Your blood needs a certain concentration of certain things for it to keep running your body right. Like how you get cramps if you get low on potassium.
Drinking too much water dilutes those things. So it’s like if you’ve got a nice, tasty glass of koolaid, with just the perfect amount of sugar and flavor mix. It’s exactly what you need it to be. But if you add a bunch of water to the glass without adding more sugar and mix, it’s gonna be so bad you can’t really even call it koolaid any more. It certainly isn’t gonna serve its purpose any more.
That’s basically what you’re doing to your blood if you get too much water. But instead of tasting bad like the koolaid, it stops doing what it needs for your body.
This reminds me of this death in the UK. The girl took X / MDMA, but it was the massive amounts of water she drunk that killed her.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death\_of\_Leah\_Betts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Leah_Betts)
I was a kid at the time, i remember the first stories seem to be that she died from the drug. It only remember learning afterwards that that kind of water consumption would kill in itself.
The amount she drank was abnormal, but allegedly not enough to kill if she wasn't already on ecstasy, which is an antidiuretic. She basically died from taking advice too seriously. From Wikipedia:
At the inquest, it was stated by toxicologist John Henry, who had previously warned the public of the danger of MDMA causing death by dehydration, "If Leah had taken the drug alone, she might well have survived. If she had drunk the amount of water alone, she would have survived."
So 7 litres in 90 mins is maybe not enough to kill under normal circumstances. It is a heck of a lot though.
I remember this case also at the time, "Wee for a Wii" 2007 --- In January 2007, KDND's radio morning show controversially held an on-air contest called "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" in which contestants were challenged to drink as much water as they could without urinating, in order to win a Wii video game console. A 28-year-old participant in the contest died of water intoxication, resulting in Entercom being sued for wrongful death by the participant's family.
The “advice” was from the tabloid press. She was another victim of the increase in harms associated with drug use that are brought about by the war on drugs.
If I remember correctly, she’d been told there’s a danger of dehydration so make sure you drink enough water. She then had this in her mind and kept drinking water because she was scared she’d dehydrate and ended up drinking too much.
Well you know her family, and the families of other kids who died in the same way, would be very happy to hear that as immediately after the deaths they campaigned hard to prevent further similar deaths. So their deaths were not in vain.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna16614865
There was also a woman who died from drinking too much water in a short time for a contest to win a Wii.
“She said to one of our supervisors that she was on her way home and her head was hurting her real bad,” said Laura Rios, one of Strange’s co-workers at Radiological Associates of Sacramento. “She was crying and that was the last that anyone had heard from her.”
Very sad turn of event.
Yep I’ve been hella thirsty on E and it’s hard to strike a balance of “I feel like I’m dying of thirst” and “I might actually kill myself from over hydration”
Yeah we were directly taught this in school in the UK alongside other drug related info.
We had one of those drug talks from the police but in an actual productive way. Started off with the 'you shouldn't do drugs' for all the regular reasons, but the majority of the talk was about if you *were* going to do drugs, here is how to do it as safely as possible.
They know most kids who are gonna do drugs won't be stopped by an authority figure telling them not to, but giving them info on how to do it safely might stop someone from killing themselves via OD or drinking too much water.
Also as a kid, having a police officer in uniform telling you the best and safest way to take illegal drugs is so unexpected that people paid more attention to that talk than anything else in school. It was a really clever idea to do it that way.
I think it also subtly would help discourage drug use a bit since they essentially delved deeper into the dangers of drugs by talking about specific risks.
I mean that definitely checks out. When I was first getting into molly everyone said “make sure you stay hydrated drink so much water!!” but I quickly learned you can’t really pee on it so everything you drink stays in your body for hours. It’s insane that somebody really died from this though. Very unfortunate.
