BOOK REVIEW
23 October 2023

The plant poisons that shape our daily lives

An exploration of nature’s toxins reveals complex relationships between humans and the plant chemicals we use as foods, medicines and mind-altering drugs.

Emily Monosson

Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature’s Toxins — From Spices to Vices Noah Whiteman Little, Brown Spark (2023)

One beautiful summer’s day about 30 years ago, my father had a mini-stroke. He was diagnosed with a heart arrhythmia and was prescribed the blood-thinning drug warfarin. But after a few years of relative stability, tests showed that his body was no longer metabolizing the warfarin properly. Searching for an explanation, doctors eventually realized that my father had started drinking grapefruit juice with his breakfast. The fruit contains chemicals called furanocoumarins, which stop warfarin being metabolized in the liver.

As my father’s experience shows, plants that we might think of as benign can — depending on our circumstances — be anything but. In fact, many are bioactive. In Most Delicious Poison, biologist Noah Whiteman delves into why plants’ myriad natural toxins arose, how animals have adapted to them and how humans have attempted, for better or worse, to harness them for our benefit, without fully understanding the effects that these poisons have on our brains and bodies.

Whiteman explores these ideas by looking at plant chemicals that people use for medicine, food and pleasure, including toxins such as ethanol (from plant sugars) that can end up as addictive substances.

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