark the end for aconite. Where it initially failed to gain support in the Orthodox medical community, it found in homeopathy. Under the concept of like cures. Like drugs such as aconite were used to treat diseases which had similar symptoms. Aconite was used for acute diseases, especially those characterized by fever and pain. It gained reputation as a substitute for blood letting. Probably it's treating one evil for another poisoning, right, I mean
you know which. In these times, people were always looking for an excuse to bloodlet Apparently, aconite were best on fearful nervous patients and to calm and it was used to calm women down during nasty periods, the ultimate all your period.
You might, you might, you might, Maybe I need to calm myself down during my rageful period.
She's raging, very paging.
I should mention, though, that the actual amount of aconite in many of these remedies was so teeny tiny small that it was negligible. Homeopaths were publishing on aconite left and right, and around the mid eighteen hundreds, orthodox physicians started paying attention, which is kind of interesting. Aconite in certain carefully measured doses seem to be effective as a neural suppressant, meaning a drug that inhibits activity of parts
of the nervous system, particularly in controlling inflammation. Don't worry, I'm not gonna stop on your toes.
Don't worry.
I'll talk so much more about it.
Wonderful, I love it. But so when when it was found to actually have these effects, it became all the rage. So throughout the eighteen hundreds and into the early nineteen hundreds, aconite or aconite mixed with other things like chloroform and belladonna. Oh good lord, yep was used as a painkiller or to treat infection, lung conditions, nerve pain, and so on.
Wow.
The adoption of aconite by Orthodox physicians from homeopathy was also a big deal. But we're still talking about a poison here. And just because something alters your physiology in a way that does not kill or name, does not make it good for you. Word yea. And so we circle back to the question I pose at the beginning of this what is the difference between a physician and a pretender, a magician, a poisoner? Yeah, the answer lies somewhere between ignorance and intent. So, Aaron, tell us what
exactly does aconite do that makes it a poison? All right?
Let me tell you about wolf, spain, monkshood, et cetera. All right, So, yeah, these plants, because we know there's multiples contain a compound called a conatine. This is the compound that actually makes you sick. And later in just a few minutes, because I'm gonna be quick, Matt is going to tell you about why these plants actually contain this compound. To begin with, like, what's the point of having something that kills people in you as a plant tissue?
Which is a really fun question I can't wait to hear about.
But first let me tell you so that I have a point to being here, what actually happens to your body when you ingest this plant? Like, what is actually making you sick?
When you go out on a limb and say it's not.
Pleasant, it's not at all? Okay, So a conotine affects a bunch of different parts of your body, but the effects that are most important are what it has on both your heart tissue and your nervous system. But the effects are pretty widespread. So it can affect your GI tract, your nervous system, your heart. It has a pretty widespread effect. So what actually happens when you take a bite of wolf spain for example, or you take a pill that someone gave you that's like full of it, sip just
a sip of a tincture or something. Right within a really short amount of time, like as little as ten minutes or maximum like two hours. Whoa, right, it's really fast acting. You'll start to see symptoms that include numbness in your face or limbs, periestiesia, which is a fancy word for you feel a tingling or a burning sensation. Could be until it's not. You might have some muscle weakness. You'll become hypotensive, which means your blood pressure drops really low.
That's not good. It's never good.
And then your heart, and this is important, it might begin to race really fast, or it might slow way way way down.
I don't like that.
It could go either way.
It could go either way.
It could go that's the scariest or not. You've poisoned.
Talk a lot about it.
You don't worry. Flip a coin, Flip a coin. No, we'll talk about why don't worry.
This is why I don't wild forage.
That's a good reason not to. And then on top of that, you might also have things like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea.
Of course, you sound like I was gonna say, na.
Diarrhea.
Yep, all of that, all of that if you manage to get to a hospital and you don't die, if it's possible and you get to a hospital, the good news is that within twenty four hours you'll probably be fine because this is very fast acting. But it's also it's a pretty quick recovery, so it has a very short half life in your body, right. Your body digests
it very quickly. But and I didn't look up enough to detail probably about the actual mortality rate, but at least in this article that I found, even in hospital cases, the mortality rate is over five percent. So even if you manage to get to the hospital and get treatment, you still have an over five percent chance of dying.
