Quote:

---

feifen said:
Why don't you google

"Can you eat Amanita Muscaria fresh?"

You may just find your answer in like 10 seconds.

---

Quote:

---

feifen said:
Why don't you google

"Can you eat Amanita Muscaria fresh?"

You may just find your answer in like 10 seconds.

---

that would tend to take away from the point of this website

"SHROOMERY: magic mushrooms demystified"

Quote:

---

Eating fresh fly agaric will not kill you, unless you eat several dozen.... and really, a dozen is much more than you need. Depending on size, 3-4 is usually good for visionary stupefacient effects, while 1-2 are good for GABA-ergic inebriation.

Fresh ones are not poisonous.  While everyone always says that the drying process is necessary to convert the ibotenic acid to muscimol, I believe this point is over-emphasized superstitiously.  Nowhere near all of the ibotenic acid is converted to muscimol by drying (if it were, then your urine wouldn't be psychoactive after eating them; psychoactivity of the urine is due to ibotenic acid cleared from the bloodstream by the kidneys).  Undoubtedly some ibotenic acid is converted, so you might require a slightly larger dose of fresh mushrooms to achieve the same effects as dry ones. (Ibotenic acid is less potent than muscimol, and its activity seems to be due exclusively to the fraction of it that your body decarboxylates to form the primary active, muscimol)

There are even people who claim that the unpleasant physical side-effects are greater with the dried mushrooms than the fresh ones, and my experience tends to support this notion.  The fear of eating them fresh doesn't seem to be borne out by the literature as far as I can tell.

If you plan on eating fly agarics with any regularity, it's not a bad idea to take a milk thistle supplement (very very tiny amounts of the liver-damaging amatoxins that make the deathcap so poisonous have been detected in fly agarics), and to eat plenty of garlic. (Ibotenic acid is neurotoxic; if it passes the blood-brain barrier, it can cause lesions in the brain. It seems quite unlikely that it passes the blood-brain barrier in any significant quantity, if it passes at all. But just in case it does, garlic contains a compound called S-allyl-l-cysteine which protects against ibotenic acid neurotoxicity)

And enjoy them tasty mushrooms! What part of the world are you from that they're showing their heads already?

Also, be sure you've properly ID'd them! Contrary to popular belief, there are some lookalike species that can be mistaken for the fly agaric unless you closely examine the base of the stipe (see the Fly Agaric Hunting Guide in my sig... Amanita frostiana and Amanita parcivolvata can be particularly convincing look-alikes)

---