Perhaps it could be the wrong combinations of foods.
The numbers from three nations with the lowest life expectancies (Zambia, Mozambique and Malawi) suggests against a semi-regular diet of field mice and grasshoppers.
Sugar cane juice contains many nutrients. Sugar is refined from it, but the residual is blackstrap molasses, which, incidentally, I use in my cereals, on my pancakes, etc.
Mushrooms have little or no nutritional value.
http://www.nutrition.cornell.edu/nutriquest/mushroom.html
If you are starving in the woods you can eat your fill of even edible mushrooms and will still starve to death.
We had a foster child that ate a whole apple, which amazed us. Now I find that it was not a completely bizarre act.
[sup]Now all I need to do is find someone that eats the entire chicken leg.[/sup]
This is second hand, but a very close friend swears to me that a guy in his Marine Corp unit used to eat the chicken, bones and all, just crunching them up. I was incredulous but he insisted that he always did it, not just once or twice to win bets. When queried the Marine claimed his whole family did that. Wouldn’t want to wander onto their property unannounced…
Back to the OP, I’ve always heard that palm hearts aren’t terribly good for you, loaded with the wrong kinds of fats.
The problem with this question is that there isn’t really any such thing as an unhealthy food (unless it is one that actually contains significant levels of toxic compounds, in which case I question whether it qualifies as a food at all), there are only unhealthy diest; cholesterol is bad in excess, but you need some.
Anyway, my vote would be Polar Bear liver.
I was just going to see whether rhubarb merited a mention in Clinical Toxology of Commercial Products, and now I’ve been blown away.
Anyway, here’s a cite for rhubarb. Gotta assume that something that can kill in large doses may do some negative things at much lower doses.
Back to my discovery, the list of poisons that can appear in vegetables runs three pages of fine print! Rinse before eating??? We should send Care packages to Bin Laden!
I’ve got to close this book and get back to cleaning the place, but before, one other thing that caught my eye. The toxicity of fabric softeners. I knew that stuff was wretched, would my soft-headed neighbors please stop using that shit and polluting the air?