Well, so that's that's really interesting because that mortality rate would have to do with modern cases. So, yeah, intentional poisoning or I ate way too much of this really weird thing.
Well, but also which happens, it's also a very common thing that's used in a lot of herbal remedies.
Okay, good, I was going to ask you about the current status of acne idea.
Yeah, yeah, so it is definitely a thing, and there's a lot of information out there about what people tend to do to treat this either the leaves or the roots that they're using in order to make it less toxic but still have less Yes, exactly, I think you'll you'll probably talk more.
Yeah, and and and the fact that this is a crossover, this is a subject will be covering probably a little bit more.
Next week, exactly.
But yeah, so it's it is still very commonly used in a lot of sort of traditional medicine type things. Okay, So here's the question, though, How on earth can just eating a plant cause so many different symptoms, everything from numbness or muscle weakness to the general cause of death is actually heart failure. Your heart just fully stops, it can't handle it, it gives out.
That's terrifying.
So how can a plant actually cause something that a lot of these symptoms, nausea, muscle weakness, these seem very disparate, right, So the question is systems, right, what on earth is happening?
Let me tell you I didn't.
I'm just like, go ahead and google it. Here's what happens. The major compound that's in these plants, a conatine, attacks your sodium channels. Here's what you need to know to understand how this compound, a conatine actually affects your system. Number one. You all know hopefully that your nervous system is generally in charge of your body, right. It sends signals to different parts of your body that say things like contract this muscle or release this hormone.
Et cetera, go to the bathroom now exactly.
So the way that it sends these signals is by moving ions, which just means a charge molecule across membranes. Okay, Sodium, which is a positive ion, is one of the most important things involved in sending these signals. So sodium tends to be really high in concentration outside of cells and lower inside of cells with me, so far, sure, great. So the other ion that's important is potassium. Potassium is higher inside of cells and lower.
Outside of the opposite of sodium.
Exactly, sodium outside, potassium inside, and overall, the insides of your cells are negatively charged compared to the outside.
Of your cells.
Did not know that.
There we go.
We're learning new things, all right. So ions, these charged molecules cannot cross your cellular membranes because they're charged, and your cell membranes are basically fat globules.
Okay, more than my cell membranes.
So these charged molecules can't cross the fat. They don't like each other. Okay, So the way that they cross is by channels, which are like doors that open and close and allow these ions to cross this membrane with
me mm hm totally excellent. So the way that your nervous system actually sends these signals to tell everything else in your body what to do is by propagating what we call action potentials, which basically just means that they open a channel and it's a channel that is specific to sodium, which we know is at high concentrations outside of your cell, and then a bunch of sodium rushes into the cell. And then they close that channel and they're like, okay, now we've got a bunch of sodium
inside of the cell. And then they open another channel and they're like potassium, it's your turn, and potassium rushes out of the cell.
Okay, okay.
So that is how they propagate these signals, is they go.
That's how it transfers down exactly.
So that's you, for example, you touch something that's hot, right and your skin feel that and it's like this thing is hot. So then that sends a signal that says sodium go, and then your sodium channels open, sodium rushes into your cells. Those doors close, and then the open ones that say potassium, it's your turn, potassium rushes out, et cetera. You can google some really great YouTube videos of this, but.
Essentially what you're saying is this is holding to the whole universal constant of things move from high to low concentrations precisely mad and so I did something another.
And so this means that if you touch that hot stove, that action potential or that that whole sequence of events is telling you right or is allowing you to move or telling you to move right.
So it tells your nervous system something bad is happening here. That action potential travels all the way down your nerve to your brain, which goes something's bad is happening. It travels all the way back to your muscles, which go move and then you move.
So it's like a two two parallel domino system going in a direction.
Right, and it happens instantaneously.
Right.
