What is “litchi disease” and why do people get it?

"If I can eat 300 lychees a day, I will be willing to live in Lingnan forever." This shows how tempting lychees are to people! Now is the season when lychees are in large quantities. Experts warn that [overconsumption of lychees can easily lead to lychee disease]

So although lychees are delicious, you should not eat too many! So what is "lychee disease" and why do people get "lychee disease"? Does this mean that lychees can no longer be eaten?

01. What is litchi disease?

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Litchi disease is essentially hypoglycemia, but not all litchi-eating behaviors will lead to litchi disease, but rather: short-term, large amounts. In addition, this disease mainly affects children, and it may be related to insufficient glycogen accumulation and metabolism in children, as well as eating only litchis and not other foods.

These keywords must not be forgotten, and there is no need to panic and turn popular science into scientific bullshit.

02. Why do people get litchi disease?

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There are two main reasons:

1. [Relative] hypoglycemia caused by fructose (or insulin peak shift)

Some people may wonder why eating a lot of fructose can lead to hypoglycemia? The root cause is that fructose challenges the insulin secretion of our body.

As we all know, blood sugar rises after a meal. In fact, this sugar refers to glucose. When glucose rises, insulin secretion increases, and finally returns to normal.

However, the large amount of fructose disrupts this mechanism. Fructose is very similar to glucose and can stimulate the increase of insulin in the human body. However, there is one difference, that is, insulin cannot consume fructose.

The result is that the more lychees you eat, the more fructose you consume, so the body secretes more insulin. However, at this time, the glucose in the body does not increase significantly (it takes a long time to convert fructose into glucose), so the insulin level is relatively high, resulting in hypoglycemia.

Of course, the above is a bit exaggerated. In fact, lychees also contain glucose, but glucose is more easily absorbed earlier than fructose.

So what happens is that the first wave of glucose enters, causing the insulin level to rise, which should have dropped. But then fructose comes again, and it raises the insulin level again. At this time, there is actually not that much glucose left. If the body's glycogen replenishment is insufficient, then relative hypoglycemia will occur.

2. Some other ingredients in litchi

It is currently believed that litchi contains some additional ingredients in high content, such as Hypoglycin-A, a non-protein amino acid found in plants of the Sapindaceae family.

You should know that even if normal people have insufficient blood sugar, our bodies still have mechanisms to produce blood sugar.

However, hypoglycine A blocks this process, causing the energy stored in our body to be unable to replenish blood sugar in time, resulting in a drop in blood sugar.

As a result, the U.S. FDA has issued a guidance recommending the detention or rejection of imported ackee products containing 100 ppm or more of hypoglycin A toxin.

It’s worth mentioning that there are two common components of the Sapindaceae family, lychee and longan, so I guess I’m not the only one who thinks lychee and longan are similar.

03. Can’t we eat lychees anymore?

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Finally, nothing is absolute, and different people have different tolerances to food.

In fact, the human body still has a strong metabolic capacity:

1. Although fructose is converted slowly, it can still be converted into glucose.

2. You don’t need to worry too much about eating normally, because after a normal person consumes food, it is not digested all at once, and it will continue to provide blood sugar to the body.

3. Normal people also have strong sugar maintenance capabilities, producing sugar for you from glycogen and even fat.

Overall, the human body is not that fragile, and lychees are not poisonous.

In the spirit of "too much is as bad as too little",