people taking cinnamon for blood sugar regulation should be aware that the different types have different medicinal properties and potencies. most of the studies done in regards to diabetes was done with Cinnamomum zeylanicum/verum, although a recent study was done using Cinnamomum cassia and showed promising results.
I find the flavor profiles to be distinctly different, and prefer zeylanicum as tea or in baked goods like cookies, but cassia in chocolates, coffee, or spicy dishes better. I like burmannii but use it less often. I’ll chew the tough cassia bark sticks, but zeylanicum bark is too flaky and dry for chewing the sticks directly for my tastes.
on a side note, i find this sort of thing fascinating. marijuana, coffee, vanilla, chocolate, banannas, mangos, avacados, and many other plants and animals we eat are still available in multiple varieties from different related plants/animals, some are more closely related then others (species/subspecies/varieties/cultivars). this is a related topic to my quest to try every type of fruit I can find. food adventures.
I’m not going to get into anything involving medical properties.
But everything we eat, even if its wild caught has multiple varieties. The differences are that some of those varieties are varietals IE different defined, designed breeds of a single species OR different species (as with cinnamon) OR down the the area in which they are raised. Or even different expressions in the processing of the same base ingredients (think wine, beer, coffee to an extent). Or just seasonal variations.
Start gardening, or fishing, or raise some live stock or whatever. And you quickly gain an appreciation for this. For example near me there is only one species of edible hard shell claim that you can access as an amateur (the quohog, we also have skimmer clams but you need an huge boat and industrial dredges to get them). These are caught, marketed, even farmed with no regards to varietal distinctions. Fuck they don’t even specify species when you buy them. But start screwing around and digging your own and you’ll notice there are significant differences. Even two clams from two nearly identical brackish creeks. Feeding from the same bay. And running just 20 feet apart. Will taste noticeably different. Oysters even more so. And again just one species around here. Then you get into things with even more variability. 2 species of native whelk? And 2 invasive ones? Thats 4 species all noticeably different from each other, and each noticeably different within themselves based on which square mile of bay you dragged them out of. Fish move around so they’re more consistent over broader areas. But there are 3 or 4 different species of flounder/flatfish here. And they all taste different seasonally. And that’s wild caught seafood. Human beings having gotten all selective breeding on any of that. Vegitables get weird. Like I hate eggplant. But there are 1000’s of varieties. White eggplant I hate less. It lacks the tannins that make most eggplant taste nasty, and has a higher sugar content making it sweet. Tiny round Asian eggplants go one better. They lack tannins, aren’t any sweeter, but have a firmer less slimy texture. I like that shit, but I still hate eggplant as a general thing. The more you dig into anything mundane the more complex it turns out to be.
I wonder about spirulina. I once got some in powdered form years ago and decided to give it a taste. My idea of tasting it was to take a spoonful and shove it into my mouth. I instantly felt as though my mouth would never, ever be ■■■■■ again as every molecule of water was sucked out through my cell membranes.
I can’t imagine if I’d accidentally inhaled the stuff.
Sad. I read a story from a 19th century newspaper about the loss of a child after he drank a bottle of oil of wintergreen. There are quite a few dangerous things in a kitchen, but few of them are effective non-toxic ant repellants. Cinnamon is such a repellent.
Someone should tell this mom that Cinnamon looks like soap and I hope he gets dysentery.
I would like to point out that class and probably race also created a situation where the DA and child services were NOT called in to investigate and the parents are not sitting in jail awaiting murder by abuse charges.
Sad story which could have been even sadder had someone not like the cut of their jib…
I never tried it but there was a technique called jet insuflation where O2 was jetted through a large bore or several IV cannulas through the cricothyroid membrane, though a wetted cinnamon plug would probably block deeper into the airway. Jet insuflation is more useful for upper airway trauma.
I once had a trauma surgeon recommend as a last ditch effort to use a BVM and ET tube or mouth to mouth(with Sellick manuver) to overpressure force the blockage down past the bronchial bifurcation where at least one lung becomes usable.
