Thai Man Found Dead, Allegedly Consumed White Wine & Durians Together

Victor Fong

2019-08-17 , 12:00 am

I TOLD YOU! DURIAN AND WINE KILLS!

Actually, we’re not so sure about that yet, but that will be explored later in the article.

China Press reported a man in Thailand who died after eating both despite a friend advising him against doing so.

Found naked in a chair

On 14 Aug 2019, at about 6.30 a.m., a 48-year-old man was found dead along Sukhumvit Road, Pattaya.

And he was sitting there on a chair naked.

Beside him was an empty glass bottle along with a styrofoam box with durian in it.

It is estimated that he had been dead for about 5 hours when he was found.

A friend told him not to

His friend, identified as Peng, 58 years old, said that they would go out to collect used goods every day together.

That fateful day, the now dead man wanted to buy some wine and durians to eat while waiting for the bus.

Peng advised him not to do so since it might kill him.

The man instead told Peng, “I’m a local, I’m not scared.”

Peng went home, but when he came back, he found his friend dead sitting naked as you saw above.

Durian and Alcohol – Not scientifically proven

While the above story will probably make a lot of people just not attempt to eat durian and drink alcohol at the same time anyway, let’s see what’s going on here.

The biggest question I have for the case is: why is the man naked in the chair?

Until more evidence is given, we cannot know anything for sure. So the only thing I can do now is to examine whether consuming both at the same time will kill you.

Doing that experiment on my own body is, of course, not advisable and would contribute to natural selection, so the next best thing is scientific studies.

YearoftheDurian has comprehensively done a blog post summarising this. So here’s what you need to know.

Study 1

In a 1969 study called “Durian and Alcohol: A Preliminary Report”, researchers fed mice durian and alcohol in four groups:

Fed durians, then fed diluted ethyl alcohol at 2-hour, 4-hour and 6-hour intervals
Fed diluted ethyl alcohol, then durians at 2-hour, 4-hour and 6-hour intervals
Control group fed only alcohol
Control group fed only durians

No mice died. All mice who were fed alcohol (group 1 to 3) behaved similarly, meaning those mice were definitely drunk. The durian ones were normal.

Study 2

Researchers in the University of Tsukuba noticed that people who ate durians had facial flushings, heart palpitations, vomiting and nausea, which are similar to people who drank alcohol and took Disulfiram.

Disulfiram was used in the 1950s to treat chronic alcoholism by allowing hangovers to be felt immediately after alcohol consumption. So the idea here is to find out if durians have something similar to Disulfiram.

The study is titled “Inhibition of Aldehyde Dehydrogenase Enzyme by Durian Fruit Extract”, done in 2009.

The result shows that durian contains something similar called diethyl disulfide, which like Disulfiram stops the normal metabolisms of alcohol and gives you a hangover faster.

So, from here we know that durian can cause a faster hangover, but it doesn’t say anything about death. Have people died from hangovers?

So, everything we have is inconclusive.

Most people who died had pre-existing conditions

Most who died consuming both had some kind of condition, like hypertension, diabetes or heart attack. In other words, those people don’t have good health in the first place.

Eating durians also increased blood pressure in high amounts of consumption.

Those who died also happened to eat a lot of durians. The 2009 case consumed 5 whole durians. In 2012, another case had someone eating an entire basket along with coke.

Though, today’s case only showed one durian box, which is suspiciously different from past data.

So, the death of the Thai man in this article is now suspicious for 2 reasons:

Sitting naked
Contradicts with past data, though inconclusive

For the rest of the people who just want to know about alcohol and durians, I’d say better to be safe.

If you do want to try it, only do so in small amounts, since over consumption is generally a bad thing.