There is a saying: "Eat puffer fish to the death."

Pufferfish is a river delicacy with a delicious taste that attracts many diners to try it.

But pufferfish contains highly toxic substances, mainly in the internal organs and blood.

If it is to be eaten, it must be prepared by an experienced professional chef.

The ingredients must be alive, slaughtered on site, internal organs removed, and the blood washed away before they can be made.

For safety reasons, chefs must taste the food first to prove that it is safe to eat before it can be enjoyed by diners.

From this point of view, the profession of chef is also risky.

The cute-looking puffer fish is also called ball fish, inflatable fish, and balloon fish. It is indeed very common in tropical oceans, but it is also an unpredictable fish.

For example, its best trick is that it can expand its body to 2-3 times its original size. Once it is frightened or disturbed, it will squeeze water or air into a bag in its body.

This scares the enemy and prevents the predator from attacking further.

Even so, pufferfish has become a common food fish on the table. Apart from artificial breeding farms, pufferfish is relatively rare in ordinary mountains, rivers and streams.

Their heads are diamond-shaped, square, etc. depending on the species. Some pufferfish have beautiful markings, while others do not.

They usually have thin spines on their bodies, which swell when they are frightened, like a spiny ball. Such pufferfish, together with saury and anchovy, are collectively known as the "three delicacies of the Yangtze River".

The meat is delicious, tender and fragrant, making countless people salivate from ancient times to the present.

In Japan, puffer fish is a top-quality food in the eyes of gourmets. People also praise it for its softness, tenderness, and silkiness, saying it is indescribably delicious. Different from the Japanese way of eating raw food, the best months to eat puffer fish in China are mainly in the

From the end of March to the beginning of April, at this time, dolphin fish have grown to the spawning stage. After a winter of slow maintenance, their fat to skin ratio is better. The problem is that the toxin content in their bodies has also reached a high peak.

, so chefs need to be more careful when handling it. You must know that among more than 100 kinds of pufferfish, many pufferfish are poisonous. There are also many people who died from eating pufferfish in the early years. Don’t forget that since ancient times, folk

There is a saying of "risking your life to eat pufferfish", which means that pufferfish is highly poisonous. To taste this delicacy, you generally need to risk your life. Can this pufferfish be eaten?

Where does its toxicity come from?

How toxic is pufferfish? Have the Japanese really risked their lives eating pufferfish for hundreds of years?

After reading this, I have to admire the Japanese. First of all, we must make it clear that puffer fish are not born with deadly poisons. The source of this toxin, in addition to mainly coming from the types of bacteria on their bodies, is also related to their consumption of a large amount of special seaweeds, because

After pufferfish eats algae, it will gradually transform into toxins in the body. Some experts say that pufferfish will paralyze nerves, mainly muscles. In severe cases, the muscles of the diaphragm will be paralyzed, causing the patient to be unable to breathe for a long time.

It will be impossible to save.

You may not know that tetrodotoxin is one of the most toxic neurotoxins found in nature.

Judging from the current situation, there is no specific antidote. If you do not seek medical treatment in time after poisoning, you will die within 10 minutes to 6 hours.

To put it bluntly, tetrodotoxin is mainly secreted by some bacteria in the ocean.

Simply put, organisms in the ocean, including fish, shrimp, algae, etc., may contain tetrodotoxin.

However, because the content of these toxins is extremely small and cannot accumulate, thanks to the puffer fish's strong tolerance to tetrodotoxin, it can continuously accumulate in the body, making wild puffer fish very toxic.

According to chemical analysis results, tetrodotoxin is a narcotic drug that is 100 times more potent than cocaine.

What’s even more astonishing is that the white powder extracted from a medium-sized puffer fish is only about 1/10 the size of a piece of aspirin and can poison 30 people.

From this point of view, puffer fish is the most poisonous food on the human table.

In reality, the medicinal power of puffer fish is indeed extraordinary.

It is said that in one accident, a person fell into a coma for 24 hours after just taking a bite of the entrails of grilled puffer fish. Do you know the horrific scene of death after eating puffer fish?

Witnesses said that people who were poisoned could not think clearly, could not speak, could not move, and finally could not even breathe.

What is certain is that the Japanese know very well that pufferfish is highly poisonous and they love to eat it, mainly because they know how to handle clean and poisonous pufferfish.

In Japan, all chefs who handle fugu need to have a professional certificate before they can become chefs. And it is not particularly easy to get this recognized certificate.

After all, the secret to surviving after eating one of the most delicious things, pufferfish, lies in preparation.

Anyone who understands knows that the edible part of puffer fish is its meat, as long as it is not contaminated by the liver, ovaries, intestines, kidneys, and eyes.

The embarrassing thing is that although the people who cook puffer fish are trained, they are also very careful when cooking.

However, in the past 20 years, more than 200 people in Japan have died from eating pufferfish. Most of these deaths were caused by eating pufferfish that was not properly handled at home.

Secondly, some puffer fish lovers, in order to seek strong stimulation, begged chefs to prepare their liver and ovaries to remove toxins.

Theoretically, the recovery rate after eating this deadly poison is 50%, but it has to be said that eating the internal organs of pufferfish often becomes a person's "last" supper. If you eat pufferfish prepared by an experienced chef,

, this phenomenon rarely occurs.