One child’s accidental death is one more than I would ever want to see happen, but I would hazard a guess that deaths from mundane things like bathtubs and electrical outlets outnumber cinnamon deaths by a couple of orders of magnitude.
This story being a headline item follows the same pattern as “deaths from terrorism” getting 100x the airtime as “deaths from traffic accidents”.
I’m with you. “Little boy dies after choking on cinnamon.” would have sufficed. I think it can go without saying that the mom wants everyone to know about the risk.
If the family lived in manufactured housing, CPS would absolutely be investigating. Makes me queasy thinking about how economic status can take a heart-breaking situation and turn it into a Kafkaesque nightmare. So sad for this family, but, yeah, it could’ve been even worse.
We kept our son out of the kitchen, chemicals and powders locked up, and sharp stuff way out of his reach. I get paranoid thinking about the dangers that still lurk in our home, and wonder if I was just paranoid enough or we got lucky that he’s made it to school age.
A little from column A, a little from column B. You try to manage risks, but a little luck is always involved. Having cinnamon somewhere that the kids could possibly reach it is the kind of thing I never even would have though of when child proofing the house. Or if I did, then only because I would have assumed that any food within reach would be instantly transformed into a spectacular mess
I’m an Eagle Scout, so my medical training is mostly relevant for lacerations, puncture wounds, cuts, dehydration, dealing with skin parasites, concussion, and CPR.
I would have no idea what to do in a situation like the cinnamon plug. If there was anyone else around I’d probably order them to call 911, check ABCs and start the Heimlich and probably try rescue breathing if that didn’t dislodge the plug (but of course, I’d probably misdiagnose the situation as an allergic reaction, come to think of it, so the kid would be a gonner anyway)
But yeah, the Scouts have been really useful to me. They emphasize that the bystander effect is real, so probably nobody’s going to do something in an emergency unless you break the trance and start forcing everyone into roles. Someone collapses? Don’t say “someone call 911”, instead single someone out “YOU call 911 NOW”, otherwise everyone will think to themselves “don’t wanna crash the cell tower, I’m sure somebody’s calling 911” and by the time someone does it’s already been 15 minutes.
There are shitty times where the 5-7 min brain damage clock means that an airway obstruction simply cant be treated if it is in the right place. I suppose a super fast team with a heart-lung machine or someone crafty enough to crack a chest and install a working bronchiostomy might get it done in time to leave a non-donor veggie on life support for a few weeks, effing acidosis is a killer. I have had situations with swollen throat meat curtains where the patient, who otherwise was responding to external pacing simply couldn’t be intubated and I ended up calling the code because no airway.
You see on TV shows and movies someone’s choking, giving the universal neck grab and some guy says “I was a boy scout” and pulls out a Bic pen and gives them a tracheotomy in like 2 seconds stabby-stabby, as if there aren’t like 10 ways to save someone who’s choking that don’t involve putting a permanent hole in their neck.
I wince every time. The scouts never taught surgery. And that isn’t even a good method for an emergency tracheotomy. They don’t even officially teach how to do a tourniquet anymore (I’m guessing liability, or that if you need a tourniquet out in the middle of the woods, it’s likely you’ll be gangrenous and close to death by the time you have access to antibiotics anyway.)
Tourniquet is only for life threatening arterial bleeds which cannot be resolved by arterial pressure and bandaging, it is not to be removed, and is pretty much a prelude to amputation(even newer CAT tourniquets do a band of vascular damage) which beats death for most folks.
We carried tracheotomy kits, and I knew the landmarks and had practised on cadavers, but it was really only useful for the rare road rashed off face syndrome. Most foreign object airway obstructions can either be cleared with a laryngoscope and Magill forceps or are so far down that any field technique that I know of, including using pen barrels and Swiss army knives, will be ineffective.
Yeah, they drove it in pretty hard that the Heimlich was the best and first option always, then trying to clear the obstruction with your fingers or a pair of needlenose pliers or a straw or pen barrel, whatever you have on hand to grab or fish it out. If those fail? I guess try rescue breathing and really hope you aren’t out in BF nowhere.