So these sodium channels have to be able to open and close extremely rapidly for these signals to be able to propagate. So that you can do literally anything, right. Okay, So sodium channels are really really important in you literally being able to survive, right, So what's the point of me telling you all this? Why did I just give you like an intro to physiology?
I have my suspicions.
As it turns out, a conatine, the compound that's in Monk's hood wolf span et cetera, binds to sodium channels and it forces them to stay open.
No, oh, that's not good.
It's not good. So what happens is you end up with a huge influx of sodium that comes into the cell, but then you can't close that channel in order to continue to propagate the signal. Right, So that means that anytime you get a future signal, you can't react to it because your sodium channels are already open. Oh I love that was such a good reaction.
Understanding is dawning.
Okay, So what does this mean in real life? So you take a big bite of wolf spain and you're chewing on it, and now your sodium channels are It's a nightmare. What's happening in your nervous system. You're not getting any new signals being passed. You have this one giant influx of sodium, and then that's it. You can't make any new signals because your sodium channels are stuck in the open position. They can't basically reset themselves, which they have to do to be able to detect a new signal.
So it's like you're trying to get a call, but every time you pick up the phone so much just screaming. Yeah.
But like back in the old days when they was like a busy signal because someone left your phone off the.
Old the old days, Like.
That's a great it's just like that, yep. So that's why you end up with things like numbness or tingling because your nerves are not propagating signals the way that they're supposed to exactly well, not not really hyper firing. They're not able to pick up any new signals.
So the way, But then the.
Question is why is this affecting your heart? Right, because like that's weird, Except it's not that weird because it turns out your heart doesn't actually need any nervous input in order to beat. So you can take a heart out of a human body and it will still beat. It's fantastic. And that's because your heart actually generates its own action potentials, right, It's very cool. And the way that it does that is a very similar mechanism to
your nervous system. It's the same sodium channels, et cetera. So that means exactly if you're opening the sodium channels in your nervous system, you're also opening them in your heart cells. And so your heart cells normally all communicate with each other almost simultaneously, and that's why your heart beats as if it's one thing.
Right. I never knew that.
Yeah, it's a bunch of little cells, right, but they communicate with each other so seamlessly that your heart can beat as if it's one thing, even though it's these billions of little cells. So when you open a whole bunch of sodium channels, that screws everything up. So you can end up with what we call fibrillations, which means your heart is no longer beating in sync with each other. Different fibers are firing at different times. It's not good.
You also can end up with your heart not being able to beat as effect because these sodium channels are open, so it can't Again, just like your nervous system get a new signal to tell it to beat right, so that would slow your heart rate down. Oh, exactly right. On the other hand, though, your heart doesn't need nervous
input in order to beat. The nervous system. Your central nervous system, like your brain, controls via what's called your fagus nerve, how fast your heart beats, so it can tell your heart if you're scared or something, it'll say beat a little quicker if this is scary, or if everything is okay, it'll say just relax man, beat a
little slower. So that nervous system is impaired, and it actually blocks your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest nervous system, so it blocks the signals that are telling your heart. A conatine specifically, is blocking the part of your nervous system that tells your heart chill out, everything is fine, which makes your heart beat faster.
So it's which everyone wins out in that battle. Wow.
Right, So that's why you can have all these various cardiac symptoms. You can have fibrillations your heart's not beating in sync. You can have Brady cardia your heart's beating too slowly. You can have taca cardia. Your heart's beating too quickly, and literally all of this is because of its effect on sodium channels.
That's really interesting, I know. So the I'm like, how if someone might be jumping the gun, but like, if someone had aconite poisoning.
Mm hmm, how would you know great that it was aconite? And it's a really great question. And so I will say that from what I've read, I have no like because I'm gonna be a future physician, right, Like, I have no idea how you would diagnose this. I I I want to ask some does anyone know who works in like an er It sounds like, okay, they've told us so far that one of the most important things that you can do as a physician is get a
really good history. And I think that this is the type of thing that you would really be able to diagnose based on history if someone said they ate something weird, or they took these pills, or they're a forager exactly.