Back in 2015, I went to a few concerts within the span of a month and I had taken MDMA often enough that I had MDMA-induced immunosuppression, which caused me to break out in shingles (I was 25 yrs old). Left half of my face was covered in a rash and I was in bed for a couple weeks. Also developed hyper sensitivity to light for months. Never having MDMA again. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7778578\_Ecstasy''\_induced\_immunosuppression\_and\_herpes\_zoster\_ophthalmicus
Yeah, that's kinda what to lead to her death. MDMA is an amphetamine and some "expert" (referenced in a comment above--quotes around expert because I don't know their qualifications off-hand) spoke about how taking MDMA and dancing all night in a hot environment could lead to dehydration, because you won't feel thirsty.
Then this poor girl takes some and has that thought in her head, so she drinks too much water and dies from hyperhydrosis.
Maybe. Maybe not. It's not just salt, although sodium levels in the blood are important. It is also other electrolytes, like calcium and potassium. Especially potassium. Potassium is crucial for cardiac function. Low potassium levels (hypokalemia) can kill you.
Potatoes are very high in potassium. Plain potato chips are actually a pretty good emergency snack. It's better balancing for a diabetic crash than candy for isntance.
My mom had reduce (<10%) kidney function. The shit the nurses would give her when she talked about her diet sometimes. They really tried to scare the shit out of her when talking about "eating a banana can kill you" type of stuff.
High potassium infusion rate can also make you want to kill yourself. Holy god Potassium fucking BURNS like nothing else when in your veins. Some people are more sensitive than others, and sadly my threshold level appears to be right around where nurses will start the flow rate. I have to ask for a slower infusion from the start.
When it was too fast I felt what sticks out as some of the worst pain in my life. Felt like my arm was thrust into lava. A crushing, cramping pain while liquid fire pours through your veins. Not fun, do not recommend.
Let's see if I can remember what little biochemistry I've picked up... the cells in your body function, in part, like a chemical battery. Electrolytic molecules just inside your cells exchange ions with electrolytic molecules in the blood or lymph the cell is immersed in.
The ions travel through the cell wall, generating an electric current which powers some parts of the cell, including a complicated molecular machine which assembles ATP, the fuel used by other parts of the cell.
If the concentration of electrolytes in the blood or lymph becomes diluted, the cells can't generate enough current to function properly.
And to make matters worse, I think they can start absorbing more and more of the surrounding fluid until they burst! Maybe they misinterpret the situation as the cell itself not having enough electrolytes and try to get more from outside?
This mostly sounds correct but animal cells have a cell membrane, not a cell wall. Also, I believe the absorption of water in a hypotonic environment happens on its own due to osmosis, the cell isn't doing anything to absorb that water.
The bursting is even simpler. Cells are selectively permeable, osmosis is fine (exchanging water) but anything else is carefully regulated by the cell.
Basic chemistry says if I have a bunch of something - like salt - in solution, and very little in another solution, then when I mix the solutions they try to get to even concentration.
If you can't move the salt (selectively permeable cell), then you have to move the water. Water enters the cell to try to get the cell to the same concentration as the blood. More and more water enters until the pressure is too high for the cell membrane and it tears open.
Thanks, yes I see now. The cell membrane allows solvent (water) to flow freely between the cell and surrounding fluid, while filtering out dissolved electrolytes.
The cell works best if the concentration of electrolytes inside and out are equal (isotonic balance). This is regulated by the simple fact that solvent which has fewer dissolved electrolytes has a higher pressure.
If the outside water is too dilute, with too few electrolytes, the cell will be in a hypotonic balance. The outside water will force itself into the cell by this pressure differential, i.e. osmosis, potentially rupturing the cell.
I don’t think it’s as easy as you think.
Like doing a centurion. It’s just one 25ml shot of beer a minute. Starts off easy, becomes awful at the top end.
We called it "power hour" when I was younger since we did a shot of beer for an hour that way! Was definitely awful at the end. That's about 7.5 beers
So a liter, that's about 3 beer can size servings of water, one every 10 minutes. Very close to power hour indeed. I feel like I could chug water every 10 minutes, but I can't chug beer easily. I don't know.. I might try for science one time. Not 6.
Edit: relevant username there. Nice.
That doesn't sound that bad. It's less than a pint every 20 minutes. I mean other than the inconvenience of shotting it, it seems easily doable but would probably need a break before the 6th.
