Fresh wood ear
Fresh wood ear (black fungus) is a familiar vegetable that brings many health benefits. This is a sweet and neutral oriental medicine that enters the large intestine, kidney, liver and spleen meridians. Using wood ear cools the blood and helps stop bleeding due to scratches and impacts.
However, this food contains porphyrin which is sensitive to light. Therefore, after eating fresh wood ear, you may experience itching, dermatitis, even swelling and pain if you go out in the sun.
Therefore, we should not eat fresh wood ear but instead choose dried wood ear. That is because during the drying process, the hot sun will remove a large amount of porphyrin from the wood ear. When using dried wood ear, we often soak it in water to make it expand. This helps remove the remaining porphyrin in the wood ear.
Rotten ginger
Ginger is a very popular food in Vietnamese cuisine because of its spicy, aromatic flavor and is very good for health. However, when the ginger root rots, it will produce a toxin called safrol. When this substance enters the body, it will cause degeneration and necrosis of some types of tissue cells in the body, increasing the risk of cancer such as liver cancer and esophageal cancer.
One thing to note, some studies have shown that when ginger is damaged even in a small part, the entire ginger root contains the toxin shikimol. Therefore, to ensure health safety, you should completely throw away the ginger root even if it is only partially damaged!
Green tomatoes
Tomatoes are a very popular food in Vietnamese dishes. This is a food source that provides an abundant amount of vitamins for the body. However, there have been many cases of poisoning, even death, due to improper use of tomatoes.
That's because green tomatoes (unripe tomatoes) contain tomatidine - a highly toxic substance that can make us feel dizzy, nauseous and vomit when consumed in small amounts. And if the amount of tomatidine entering the body is too large, it can be very dangerous for us.
In addition, solanine - a rather toxic alkaloid, often found in potato sprouts, is also found in green tomatoes. This substance will automatically disappear when the tomatoes are ripe. Bean sprouts without roots
Bean sprouts are a very popular food, containing many nutrients that are good for the body. However, in addition to the traditional method of making bean sprouts, bean sprouts can now be produced by incubating them with chemicals. This type of sprout often contains many toxic substances, accumulating over a long period of time can cause cancer.
Therefore, when buying bean sprouts, choose the type of sprouts produced by traditional methods to protect your health. You can distinguish between these two types of sprouts based on their characteristics. Bean sprouts fermented in the traditional way will be tight, with full stems, cotyledons and roots. The roots of this type of bean sprouts are long like threads, not big, not shiny. For bean sprouts made by the method of incubating with chemicals, the bean sprouts are often short, the stems are thick, the roots are very short or even have no roots. You should not use this type of bean sprouts to avoid health hazards!