Go On, Keep Eating Almonds
May 24, 2009 1:39 PM | 0

 

They aren't going to kill you or your rats.

Awhile back, I was reading that almonds contain tiny amounts of cyanide -- not enough to hurt a person, but enough to sicken or kill a rat. So I've been really paranoid about keeping almonds out of reach of the boys. Of course, they managed to get into a bag of almonds anyway, and guess what -- no signs of illness! So, I set out to determine whether or not this cyanide thing is actually true.

The short answer: it isn't.

The long answer is a little more complicated. Bitter almonds contain prussic acid, which turns into cyanide when you eat it. Heating a bitter almond will neutralize the cyanide (I'm not entirely clear how that works, or how much it needs to be heated). So, yes, if you have bitter almonds, don't eat them raw!

But you don't have to worry. It's illegal to sell raw bitter almonds in the US. (It is legal to sell foods that contain processed bitter almonds, though; and I'm not sure whether those foods are required to be cyanide-free.) So if you have a bag of raw almonds, and you got them in this country, they are not bitter -- they're the sweet variety. Specifically, you probably have the nonpareil variety, which has no prussic acid at all.

So, the moral of the story: go ahead and feed them to your rats.