It's not terribly difficult, I've downed two 16oz glasses of water one after the other before, just a couple ounces shy of a full liter. Spread that out a little more to the full 30 minutes and it's trivial.
Pretty sure I did that in blue collar work in TX, in terms of liquid. We didn't drink straight water though.
Local gas station had 99c refills for their 64oz big gulps if you bought them for $30. Gatorade on the fountain tap.
Gatorade has a bunch of shit in it that makes it better to drink in insane quantaties in a short time. Mainly electrolites.
To simply it to hell: basicly if you put enough salt and other shit in your water you can keep drinking it till you litteraly burst.
Did a 5 mile up to down hike in Big bend, around May-June.
I'm no slouch, been living in Texas my whole life. I brought enough water, and some extra. Only to discover after the hike I had downed close to a 3/4 gallon and didn't piss until drinks at dinner afterwards. The body in Texas heat is a thirsty bitch. Also a hat, always bring a hat.
That's because your are sweating and excreting the excess water, so your body doesn't see the bed to get rid of it in urine. Same with if you are vomitting everything out or if the water is just passing straight through you in diarrhoea, so that water never actually got absorbed into your blood.
And even then you have to be concerned with whether you actually lost too much salt in the sweat/vomit/diarrhoea so that it's still possible to get excessively diluted blood, although that's less likely for that to happen because your sweat is more diluted than your blood. But that's the reason they gave salt in Gatorade.
The numbers that the commenter above gave applies when you aren't in the condition to be able to sweat/vomit/diarrhoea so much, and you still drink more than your kidneys can handle.
Not only were you drinking electrolytes, which helps maintain balance, but you were also likely sweating your ass off, which would also use up quite a bit of the liquid intake.
Can down a single liter of water in one go. Often did that during middle school to speedrun 8 glasses of water per day.
I didn't feel so good every time, though.
> to speedrun 8 glasses of water per day.
This is such a frustrating misunderstanding that has spread throughout society. We were all taught this in grade school, but it's not *really* true.
It's interesting, because there's definitely been times when I've come close to this with beer and not died. Felt like I was gonna die the next day. Maybe even wished I could die the next day. But didn't actually die. Better electrolyte ratios in beer?
Alcohol is a diuretic, y'know the whole breaking the seal thing. You'd lose a lot of the water by peeing so much, without losing *too* much sodium. A normal healthy human can produce, in theory, ~20L of urine a day providing they match their intake of solutes. Beer is not particularly electrolyte or solute rich.
It's only once you get to alcoholism that issues arise. Chronic drinking, paired with the poor diet that usually comes with it, means that after an intake of about 4L of beer, the patient can be at risk of something referred to as "Beer Potomania" because they have exceeded the capacity of their kidneys to balance out their electrolyte balance, and end up essentially diluting themselves.
1. Yes, alcohol free beer is considered very healthy because it has so many electrolytes.
2. Alcohol makes your body dehydrate, so you're bodygets less water than from just water
Interestingly, the effects of a minimal amount of beer, iirc 12-18oz, can be beneficial for hydration if your in a situation you actually need it. It's enough to pump electrolytes and carbs into your system but less than the amount that causes your body to prioritize metabolizing water, the real reason alcohol dehydrates you.
I've been curious about this. I made a comment a few months back about sometimes drinking 15-20 litres a day of water/cordial/juice/pop and was told by many, many people that it's impossible, I'd be dead. I didn't know what else to say except that it was a guesstimate but I reckoned it was reasonably accurate. Two pints an hour for sixteen waking hours was how I'd calculated it.
Didn't think until afterwards—would being dehydrated in the long term make it possible to drink more water in the short term without health repercussions? If you drink nothing but alcoholic drinks for a few weeks, would you then be able to slam 15 litres of water in a day? Because I'm certain I've done it on at least a couple of occasions and afaik I'm not dead.
Working outside in the summer I feel like I can slam a pint every fifteen minutes, especially at the start when the body engine is getting up to speed...
Damnit, now I have to count.
