How Much Soda You’d Have To Drink For It To Literally Kill You
Leave it to ASAP Science to find out how much of our favorite foods can actually kill us, and why. Sure, a lot of times it’s a ridiculous amount, like when we learned that we’d have to chug 70 cups of coffee at once before you actually croak, but it at least eases our minds when we overindulge in such foods.
The science-based YouTube series is back with another “This Much Will Kill You” video, and they cover a few different foods.
While you’ll be happy to know that it takes a whole lot of effort to die while eating sugar and bananas, it’s a whole lot easier to eat a lethal dose of nutmeg.
Here’s the rundown:
The video points out that a 150-pound human being would have to consume 10.5 cups of sugar for it to be deadly. Sounds unreasonable, but let’s do a little math to see how much that equates in terms of soda, just because it’s easy to drink your sugar in soda form.
There are 200 grams of sugar in a whole cup, so that means the deadly amount of sugar would equal 2,100 grams of sugar. A 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola contains about 234 grams of sugar, that means you’d have to drink a about nine 2-liter bottles of Coke in one sitting to equal the death-inducing 10.5 cups of sugar.
As far as bananas go, you’d have to eat 480 before you reached the same dangerous dose of potassium found in lethal injections.
What Asap Science fails to mention, is that it only takes one bite of banana to go down the wrong pipe and choke you to death. Unlikely? Probably, but so are the chances of anyone eating 480 bananas.
The video also highlights that you’d have to eat 129 teaspoons of pepper at a time before passing out and dying, and while it sounds ridiculous, I’ve seen numerous people try to swallow cinnamon, so I wouldn’t put it past someone like Steve-O to try and test this pepper theory, but please don’t. Just trust the science, Steve.
The scariest part of this video, though, is how little nutmeg you need to eat before it’s a killer dose. While the pepper and bananas might seem a little unlikely, just 2 teaspoons of nutmeg can cause you to convulse, and even die.
So it is possible to overdose on foods, but scientifically, it’s fairly hard to do, and hopefully needless to say, do not try any of this at home, just appreciate the science behind it.
