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I thought I'd investigate this and find it was a load of hooey. Once I started looking around thought, I found something really, really interesting. The deadly nightshade family is deadly because many of its members contain "tropane alkaloids" which, as Wikipedia puts it:

In other words, if you're taking an anti-spasmodic you're almost certainly taking deadly nightshade. Theoretically this could mean that if your constipation is due to colon spasms you have nothing to fear from deadly nightshade, but if your constipation is due to a sluggish colon deadly nightshade could slow it down further. The problem is that as far as I can tell the parts of the deadly nightshades we actually eat don't contain the tropane alkaloids.

With regard to potatoes specifically this article states that:

In other words, the leaves and stems are inedible but what we call the potato should be fine. It does caution, however, that potatoes can become toxic if allowed to sprout. (I'd always heard sprouted potatoes were dangerous but never knew why.)

The Wikipedia article kind of peters out but it sounds like what is true for potatoes is also true for tomatoes and eggplants - the plant may contain the alkaloid but the fruit does not.

Peppers of all sorts are something different. Although part of the nightshade family, they do not contain a tropane alkaloid. Rather they contain Capsaicin which is not toxic to mammals but stimulates certain pain receptors. That's why we perceive peppers as "hot".

What I get out of this reading is that the parts of the deadly nightshades we actually eat shouldn't be a problem. I will say, though, that none of this explains the widespread conviction that deadly nightshade is bad for people with fibromyalgia - I don't know if there are any studies that confirm this but it seems to be a firmly held belief. So I guess the bottom line, as with so many other things, is that if a food bothers you avoid it - whatever family it's in.

HTH.

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[Research tells us fourteen out of any ten individuals likes chocolate. - Sandra Boynton]

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