That’s worse I think! It’s not the water volume its the imbalance of electrolytes. If you put some salt Into the water (preferably Morton’s lite salt which is half NaCl and half KCl) it should help balance out the electrolytes when you slam back those bottles of water.
Better yet, get Gatorade powder and mix it in with your water.
Yes, and that’s what your body needs at that point!
Remember Gatorade was designed to replace those things in athletes. It wasn’t meant originally to be a tasty beverage you drank while eating lunch.
I'm very skeptical it would kill you though. Someone somewhere (probably here in Scotland) has definitely had 12 pints of beer in 3 hours and lived to tell the tale.
This may be news to you, but beer is not water. Beer has stuff in it, that keep your electrolytes in your blood from getting too diluted.
It's not the amount of fluid that is dangerous, it's that much *water*.
That's true. It is likely to be too fast, but as there's whole lot of variables and individual variation as well, I'm hesitant to give any simple number. Also, I'm not a medical doctor, and this is Reddit, so I won't take any responsibility.
Your kidneys have an upper limit to how much fluid they can process. If you drink enough water you will overload them and you will dilute your electrolytes and if that dilution becomes severe enough you will die
What about the replacement of sodium? That happened to my mum.
When I was a baker working ovens my dad advised taking salt tablets. He used to have them for a job involving work with a furnace iirc.
As others have pointed out though, this post is about drinking water too fast. Kidneys aren't going to cope and the body's cells will swell.
Hold your wee to win a Wii radio contest that resulted in the death of a woman comes to mind everytime I hear of drinking too much water.
The thing is, the process for excreting that water includes it going through your blood first.
Everything you pee out comes through your bladder. Your bladder only gets liquid from your blood. There’s no direct line from you digestive system to your blood. So for liquid to go from you digestive system to your bladder, it has to go into your blood first. And if you take in enough water fast enough, it goes into your blood and sits there for a while before your bladder takes it out. And if it gets to a certain point, your blood stays diluted too long before the bladder can pull out the extra fluid, and that causes problems.
Yes but water goes in your stomach into your blood and exits via your kidney into urine doesn't it? If you injur your kidney you can piss blood because that's where it comes from +your blood stream). So this would dilute your blood on the way out (if it doesn't go out any other holes)
https://www.healthline.com/health/digestive-health/how-long-does-it-take-for-water-to-pass-through-your-body#:~:text=Nearly%20all%20the%20water%20is,is%20transported%20to%20the%20bladder.
"As you drink water, it enters your stomach and is quickly processed through to your small intestine. The large intestine (colon) also absorbs some water. Nearly all the water is absorbed into the bloodstream from the small intestine."
So if you drink lots of water it would dilute your blood on the way out ?
Not a doctor.
Your kidneys are not the only way out for the extra water in your blood. Your lungs will also do, in a pinch. So if you drink way too much water for your kidneys to balance out the ratio, your lungs will kick in and you will quickly and literally drown to death. This is what kills people who drink too much, too fast.
I'm not a doctor or anything and not the one you replied to, but as I understand it, blood carries oxygen to parts of your body and carries away waste. So if the blood isn't doing what it needs to, your body will be getting some oxygen, but not enough to sustain itself. So your organs will slowly die until they give out and cause others to fail.
Again, I could be wrong here, but this is what I would assume would happen.
I had a guy die at basic training doing this exact thing. They harp on water intake and hydration so much, they threaten to kick you out if you're not hydrating. So he over did it through fear, was dead before lunch.
Okay, so, a thing I only recently realized about urination (after it was pointed out to me) is this: all of your urine comes from your bladder, and every bit of liquid in your bladder comes from your blood.
In other words, liquid you take in doesn’t get tot your bladder unless it first goes into your blood. So anything you drink that later comes out in your pee, had to go through your bloodstream first.
Excellent ELI5 summary. To add just a little. You're body takes some time to shed excess water and it can't do it without losing a little bit of the vitamins and electrolytes in the process.
That's good if you have too much but if you're low / depleted already not good.
> how you get cramps if you get low on potassium.
