Weird. In Ladakh, I ate bags of apricot kernels (which are grown locally and sold in large quantities without any kind of warning, shelled and ready to eat. It

Weird. In Ladakh, I ate bags of apricot kernels (which are grown locally and sold in large quantities without any kind of warning, shelled and ready to eat. It hasn't caused any mass poisonings AFAIK). Judging roughly from the picture, I'd sometimes eat at least 1/3 of this bag in one day. I don't remember experiencing any poisoning symptoms. I love the slightly bitter taste, though at some point I do get a kind of "too much" feeling and that's where I stop. Directly comparing the Amygdalin content of the kernels to the LD50 of raw cyanide is probably an oversimplification (digestion and metabolism are often a more complex story than a simple transformation). That being said, I'm not going to advocate that you should go ahead and eat them like chips as I did. EDIT: Google turns this up: "Cyanide poisoning caused by ingestion of apricot seeds", which covers 13 cases in a region that also cultivates apricots. I can't access the article so I'm not sure about the quantities involved. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20196932 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20196932