So this is the type of thing that it's really important to talk to your patient or talk to a person and get that history from them, because yeah, the symptoms are kind of all over the place, and they can be so varied, but at the end, what you die from is your heart just basically giving out.
That's a really sad I know.
And this is why when people say plants are boring, I just want to slap Yeah.
So yeah, that's that's terrify.
That is terrifying.
So then the question is why on earth do these plants make this compound to begin with? Like, what's the point? Are they just trying to kill people? Do plants hate people? Yeah?
They do, that's all it is. Actually, they despite being around for many millions of years before we even came onto the scene, they had it out for us. They knew it was coming.
Listen, Matt, it's all about us.
Emolition has a point and is predicted.
It's hierarchical, it's directed. No, and that's a really good question, and I'm really happy to be here to talk about that because it's something I hold near and dear to my heart. But I think with all this talk about the plants, it would be worth kind of mentioning what
these plants are and what they look like. And to do that, I think you might have noticed this ginormous, unnecessarily large book I brought This is called The Illustrated Treasury of Cultivated Flowers by Anderson Beautiful Illustrations, and there's a whole section on monkshood or the econon of genus. And it's because they are extremely popular till this day horticultural specimens. I mean I can count four or five houses within a few blocks of where I live that
have them prolifically seeding into their gardens. It's still extremely popular. So I figured I would bring this book to show both of you because one of you at least had mentioned you hadn't googled what the plant looked like.
California Air and California.
But essentially these are perennial plants, so they come back year after year from mountainous regions around the globe. There's about two hundred and fifty different species of them, and they all have these beautiful what they call palmately compound leaves. So essentially what that means is the stem of the leaf comes up like your wrist and attaches to your hand. And if you picture the dissection on these leaves, they're like a hand with just over twenty fingers. It's just
a very dissected thing with a single attachment point. Your palm would be ly palmately compound. But the real showstopper about these plants are their flowers. Right, So you get these tall spikes, and I mean tall. These plants can come up to about my chin and I'm I'm not a tall person by any means, but you know, four or five feet tall is pretty big for an earth and some can get taller. But their real selling point
is their flowers, and these are gorgeous plants. They are popular for a reason, and their flower color ranges from yellows to deep purples. But essentially the name monkshood comes from the fact that their petals are highly derived for bee pollination, so kind of setting up the stage for the shape of a bee to come and visit their flowers, and two of the petals come up to the top
and form a hood over the reproductive parts. So it kind of looks like a beautiful blue night wearing a hoodie a blue They're gorgeous plants, right, I mean, this is a beautiful picture. This is of a Conodum neapelus. But there's plenty of others. Like I said, there's about two hundred and fifty different species in these plants. Now, it's worth mentioning that they are members of the buttercup family, and most of that family, which is Ronunki lacy, have
a lot of alkaloids. They're known for their alkaloid production, and they're toxic. They're very toxic, and for good reason. We'll get to that. But the wolf Spain we've probably been most referring to is acnonym lacoctinum, and that one's native to most of Europe and northern Asia. So that's the one that most of what you know, White European history would have probably been writing about. But that's not
to say that there aren't others. Like I said, this is a genus of two hundred and fifty give or take species, all of them extremely toxic to humans. There's also within the guys of herbalism wolf Spain, there is econonym Cosmanthemum or sorry, casmanthem There's econonym heterophyllum and econonym violaceum. And these are all largely Himalayan in their distribution, so India, Pakistan, Nepal, and I think a little bit into Iraq, but I could be mistaken about that. And they have been very
important in all of those cultures. So you talked a lot about the history, but essentially all of the history you gave has been used in various cures throughout history. So more than one group of humans stumbled on to the fact that you eat these and you're going to be in tough shape.
You can kill your enemies.
Yeah, and you.
Mentioned econodine, right, and that's really the one that a lot of people focus on with wolf Spain. But it's worth mentioning that they produce lots of alkaloids. Yeah.
I didn't even talk about all the they all act in similar ways, but yeah, I didn't even mention all the other name.
