If I drink too much of this, am I going to overdose?!
WHAT ABOUT THIS?
Overdosing is a terrible thing, and though it's commonly associated with opiate drugs,
you can overdose on a bunch of seemingly harmless other things.
Recently a case study published in Pediatric Neurology described a boy in Italy with seizures,
headaches, and high blood pressure.
After a week in the hospital, doctors noticed the boy's teeth were black.
(It took them a week?
What?!)
Turns out, the kid has been eating 20 licorice candies every day for the last four months.
SIDEBAR: we call it black licorice, everyone else in the world just calls it licorice.
The red things WE eat don't contain licorice.
Licorice has been used as a medicine for over 4000 years and comes from the extract of the
licorice root, which contains glycyrrhizic (glis-sigh-rizzic) acid.
The acid is 50 times sweeter than sugar and is used to treat chronic hepatitis, inflammation,
ulcers, liver damage, and even viruses.
Eating too much caused the boy's body to freak, so they stopped his "excessive consumption"
and he returned to normal.
HE OVERDOSED ON LICORICE.
The moral of this story, you can overdose on a lot of things.
For instance, if you were hospitalized because of irregular heartbeat, restlessness, vomiting,
muscle tremors, insomnia, anxiety and headaches -- that would be pretty serious; right?
These are symptoms of a caffeine overdose!
You could even fall into a coma and die if you consumed an excessive amount.
Caffeine is one of the most commonly abused self-medications in the world.
"80% of the inhabitants of affluent countries drink coffee or tea daily," and more than
600 to 900 milligrams of caffeine a day is an overdose.
For measure, ONE tall (12 oz) Starbucks Blonde Roast coffee contains 260 milligrams of caffeine.
Yikes.
But no one worries about that, instead we worry about mercury contamination in fish!
A study in Biology Letters in 2010 found bluefin and bigeye tuna contain more methylmercury
in their muscles than other species!
But while overdosing on methylmercury can cause irreversible brain damage, to find out
how much that would be depends on the fish and where it came from, how much you ate,
your body mass and how frequently you eat it.
That’s why the FDA recommends no more than 6 ounces, or one tuna steak meal a week.
Tomatoes and potatoes can cause solanine poisoning, but you'd have to eat SO MANY of them to "overdose"
on potatoes -- 67 potatoes in a single sitting, as calculated by one website.
Not to mention, the human body can only process 2,000 milligrams per day of ascorbic acid
or "Vitamin C." Carrots, oranges, strawberries and peppers all contain it; and if you overate
these foods while taking supplements too, you COULD conceivably end up consuming more
than your body could clean.
That would cause vomiting, heartburn, headache, kidney stones and digestive problems like
diarrhea and cramps.
Over 11-thousand milligrams can kill, but that's a LOT.
Even WATER can kill.
Too much water dilutes the electrolytes in the body, throwing the water and sodium balance
off -- and causing death by water intoxication.
While relatively uncommon, it does happen, usually as part of mental illness, or miseducation
in lifestyle choices.
One 2005 New England Journal of Medicine study found 13 percent of Boston MArathon runners
had extremely low sodium in their blood, and in 2007 a woman died during a radio station
contest from water intoxication.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again.
Everything in moderation!