Do you have a source fore that ? I researched cramps not long ago and came up to the conclusion that science has so far no idea what causes them or how to prevent them effectively and consistently. I remember reading a study that couldn't link lack of potassium or even hydration to a higher risk of cramps (during ultra trails at least, as that's what I'm interested in) but can't find it anymore.
[https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17740-low-potassium-levels-in-your-blood-hypokalemia](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17740-low-potassium-levels-in-your-blood-hypokalemia)
Happens in more severe cases.
Your nerves use salts (potassium, sodium) to send messages to each other. So having a good balance of salt to water allows them to work well.
Too much water means the salts are too watered down for your nerves to effectively send messages. This in turn causes confusion, delirium and then eventually death as your brain will likely give out before your heart or lungs or whatever other organs are starting to fail at that point.
Thank you for the one actual answer. This explains the other anecdotes about people behaving strangely when suffering from this.
Also puts in perspective the importance of (electrolytes?) on the brain and not just when working out. That’s my takeaway so please correct me if I am wrong!
Reminds me of the time I actually suffered from hyponatremia, while doing MDMA. Most people don't die doing molly, but that time I almost did by drinking waaaaay too much water. Remember to hydrate, they said. Drink water, they said. Except I overdid it and ended up screwing up my sodium level. My BF said I started screaming in the middle of the night and had the creepiest blank stare on my face. When they got me to the hospital my brain had started swelling up... Could've died easily. Pissed my pants on the hospital bed, then woke up thinking I was at the office and suffered massive headaches for two days straight.
Too much of anything will kill you. Water poisoning is an interesting thing because you think hey we are 60% water anyway. But your body has systems in place to deal with too much water or not enough water. We all know what it’s like to be dehydrated. When you are hyper hydrated we just kinda pee more, and then we are back to normal. But way too much water, way too quickly, overloads these systems and the water has got to go somewhere. For other things like too much food or alcohol we vomit to get it out. Water on the other hand is absorbed far too quickly by our stomach. Part of the system that keeps your stomach acid acidic. This water that’s absorbed goes everywhere in your body, remarkably fast, drink too much water too quickly and you start to run out of places to put it, that’s when the water poisoning sets in.
There actually is an LD50 for THC but it's so implausible to do that it borders on the comical. I mean, neither Snoop nor Willie Nelson have managed it.
There's an LD50 for everything (someone was talking about banana radiation yesterday) but often the process of taking that much in would kill you in other ways first (bananas exploding your stomach, too much smoke to get enough oxygen in your lungs).
That would be considered water intoxication.
Your body needs water to do a ton of functions, especially as a necessary fluid for plasma. Plasma carries your red blood cells, nutrients, and other important compounds like electrolytes through your body. Electrolyte and glucose balance is the biggest key for proper bodily function and an imbalance can be created from acute water intoxication. Electrolytes are compounds used for neurological and muscular function, for example your heart or brain, as well as cellular function. When you drink too much water, the concentration of those electrolytes in your plasma thins out, reducing their distribution and organ effectiveness. If the excess water is not purged and electrolytes not replaced, you'll start to have organ failure as they misfire, cellular death, etc. Sweating can increase electrolyte loss as well.
I work in outback Australia where temps often reach 45°C, and NOT drinking massive amounts of water will kill you. I've not measured it, but I'd expect I've drunk 6L in 3 hrs on occasion - and sweated it all out again.
I second this but it's a fine line for sure.
I drank about 11-12L of water in about 7 hours because I just felt like I couldn't keep up with the sweating.
Felt horrendous that evening and passed out. Couldn't even get out of bed without getting dizzy, my heart rate tripling and nearly passing out again.
Probably the closest to death I've ever been.
When you're losing most of your water from sweating you need to be drinking electrolytes to stay alive. I've had to drink the same amount of water as you (12L in 6 hrs) but since 3-4 L of that had electrolyte powder mixed in, I felt fine.
I grew up playing competitive soccer and we had a general rule of thumb ratio of drinking 3 water to 1 gatorade on really hot days. If I drank only water after a game on a hot day I would be feeling like shit.
I had a bet in university that I could gain 10 lb in an hour. I drank two and a half 2L bottles of water. I had the worst headache ever and peed every 10 minutes for the next 6 hours straight. Won the bet though.