Yeah, and alcoholtes come in many forms, but in the context that we're talking about tonight, they're what we call secondary metabolites and plants, and what that means is that these are compounds that plants produce that aren't involved in growth and reproduction. Oh okay, so secondary right.
Purpose?
Right? Yeah, whatever, it's secondary compounds are largely defense compounds, and there's a lot of different ways a plant can go to defend itself, and you got to think about it from a plant's perspective, right, They're not animals they can't run from danger. Plants are stuck where they are. For the most part. There's exceptions to that rule. For anyone listening that's a plant person here, we don't need
to talk about those. But yeah, if you're stuck in a place and you're a tasty, nitrogen filled plant, things are gonna want to eat you, and you, in the plant sense, are going to need to defend yourself. And one of the many ways that plants do that are through very toxic chemical compounds, and that's where most of secondary metabolites come in. When we talk about the collagen
survival of plant species. They're to either make you so distasteful that nothing wants to eat you, or if something makes that mistake, it's the last mistake it ever makes.
Very cool, Yeah, very cool.
The thing to keep in mind about alkaloids is that they're nitrogen rich compounds. So these are usually plants that come from good soils, right and so acononym is largely a plant species in the northern hemisphere that's native to temperate areas, mountainous areas, but generally pretty rich soil types.
Because it takes a lot to produce these compounds, right, Yeah, you don't need to do it, or evolutionaries speaking, why would you produce them if you didn't have to, right, And the amount of energy and vital compounds that go into making them kind of leeds into the fact that they are very necessary for these plants long term survival. So the big thing with these plants is that they
just simply don't want to be eaten. And that's what's amazing about plant compounds, and that's something that humans have used for centuries, is the fact that the compounds that they're producing have to be biologically active. And this is why I love your idea of like it's all in the dose, right, what's a poison and what's a medicine? Well, how much are you taking and why are you taking it? Right? And that's key to this is that these plants don't
want to be eaten. Plants are trying to kill whatever's eating them, or at least make them never want to eat it again. And that's where these alkaloids start to come into place. So ecologically, evolutionarily speaking, these are all defense compounds, at least in the context of this. There's probably other functions that we don't quite understand yet, because again, the science is truly in its infancy in a lot
of ways. But it's fascinating to think about what these plants are doing just to keep things from butting off pieces. And that brings up a really good point here, is that there's variations in the composition and concentration between species, between individuals within a species, and even between parts of the same plant.
Yeah, that was a big thing I saw when they were like talking about people that use this in different remedies, was like, are you using the.
Root or the stem or the leaves?
Does it also does the species variation? Does that depend on like what organism is the primary consumer of that plant?
It's very much can. So you will often see plants that get into areas where, say islands, where there aren't large predators or mammals, don't make it too quite easily. Yeah, you still have to deal with your insect constituency, but you see kind of a reduction on a lot of compounds, because why would you produce something if you didn't have to? These are expensive products to produce, so why.
Make something that's strong enough to kill a mammal if all you have to kill is like a grasshopper? Right, which it probably it doesn't take nearly the concentration or whatever to kill a grasshopper as.
It was into the whole energy budget. Yeah, one, am I spending my energy.
On this is so fun?
Yes, I know. I love that the ecology side is coming out right now. Yeah, but exactly, you've hit the nail on the head, and we'll talk about insects and just that evolutionary arms race in which you get around those sorts of things. But again, all of these are
to deter herbivores to any extent possible. Yeah, So as far that we know from what we've been able to establish at this point of the fifty four phytochemically investigated species of ecnodom So essentially that's just saying of the fifty four species that we've decided to analyze the chemical composition, they all contain a connoteam like alkaloids, which are neurotoxic,
as we decided cardiotoxic from mammals and insects. And it's important to note that you're talking about sodium channels right raid. Our favorite b spray also opens up those sodium channels and that's the way in which it works.
So yeah, yeah, these sodium channels are highly conserved across evolutionary tax.
