"An apple a day keeps the doctor away," which shows that eating apples appropriately can bring many health benefits. However, some apples rot in parts due to improper storage. Can such apples still be eaten? Can they cause cancer?
Rotten apples produce harmful metabolic products
Wang Cuixia, a master of nutrition and food hygiene, said, "An apple has a small rotten spot, can you just cut it off and eat it? No! Even if you cut off the rotten part, microorganisms in the flesh can still produce some harmful metabolic products. For example, patulin produced by molds can 'spread' and 'infect' other seemingly normal parts.
>Patulin is the main toxin on moldy fruits and has animal carcinogenicity. Test results from the former Institute of Nutrition and Food Hygiene, Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, show that once an apple becomes moldy, patulin can also be detected in the normal parts, with the highest content being 50% of that in the moldy part.Fan Zhihong, an associate professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Safety at the College of Food Science, China Agricultural University, once said that when people consume fungal toxins from rotten fruit, they may experience dizziness, headache, nausea, abdominal bloating, and in severe cases, it can be life-threatening. She explained: "The most toxic substance that poses a threat to human health is patulin."
"The detection of patulin cannot be equated with the actual harm it causes," Fan Zhihong said. "If it is carcinogenic, it is a long-term accumulation process. You can't eat such apples for a long time." In her view, there is no simple equivalence between the test results and the risk of cancer.
No conclusive evidence that rotten apples cause cancer
Will eating rotten apples really cause cancer? Yuan Baojun, chief expert of the Jiangsu Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention and vice chairman of the Jiangsu Nutrition Society, told reporters that it's not that simple. While patulin is carcinogenic to animals, there is currently no research or reports on whether it is carcinogenic to humans. The rotten part of an apple is caused by necrosis of the apple flesh tissue due to toxins produced by microbial infection. These toxins can indeed spread to other flesh tissues, but whether they will harm the human body depends on the type of fungus and the toxins produced. Moreover, the human body itself has the ability to resist and eliminate foreign substances. Eating these molds does not necessarily lead to cancer.