The ‘suicide fruit’ from The White Lotus is real and has killed thousands of people
The White Lotus season three has come to a close, airing its eighth and final episode on Sunday.
In the finale, a strange and dangerous fruit has potentially dire consequences. The “suicide fruit” is first introduced to the Ratliff family at the beginning of the season, set in Thailand.
However, it turns out that the green fruit is not a work of fiction. The plant, filled with toxic seeds, comes from cerbera odollam, a tree that’s commonly known as the suicide tree or pong-pong.
The consequences of eating the fruit are severe. According to a 2018 study published by The Journal of Emergency Medicine, Cerbera odollam is “frequently used for suicidal ingestion.”
The seeds of the plant “can cause hyperkalemia, heart block, and death” due to the effects of the tree’s cardiac glycosides, which are organic compounds that increase the amount of force put on a person’s heart.
The tree is native to South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Queensland, and Australia.
What are the symptoms of pong-pong seed ingestion?
The study in The Journal of Emergency Medicine examined six cases of pong-pong seed ingestion, in which the most common symptoms were vomiting and bradycardia. Three of the patients died — all of whom had heart block, a condition that “makes your heart beat slowly or skip beats,” according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Symptoms of pong-pong seed ingestion can occur within 20 to 30 minutes, with the body’s defense system prompting “nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea to flush the poison” out.
Within an hour, a person’s heart rate can become dangerously low, resulting in palpitations and dysrhythmias that can lead to heart failure.
“It will basically override the polarization within the body that’s required for the heart muscle to contract and relax,” Owen McDougal, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Boise State University, told National Geographic. “Without the impulse and relaxation phases, the heart muscle just stops working.”
How often are deaths caused by the fruit?
Seeds found in Cerbera odollam have been responsible for “hundreds of deaths worldwide,” according to a 2018 study published in Clinical Practice and Cases in Emergency Medicine. From 1989 to 1999, there were a recorded 537 deaths in Kerala, India alone due to the seeds in cerbera odollam.
A 2004 study published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology also found that the tree is responsible for 50 percent of the plant poisoning cases in Kerala. The study also reported that the tree’s related species, Cerbera venenifera, “was responsible for the death of 3000 people per year in previous centuries.”
A very small dose of the seeds can be fatal, though some people have survived poisonings from it.
