A friend of mine had a birthday yesterday, so I baked her a cake, which we consumed today. It was a lemon and poppy seed cake with drizzly icing, and it worked out quite well even though I'd never made it before :)
Last night I developed a nasty headache which made me feel nauseous and gross. Then again, this afternoon, I developed a nasty headache which made me feel nauseous and gross. Coincidence? Hmmm.
I'm well acquainted with the rumour that poppy seed consumption can give you a false positive on a drug test, but what I suddenly began to think about was this: poppy seeds make opium... opium is an opiate... morphine is an opiate... I am allergic to morphine. Well, I suffer an adverse reaction to it, which is close enough to allergic I'd say.
So, having employed the help of ibuprofen and a decent nap to numb the painful throbbing of my head, I got onto Google and consulted the very reputable sounding icanhasscience.com, which informed me that morphine is, in fact, derived from the poppy plant.
Apparently a standard oral does of morphine is between 10 and 30 mg. The concentration of morphine in poppy seeds varies widely, but if you ate about 40g of the most highly concentrated seeds you would ingest the equivalent of a 10 mg oral dose of morphine. So theoretically you have to eat a LOT for it to have any real effect. But the only part of the cake that I ate yesterday was some of the uncooked batter off the sides of the scraped bowl... yet it was still enough to give me a nasty headache?!
I started to doubt my own theory, but then found this comment by SciWo on the icanhasscience.com blog post:
I had adverse reactions to codeine and morphine prescribed after surgery, and I’ve noticed several times that poppyseed bread/bagels give me headaches.
So I guess it isn't just me.
My entire cake only contained 50g of poppy seeds, and I'm sure they weren't even high quality, so I guess I'm just ultra sensitive to morphine. There are other recipes out there that would have been far worse though. Like this one, with a whopping 128g of seeds. I feel sick just thinking about it >_<