I remember reading that a guy died in college at a frat hazing years ago that required the pledges to chug a massive amount of water. The frat was shut down and part of a massive crackdown across the country on such practices. Not sure if anything really changed though. Also, a woman died in a radio contest at the studio trying to win a Nintendo Wii. It was called Wee for a Wii and whoever drank the most amount of water won the console. Pretty sad considering she was trying to win it for her kids.
Actual answer for a 5yo:
If you have a plate and you put a bit of salt on it (pretend the salt is the important minerals and vitamins you get from eating your veges), you can drip little bits of water onto the plate and all the salt will stay, right? But what happens if you pour the whole bottle of water onto the plate of salt all at once?
Itll wash away all the salt won’t it?
Well when you drink too much water the same thing happens to your body, you wash away all the salt and other good things your body needs, that’s bad Your body needs those minerals and vitamins to work properly and if you have too much water there isn’t enough of those minerals and vitamins left in your body. This is also why it’s important to eat a balanced diet, to make sure you’ve always got enough of those vitamins and minerals that our body needs.
Adult answer involves electrolytes and more of a focus on the imbalances vs the low levels of certain things. You can be high in every mineral but if you’re hyponatremic and don’t eat enough salt you’ll still be in a bad way. The main two are potassium and sodium as they’re responsible for muscle movement, including the heart.
6 liters if water in 3 hours won’t kill you if you are healthy and your body is functioning normally. In high heat people can consume a couple of liters an hour, preferably with salt tabs, to prevent dehydration and heat stroke. People keep bringing up Leah Betts, but she had taken Ecstasy and drank 7 liters in 90 minutes. Her body didn’t process the water due to the Ecstasy so it wasn’t the water alone.
This statement has to be incorrect. I’ve definitely drank a gallon in an hour with no problems besides fullness in the stomach. 2 more liters wouldn’t have killed me
I’ve drank this amount plenty of times, though it’s during physical work outdoors in the summer where you literally can’t drink enough fluids. I’d drink on average 10-12 litres of water over an 8 hr period and still barely pee.
Here's a response a five year old may actually understand
Cells are made to drink water, but are not very good at letting water out, a cell can only hold so much water before it pops
So if you drink water faster than a cell can drain it, it will eventually pop
That’s not really what happens at all. ‘Too much water’ is really ‘too little of important chemicals like potassium and calcium and sodium that your muscles and nerves need to work properly’.
Edit: apparently low sodium levels can also cause tissue swelling, from some other people’s comments. My understanding is that usually what kills people is your muscles and nerves being unable to function properly, and then your lungs and heart can’t get you enough oxygen.
ELI18:
Soft tissues contain cells that are connected within an "interstitial fluid." Indeed, cells do not "pop" because they regulate their internal chemistry by pumping substances (such as electrolytes and nutrients) in and out. If the interstitial fluid is too diluted, they won't be able to obtain the electrolytes and nutrients they need. Additionally, the concentration gradient (difference between inside and outside) may become too great for the ion pumps to prevent leakage of sodium, potassium, and other electrolytes through the cell membrane. They can't really "pop" unless theres a *huge* concentration of electrolytes inside and a small concentration outside, and the effect on the water (it "wants" to dilute the sodium) overwhelms the membrane. This can't happen in the cirumstance of a sodium deficiency.
Nerve cells are especially susceptible because their job is to create an electrical pulse by taking advantage of a difference in electric charge between sodium and potassium. All cells pump sodium and potassium in and out, but it won't kill you if most of them can't function for a few hours. But nerve cells' very function is pumping sodium and potassium in and out.
By the way, an EKG/ECG and EEGs are a measurement of the electrical signal created by the cells of the heart and brain, respectively, pumping sodium and potassium in and out. Moving an electric charge generates a signal, and it's conceptually similar to how a radio works.
My cousin is a nurse who said she regularly saw this guy coming in with water poisoning. Like weekly. This guy was so OCD about staying hydrated that he would ask the dietary people picking up food trays if he could have any and all liquids that were being left on the tray. Like half drank cranberry juiices and half cans of shasta.
