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Roots and Tubers
Published in Christopher Cumo, Ancestral Diets and Nutrition, 2020
Cyanide poses the greatest dangers when famine threatens from drought. Tolerating aridity better than other crops, cassava may be the only edible to survive, leaving people little else to eat. Yet aridity lowers cassava’s water content, concentrating cyanide in roots and other tissues. Insufficient food from poor harvests and cyanide from potent cassava combine to damage the brain, partially paralyzing victims. The disease, known as konzo, usually cripples the legs. Konzo may also impair speech and vision.
Back to the Future – The Prospects of African Indigenous Crops as Future Foods
Published in David R. Katerere, Wendy Applequist, Oluwaseyi M. Aboyade, Chamunorwa Togo, Traditional and Indigenous Knowledge for the Modern Era, 2019
Callistus Bvenura, Estonce T. Gwata, Felix D. Dakora
Besides its culinary use, cassava has a wide range of uses, including the production of biofuels such as methane and ethanol, starch, and products such as biopolymers, medicine, cosmetics, and feed (Balagopalan 1988). Large volumes of suspended solids and organic matter waste resulting from these industries can potentially be bio-refined or fermented into value-added products and biochemicals (Zhang et al. 2016). Cassava is also useful in the textile production, adhesives, plastic, and detergent industries (Li et al. 2017; Tonukari et al. 2015).
Cyanogenic Glycosides
Published in Dongyou Liu, Handbook of Foodborne Diseases, 2018
Some cyanogenic glycoside-producing plants supply various nutrients for human populations. For example, cassava tuberous root provides an important source of carbohydrate for people in tropical regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and South America; cassava flour is a staple food for the low-income population in the Brazilian Northeast [8,9]. As cassava, especially that grown with poor soil, may accumulate between 200 and 1300 mg linamarin and acetone cyanohydrin per kilogram dry weight in leaves and roots, it requires detoxification through chopping and grinding in running water prior to preparation. Workers engaged in cassava flour production (stripping, grating, pressing, drying, and sieving) have been shown to be chronically exposed via volatilization and air contamination to HCN at average levels between 0.464 and 3.328 mg/m3 (TWA), which is below the TLV-C of 5 mg/m3 but not below the action level of 2.5 mg/m3 [9].
Cassava toxicity, detoxification and its food applications: a review
Published in Toxin Reviews, 2021
Anil Panghal, Claudia Munezero, Paras Sharma, Navnidhi Chhikara
Cassava roots are predominantly starchy food and are poor in protein compared to other starchy foods such as maize and sorghum. The protein content is low and varies from 1% to 3% on dw basis. Amino acid profile of cassava flours is usually poor except for arginine and glutamic acid. Cassava contains significantly less amount of fat (0.1–0.3%) as compared to maize and sorghum. It constitutes about 45% of nonpolar lipids and 52% of different glycolipids predominantly galactose-diglycerides (Montagnac et al.2009).