I’m sure we’ve all heard the myth that eating an apple seed can make you sick, and eating too many can kill you; but how did this myth get started?
“Apple seeds contain amygdalin, which hydrolyses in your digestive tract to produce HCN (hydrogen Cyonide), which is the toxin that will kill you. HCN is extremely poisonous; as little as 1–3 mg per kg of body weight will kill you if ingested. [Source] Thus, for an average person of 70kg, it requires roughly 140mg of ingested HCN to kill you.
Now, apple seeds contain 1–4 mg of amygdalin per gram. [Source] However, the HCN content in amygdalin is only a measly 6% of its weight, giving an average HCN content of only 10-30μg per gram of apple seeds.
1,000 apple seeds weigh roughly 26.74g, [Source], so a single apple seed weighs 0.02674g. Given one seed, it is a cyanide content (taking an average of 20μg g-1 ) of only 0.53 μg.
Therefore, for it to be fatal, you need to consume slightly more than 250,000 seeds, which is a reasonable estimate.
(This is all tangential to you actually chewing the seeds to release the chemicals. If you don’t chew them you can happily gulp your 250,000 apple seeds.)”
SO, if you followed all that, and we assume apples have an average of 7 seeds, you as a human would have to chew and eat exclusively the seed part of 35,715 apples to have a fatal result.
To take it a step further, and assume birds and people process HCN the same way, we can scale down the math for an average to slim Greenwing Macaw at 1,000 grams and a Greencheek Conure at 70 grams. The macaw would have to chew and swallow the seeds from 510 apples, and the Greencheek would have to chew and swallow the seeds from 35 apples.
So given the math, it's very unlikely that a normal, healthy bird could eat let alone access enough seeds for a fatal result. So stop worrying so much and feed your bird some apple today!
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