Right, that's a very effective way to kill any sort of living animal. Yeah, definitely, or again make it never want to eat you.
Yeah.
So the fact that different organs can vary is pretty interesting because the localization of these secondary metabolite says a lot about from a survival standpoint, what these plants really are trying to protect. So most of what you most of the stuff you want to avoid with econodam, although I recommend avoiding the whole freaking plant in terms of digestion.
Are the growth tips, so any part that's actively growing, so a leaf, bud, the flowers, right, Reproduction is the key to many sort of species.
That makes sense.
Yeah, So you want to protect the parts that.
Do that, so they should be the most dangerous the.
Roots because essentially a plant is nothing without its roots. And most of the deaths that I encountered in my trying to avoid encountering them were from people eating the tubers.
Yeah, what's left over at that point? So if you are going to use aconite, use the stems, right, but also don't use any part of it.
Just seem like if you're going to use it, think of twice and don't yourself, right, But that brings up a really interesting point because it's not just herbivores that are interacting with these plants.
They're flowering plants. They're an angiosperm, and what do we know about angiosperms?
Lots of flying bees, and pollinator.
Was like a wing thing to give us a cue, he was flapping his hands. We got there eventually.
So when people started looking at the levels of these toxic alkaloids, which again a conatine is just one of them. There's at least ten different very toxic alkaloids to consider when considering this plant. I don't know why we just focus on one of them, regardless, when people looked at which parts of the plant were producing that it made a lot of sense because the highest levels you see are in the roots. I brought. I brought a graph.
There's a graph.
First with the highest concentration are the roots. The second is the pollen, third is the flower, so the flower being the sepals and the petals the pollen, which is really interesting because that's a floral reward, right, it's a gammy. You need it to get from one plant to another
for sexual reproduction. But there's within reason. Yeah, but why would a plant want to protect its pollen where that's the key, you know, something needs to pick that up and take it, usually a bee in this case, because it's worth mentioning that most econodam are be pollinated to the point that in Europe at least and in Asia too, I think there are bees that pollinate nothing else, right, that their entire life history overlaps only with the blooming
period of that specific monks of the species. So this question became, why the hell are these plants putting this in their pollen? And why is that second to you know, the root, but then beats out the flour and the leaf, which are parts you generally assume are pretty important for a plant. Well, that brings up a really weird idea of the fact that you know, certain insects start to
benefit from these compounds. Oh what Yeah, and this is still largely hypothetical and remains to be tested, But think about it this way. Everyone's really familiar with the monarch butterfly. It eats milkweed, and part of what it does is that milkweed is full of other alkaloids, which we can
talk about it in a later episode. But they sequester those poisons, and all that means is that their storm them in their tissues and that keeps birds from wanting to eat the caterpillars and the butterflies.
Oh my god, this is so exciting.
It's extremely exciting because someone Goslin and others in twenty thirteen put this idea to the test, and this was a really cool one of the cools papers I found in researching this, and it kind of comes down to this idea of attraction versus protection. You want to protect your parts that are really important to you, but you also need to attract insect pollinators in this case. So could it be that these bees are collecting the pollen, feeding it to their offspring and it's questering at least
some of those alkaloids and their tissues. And what they found is that, yes, it's happening. Now they do not know if it's enough to deter potential predators on the bees bees. But this concept of potentially reinforcing the fact that you're bolstering and protecting your flowers but also kind of encouraging your pollinators to keep coming back, that is so cool. There's enough evidence to suggest that further work should investigate this to it. That's really cool.
That is really cool.
And so just to like recap. Yeah, Like, so we're talking about these bees being able to take these poisonous things which are poisonous to so many vertebrates, so many arthropods, so many animals, and use that to also be toxic or poisonous.
So that if something eats them, then they're going to get poisoned by that same poison that the plant made.
Exactly.
That's super cool.
This is an evolution at its best and why I'm in the field that I'm in.
Yeah, that's really exciting.
