Talk:Pithecellobium dulce

Seeds as Food
Wikipedia should be very careful pronouncing legume seeds as edible, many/most contain toxins & antinutrients. Original source used (Conabio) appears to be copy&pasted without the ref.s from the Spanish translation of Parrotta's 1991 factsheet for the US forestry service, whose ref. for this factoid is a single anecdote from Sri Lanka (Parrotta writes the seeds are eaten in SE Asia, despite Sri Lanka not being in SE Asia). Just because some people are said to have eaten the seeds doesn't mean they're edible.

The studies used on seed composition are quite problematic. Parrotta used a single ref by Banerjee & Jain [1988] (and seems to partially misquote it), but the fatty-acid composition, % lipids, and % protein differ markedly from other studies. The Pakistani study also shows extreme variation here and is very shoddy: the English grammar is so bad it renders parts of the text unreadable, the results&discussion of their study mixes in conclusions from other unrelated studies, the abstract mentions a conclusion nowhere in the main body of the work, the main authors (two sisters?) overly reference other studies of theirs in the same journal for no apparent reason (except citation coercion to game the journal's impact factor, or their own), and worse of all, a few references I checked did not contain the information cited to them, or even mention this plant (for example the Rzedowski's great work 'Flora Fanerogámica del Valle de México' doesn't mention Pithecellobium dulce at all, much less lipid constituents in the seeds).

Furthermore none of these studies actually investigate edibility (for example using animal models) or potential toxic constituents.

Cheers, Leo   86.83.56.115 (talk) 16:11, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Guamuchil
Interesting to see the names of this fruit around the world except the name from it's original place: Guamúchil There is a city with that name too. 139.60.10.72 (talk) 16:34, 8 May 2022 (UTC)