andrew weil

I knew Andrew Weil was a famous but very ignorant MD, living on his reputation instead of clinical skills. But I never realized till now how silly and ignorant he is. He claims that solanine, a poison in some of the food plants of the nightshade family, does not harm. He’s wrong: dangerously and stupidly wrong. He’s clearly too ill-read and too underperforming as a clinician to have become aware of the tremendous bad effects that can be caused He says: solanine is a significant toxin, but you are unlikely to run into trouble with it in our part of the world, because we grow potato varieties that do not produce much of it. A 200-pound person would have to eat two pounds of fully green potatoes in a single day to consume a toxic level of solanine. I say: nuts to that. He’s talking classic toxicology levels and completely ignores the issue of biological variation. With any toxin, there are people who can tolerate huge amounts of it (Rasputin survived a cyanide dose that would have killed a dozen people or more), and others who are made desperately sick by just small traces.

I knew Andrew Weil was a famous but very ignorant MD, living on his reputation instead of clinical skills. But I never realized till now how silly and ignorant he is. He claims that solanine, a poison in some of the food plants of the nightshade family, does not harm. He’s wrong: dangerously and stupidly wrong. He’s clearly too ill-read and too underperforming as a clinician to have become aware of the tremendous bad effects that can be caused He says: solanine is a significant toxin, but you are unlikely to run into trouble with it in our part of the world, because we grow potato varieties that do not produce much of it. A 200-pound person would have to eat two pounds of fully green potatoes in a single day to consume a toxic level of solanine. I say: nuts to that. He’s talking classic toxicology levels and completely ignores the issue of biological variation. With any toxin, there are people who can tolerate huge amounts of it (Rasputin survived a cyanide dose that would have killed a dozen people or more), and others who are made desperately sick by just small traces.