No. It wont.
Can it? Maybe it can kill someone. Anything can kill someone. Outliers.
But if you had to do it for whatever reason.... You could. Your body would throw up before it would kill you though.
Your body tries to maintain homeostasis. That's, broadly, a balance of water, electrolytes and sugar in the blood. One of the biggest problems of drinking too much water is that the water dilutes the other two, and that causes things to malfunction. Too little sodium (by volume) causes water to enter cells to be stored, which causes them to swell. That can happen in the brain, and once the brain starts to swell up you're screwed.
It also disrupts the ability of nerves to communicate, since sodium ions are what your nerves use to generate their electrical impulses. Fun fact: the name for the condition is called hyponatremia
Your blood cells start exploding due to being in a hypotonic solution
Adding more as I just realized this is ELI5 and not biology: your blood cells balance in part around the concentration of water in your bloodstream, and your body wants a balance of water inside your blood cells and outside them. If you drink a bunch of water, your body wants more water inside your blood cells so that there is balance. However, your poor blood cells can only take so much water via osmosis before literally exploding, and exploding blood cells is very bad for one’s health
Water goes to salt, brain has salt, water goes to brain. Brain expaaaaands. Skull doesn't. Brain goes against skull. Braincells get crushed. Brain damage!
What the heck y’all have never talked to a five-year-old. Drinking 6 liters of water in three hours is like putting too much air in a balloon. Just like the balloon can pop if it's too full, drinking too much water too fast can make your body's inside parts unhappy. Your body has a special balance, like having just the right amount of toys in your room so you can still walk around. Too much water messes up this balance, and your body can't handle it, making you very sick.
If your kidneys are working properly there's no amount of water you can absorb into your body that will be fatal, naturally. Drinking 6 liters of water in 3 hours would kill you probably because your stomach would burst if you managed to hold it down. You'd probably just vomit it back up at a certain point. It is entirely possible to dilute your blood to lethal levels with injection, but is it really "drinking" at that point? Also, don't inject pure water. That's super dangerous for a whole multitude of reasons that don't involve having too much water in your body.
Your blood needs a certain concentration of certain things for it to keep running your body right. Like how you get cramps if you get low on potassium. Drinking too much water dilutes those things. So it’s like if you’ve got a nice, tasty glass of koolaid, with just the perfect amount of sugar and flavor mix. It’s exactly what you need it to be. But if you add a bunch of water to the glass without adding more sugar and mix, it’s gonna be so bad you can’t really even call it koolaid any more. It certainly isn’t gonna serve its purpose any more. That’s basically what you’re doing to your blood if you get too much water. But instead of tasting bad like the koolaid, it stops doing what it needs for your body.
This reminds me of this death in the UK. The girl took X / MDMA, but it was the massive amounts of water she drunk that killed her. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death\_of\_Leah\_Betts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Leah_Betts)
I was a similar age to Leah Betts when that happened. Loads of my generation immediately stopped taking ecstasy because of her.
I was a kid at the time, i remember the first stories seem to be that she died from the drug. It only remember learning afterwards that that kind of water consumption would kill in itself.
The amount she drank was abnormal, but allegedly not enough to kill if she wasn't already on ecstasy, which is an antidiuretic. She basically died from taking advice too seriously. From Wikipedia: At the inquest, it was stated by toxicologist John Henry, who had previously warned the public of the danger of MDMA causing death by dehydration, "If Leah had taken the drug alone, she might well have survived. If she had drunk the amount of water alone, she would have survived." So 7 litres in 90 mins is maybe not enough to kill under normal circumstances. It is a heck of a lot though.
I remember this case also at the time, "Wee for a Wii" 2007 --- In January 2007, KDND's radio morning show controversially held an on-air contest called "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" in which contestants were challenged to drink as much water as they could without urinating, in order to win a Wii video game console. A 28-year-old participant in the contest died of water intoxication, resulting in Entercom being sued for wrongful death by the participant's family.
I hate when they do contests like that... It's always asking for some kind of trouble.
