Extreme food stories grab people’s attention.
Headlines like “Girl Who Ate Only Chicken Nuggets for 15 Years Collapses” or “Woman
died from drinking 10 liters of Coke a day” make you realize that it’s not just what
you eat but also how much you eat that matters.
As the headlines above suggest, some foods can be toxic or even fatal when consumed in
large quantities- and not all of them are junk food.
We will discuss five potentially hazardous everyday foods in this episode of The Infographics
Show, “Regular Food You Can Overdose On.”
5.
Brazil Nuts
Brazil nuts are a good source of selenium, which “plays an important role in reproduction,
thyroid function, and DNA production” according to one lifestyle blog.
The problem is that you can easily overdose on selenium if you eat what many would consider
to be a small amount of nuts.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Selenium Fact Sheet for Consumers states that Brazil
nuts contain 68-91 mcg of selenium per nut.
One nut alone is more than enough to satisfy the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) of
55 microgams, or .0000019oz of selenium per day for adults, and you should eat only about
4 to 5 nuts per day if you want to stay within what the Linus Pauling Institute describes
as the “tolerable upper intake level (UL) for selenium,” which is 400 mcg per day
for adults.
Selenium poisoning or selenosis can occur if you eat too many Brazil nuts over a long
period of time.
How much is too much?
The Merck Manual states that “At high doses (> 900 mcg/day), selenium causes toxicity.”
This amount is roughly equal to eating 10 to 14 Brazil nuts per day.
The NIH Selenium Fact Sheet for Consumers lists skin rashes and loss of hair or nails
as some of the symptoms of selenium overdose, and it notes that “extremely high intakes
of selenium can cause severe problems, including difficulty breathing, tremors, kidney failure,
heart attacks, and heart failure.”
4.
Potatoes
Potatoes are one of the most widely consumed food crops in the world, but did you know
that they can be toxic under the right conditions?
Potatoes belong to the nightshade family, Solanaceae.
Like other nightshade plants, potatoes contain solanine, which is a glycoalkaloid toxin.
Potatoes are even listed in the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA) Poisonous
Plant Database.
According to the FDA, the average solanine content of the common potato is 8 mg per 100g,
or .0003 oz per 3.5 oz. of potato.
Health problems can occur if you eat potatoes that contain more than 20 mg of solanine per
100g of potato, which a review about potato glycoalkaloids describes as the “generally
accepted” safe upper limit of glycoalkaloid content.
A Healthline nutrition article states that “eating a 16-ounce (450 g) potato that has
surpassed the acceptable level of 20 mg solanine per 3.5 ounces (100g) would be enough to make
a 110-pound (50-kg) person sick.”
The article also lists some of the symptoms of solanine poisoning.
They range from mild ones such as vomiting and diarrhea to severe ones such as paralysis,
convulsions, coma, and even death.
What can increase the amount of solanine in a potato is exposure to light, which also
increases the production of chlorophyll and gives the potato a greenish hue.
Many experts agree that green potatoes tend to contain a higher amount of solanine than
ones that are not green.
They also seem to agree that peeling green potatoes and boiling or cooking them in other
ways does not significantly reduce the amount of solanine in them.
What they can’t agree on is what to do with partially green potatoes.
Some experts say you can still eat the potato by cutting out the green parts, but others
advise you not to take any chances and discard the entire potato.
Bad taste is another indicator of high solanine content whether or not the potato is green.
According to the Hong Kong Centre for Food Safety (CFS), “glycoalkaloid concentrations
above 200mg/kg (2.2 lbs.) are associated with a bitter taste and a burning sensation in
the throat and mouth.”
CFS speculates that this taste is probably part of the reason why deaths caused by solanine
poisoning from potatoes are rare events.
3.
Lima Beans
Lima bean haters have another excuse to avoid the unpopular legume: raw lima beans are poisonous.
They contain a cyanogenic glycoside called linamarin.
After lima beans are consumed, enzymes in the body break linamarin down into hydrogen
cyanide.
According to a New Zealand Food Safety Authority (NZFSA) information sheet, lima beans contain
about 0.07-0.11 oz. (2000-3000 mg) of hydrogen cyanide per 2.2 lbs. (1 kg) of beans.
Most people would probably not eat that many beans at one sitting, but eating a small amount
of raw lima beans is still a bad idea.
It does not take a large amount of cyanide to sicken or kill you.
The NZFSA information sheet states that the acute dose of cyanide is “in the region
of 1mg/kg, or .000035 oz per 2.2lbs of body weight.”
This dose can bring about twitching, cyanosis (blue discoloration of the skin), and other
adverse health effects.
A news article about cyanide poisoning gives a rough estimate that “about half a gram,
or .018 oz of ingested cyanide will kill a 160-pound (72.57 kg) adult.”
If you don’t want to worry about being poisoned by the linamarin in lima beans, you should
thoroughly cook them.
You should also eat lima beans grown in the United States.
One news article notes that “in the U.S. there are restrictions about cyanide levels
in commercially grown lima bean varieties.”
2.
Sugar
For most healthy people, eating too much sugar at one sitting is not fatal.
It can cause what health websites call a sugar “high” followed by a sugar “crash”
as your pancreas goes into overdrive to send enough insulin to process the high amount
of sugar in your blood.
It can also cause “significant body fat storage.”
However, it is possible to eat enough sugar at one sitting to kill yourself.
According to one news report, “Ten and a half cups of sugar at once is enough to end
the life of an 11 stone (70kg) person.”
This means that approximately 4.65 pounds (2.11kg) of sugar is a fatal dose for a person
weighing about 154 pounds.
If gulping down plain sugar sounds like a boring way to die, here are some other options.
Using the sugar content found on nutrition labels posted online, we calculated that you
could consume slightly over 4.65 pounds (2.11 kg) of sugar if you eat 452 Oreo cookies or
249 fun-size Snickers bars.
According to one health website, one Hostess Apple Fruit Pie contains 1.48oz.
(42g) of sugar, so you would need to eat only 51 pies to do yourself in.
1.
Chocolate
The toxin found in chocolate is theobromine, a plant alkaloid that comes from cocoa beans.
According to a Popular Science article, theobromine acts as a mild stimulant, a diuretic, and
a vasodilator that “can open up your blood vessels and cause your blood pressure to drop.”
It can have some serious negative effects upon the human body.
One news article reports that “Theobromine poisoning can cause heart failure, seizures,
acute kidney damage and dehydration.”
The good news is that you would have to eat a large quantity of chocolate in order to
fall ill or die from theobromine poisoning.
A Popular Science article notes that a toxic dose (the LD50 level) of theobromine is 0.035
oz.
per 2.2 lbs. (1,000 milligrams per kilogram) of body weight.
It also provides a specific example of theobromine poisoning that is based on an average human
weighing 165 pounds (75 kg).
In this scenario, the person would have to eat “about 75,000 milligrams, or 2.65 oz
to be at a toxic level,” which can be found in “711 regular-sized Hershey’s milk chocolate
bars or 7,084 Hershey chocolate kisses or 332 standard-sized Hershey’s dark chocolate
bars.”
Do you know
of
any other regular foods that you can overdose on?
Let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other video called Vegans vs Meat Eaters, Who Will live
longer?!
Thanks for watching, and, as always, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe.
See you next time!