So you've got this dual benefit, right, You've got this poison in your very sensitive tissues that are protecting you from generalists. Not to say things don't feed on these plants, they do. There's I came across a list of plenty of butterfly and maflar but that will feed on these plants. Specialization goes both bays, right, Yeah. Yeah, but it reduces the amount of animals that could potentially feed on you.
But then this also added benefit of reproducing or adding to reproductive fitness by kind of helping out your so called symbaiant in.
This case, that is so awesome.
These are really neat plants, and I'm so happy these are the ones that we're covering. And that's not to say that like the species we mentioned are the only ones here that we're considering. I mean, a contodom is a northern hemisphere species. We have them in North America. Unfortunately a lot of ours are endangered.
Why are they endangered?
The ones in North America are largely due to habitat loss. I mean, that's the number one reduction of any species on this planet. It's the one thing we should be fighting is just gobbling up habitat to preserve it instead of to build malls on it. But so, the IUCN red List, which is the International Union for Conservation of Nature, lists at least a handful of Acnodum species as critically or at least endangered on one level or another. So a lot of them are the ones that are native
to the Himalayan region of India, Pakistan, and Nepal. And what ends up happening there is this is where a lot of the contention with herbalism practices comes from, right, So I'm not trying to crap on anyone's culture That's not what I'm doing here. I'm simply stating the facts. Is that a lot of these species are important to cultural practices, but any plants that become very popular or very important than those cultures are obviously sought after. Right.
So the ICN Red List all of the species of Econonym that they listed are endangered because of overharvesting for these medicinal practices.
So it's not like they're growing their own to be harvested. They're going out in the wild and harvesting.
Yes, And that's a sad fact about at least western erbalism, is the fact that they value naturally sourced product over product that has been grown horticulture. There are, at least in an agricultural setting, which is very counterintuitive because one thing is that despite the fact that these plants are producing these compounds, fact that natural selection is what it is, and you're not going to have the same pressures everywhere.
These compounds are not always in the same doses. Yeah, So what ends up happening is, like we mentioned, not all parts of the plant are as equally toxic, and if you want to get the most potent, generally that means harvesting the roots. So all of these plants are taken roots and all. There's no regenitive capabilities once you've harvested the root of a plant. So that's why a lot of these are ended up being put on the endangered species list is because you've harvested every chance this
plant has of coming back. And that's to me kind of tragic.
I mean, it seems like one of the things that we keep coming back to in this podcast is the impact of urbanization and so like that in a vacuum over harvesting cannot be possible without the habitat reduction at the same time, and so it's a one to two punch where we have these urban communities spreading into areas and we have a lack of which in so many cases it's it's not financially feasible. So like, yeah, it's it's like this is it's almost an inevitable fact of urbanization.
The question then becomes this a is this is an effective way of treating and is there educational ways of getting past that? But then, as you mentioned, and I'm really happy you did, is this idea of diminishing returns And that is where my contention with a lot of
the foraging community comes from. It would be awesome if everyone could adopt forging practices, if we had enough land to support that, But unfortunately, this largely becomes a practice of people that are comfortable in areas where there isn't a lot of natural areas left. So as our natural areas shrink and people take up this practice and go into the forest and treat it like the bulk been
at your grocery store. This is something we're going to see time and time again, and it's really important to mention that you do not have to take every last individual of a species to doom it to extinction. You can reduce its genetic diversity or its population numbers to levels in which they're just going to stagnate and die anyway. And that's the fear with a lot of these medicinal plants.
Oh that was fun. Yeah, that was I learned a crap ton, including what monks hood actually looks like.
A Once next fall comes around, I will happily show you all of the monkshood in our neighborhood.
That would be so fun.
Time. Well, I learned a ton too. Thank you for letting me exercise a set of muscles that I don't generally get to exercises.
This was really great, super fun.
To all of the expectations, and we have multiple more episodes.
We have more coming to you, so I guess is that all we have.
I think so we don't really need to tell you to wash your hands this time.
Wash your plants, no boil your plant.
Don't eat everything you were growing, I think is probably the better figure.
Don't eat that plant, you filthy animals.
Filthy animals,