Thursday 21 July 2011

Nutcase? No, Nutmeg!

Today I went grocery shopping!
I love to stroll through the supermarket aisles, especially when I'm in a different country. One can learn so much about a place just by looking at their food!!!

One of my favourite parts is always the one of spices.
There is something so inebriating in their smell, the warmth they coat the food with, sometimes the sharpness of taste and always the comfort of a perfume that is somehow connected to a part of everybody's childhood.

I like pretty much every spice except for nutmeg, I feel horror just at the thought of it!
I can't exactly explain why. It's the tang of the smell, that bittersweet after-taste that lingers in your mouth that never convinced me much and it's the pungent odor that attacks you when you grate the nut directly onto your food.

Well, imagine my surprise when a colleague from the hospital commented that possibly I had developed an aversion to nutmeg due to what it does to the brain!

Huh???

It turns out that one can reach and altered state of consciousness by eating, snorting or smoking from a tin of nutmeg!!!
He went on to explain that nutmeg contains Myristicin which is a weak monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
For the "non-medical" readers, this substance is used as an antidepressant and because it's very dangerous it is only reserved as a last line of treatment in case the usual stuff doesn't work!
Myristicin poisoning can induce nausea, convulsions, palpitations and eventual death by dehydration.

So, just a few spoonfuls of nutmeg can cause a hallucinogenic trip for several hours (sometimes even a whole day!!!)

My friend hinted that possibly I am very sensitive and just the smell of it may cause my brain to reject the idea of getting any closer.
This fact though opens a can of worms... I guess that if this information becomes public knowledge the supermarkets will soon have to lock up their stock!

Getting high on Nutmeg... who needs real drugs than when the same can be achieved at a very little fraction of the price????


1 comment:

M.P. said...

I actually tried to get high on it a couple of years ago, but it did not seem to work on me...:)