Why Is Squash Bad for You? Toxic Squash Syndrome

Squash is a member of the Cucurbitaceae family, which generates the toxin cucurbitacin as a natural defense against insects.

Although wild squash, cucumbers, and other cucurbits may contain large amounts of cucurbitacin, farmed varieties normally only have trace amounts that have no effect on people. 

According to some observations, wild cucurbits contain higher concentrations of cucurbitacin and taste quite bitter compared to those that are found in a garden or store.

Wild squash and other vegetables are thought to contain more cucurbitacin due to cross-pollination with wild plants and stress during growth, such as insufficient water or inadequate fertilizer.

Due to the intense and unpleasant bitterness of plants with a high cucurbitacin concentration, you can usually tell when squash is bad. 

If you take a bite of squash and notice a nasty taste, spit it out and throw it away. Even a small amount can cause serious side effects that can make you sick.

Avoid eating squash that you are unfamiliar with. For example, if your garden produces squash that you did not plant, avoid eating them.

Squash was traditionally known to have a mildly bitter taste but otherwise wasn't unique. 

However, everything changed when two French women started losing their hair. According to a report on the two instances that were printed in the journal JAMA Dermatology, the women were strangers and did not purchase their squash from the same vendor. Despite this, they both experienced toxic squash syndrome.

In one of the incidents, a woman and her family experienced nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea after consuming a soup made from a pumpkin that tasted bitter. A week later, the woman lost significant amounts of hair (covering a sizable portion of her scalp), although none of her family members experienced this.

In the second case, a woman experienced severe vomiting an hour or so after consuming a bitter-tasting squash, but no one else who consumed the vegetable experienced any ill effects. Three weeks later, she began to lose a significant amount of hair from her head, underarms, and pubic area.

Although cucurbit poisoning is uncommon, other examples have been documented in medical literature. In those cases, people had food poisoning after consuming bitter squash, zucchini, and other gourd plants. 

According to the case report, bitter gourds containing poisonous substances can cause temporary hair loss because they have the same effect on hair follicles as some chemotherapy medications.

In more recent research that appeared in the Journal of Clinical Toxicology in January 2018, a French poison center identified more than 350 instances of food poisoning connected to bitter-tasting squash that occurred between 2012 and 2016. Results showed that 26% of those cases were vegetables from home gardens, whereas about 56% of those cases involved store-bought squash.