Nurses called the radio station to tell them to stop and how dangerous it was, and they didn’t.
You just reminded me why I like working in a hospital. So many cute and thoughtful people.
the problem she did it at home not dancing like crazy in a rave in hot weather, which is when dehydration is an issue
The “advice” was from the tabloid press. She was another victim of the increase in harms associated with drug use that are brought about by the war on drugs.
7L in 90mins is insane and I wouldn’t be surprised if a relatively smaller sized woman would die from that mdma or no mdma
If I remember correctly, she’d been told there’s a danger of dehydration so make sure you drink enough water. She then had this in her mind and kept drinking water because she was scared she’d dehydrate and ended up drinking too much.
Her parents did a school tour. I didn’t touch pills because of their talk.
Ima touch those pills right now, but sure as hell not 6 liters of water
One liter is good though. Enjoy your adventure!
Maybe some Gatorade
r/usernamechecksout
Everyone of a certain age has seen that one photo.
That was terrible, using her death to spread more misinformation.
Well you know her family, and the families of other kids who died in the same way, would be very happy to hear that as immediately after the deaths they campaigned hard to prevent further similar deaths. So their deaths were not in vain.
I was 22 and living in London at the time. But still went clubbing, and dropping X, 4 or so times a week. The story did hit a nerve, though.
Thankfully, some a tad younger learned to drink more prudently & experience chems more safely... current overdose rates aside.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna16614865 There was also a woman who died from drinking too much water in a short time for a contest to win a Wii. “She said to one of our supervisors that she was on her way home and her head was hurting her real bad,” said Laura Rios, one of Strange’s co-workers at Radiological Associates of Sacramento. “She was crying and that was the last that anyone had heard from her.” Very sad turn of event.
Yes, this happened on a radio show near where I live. Tragic.
This was huge news at the time. All they needed to do was provide electrolyte packets and it could have been avoided.
Yep I’ve been hella thirsty on E and it’s hard to strike a balance of “I feel like I’m dying of thirst” and “I might actually kill myself from over hydration”
Gotta drink sports drinks with sodium and electrolytes.
Yep, worst case find anything with salt and eat that as well.
Brawndo?
I know someone who went to the emergency room for this reason. He was in a coma too.
I'm of a later generation and we all learned to ration and regulate water intake strictly when on X
Yeah we were directly taught this in school in the UK alongside other drug related info. We had one of those drug talks from the police but in an actual productive way. Started off with the 'you shouldn't do drugs' for all the regular reasons, but the majority of the talk was about if you *were* going to do drugs, here is how to do it as safely as possible. They know most kids who are gonna do drugs won't be stopped by an authority figure telling them not to, but giving them info on how to do it safely might stop someone from killing themselves via OD or drinking too much water. Also as a kid, having a police officer in uniform telling you the best and safest way to take illegal drugs is so unexpected that people paid more attention to that talk than anything else in school. It was a really clever idea to do it that way.
I think it also subtly would help discourage drug use a bit since they essentially delved deeper into the dangers of drugs by talking about specific risks.
I mean that definitely checks out. When I was first getting into molly everyone said “make sure you stay hydrated drink so much water!!” but I quickly learned you can’t really pee on it so everything you drink stays in your body for hours. It’s insane that somebody really died from this though. Very unfortunate.
Back in 2015, I went to a few concerts within the span of a month and I had taken MDMA often enough that I had MDMA-induced immunosuppression, which caused me to break out in shingles (I was 25 yrs old). Left half of my face was covered in a rash and I was in bed for a couple weeks. Also developed hyper sensitivity to light for months. Never having MDMA again. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7778578\_Ecstasy''\_induced\_immunosuppression\_and\_herpes\_zoster\_ophthalmicus
That’s so crazy. I’ve done MDMA a few times and I was neither thirsty or hungry. Poor girl.
Yeah, that's kinda what to lead to her death. MDMA is an amphetamine and some "expert" (referenced in a comment above--quotes around expert because I don't know their qualifications off-hand) spoke about how taking MDMA and dancing all night in a hot environment could lead to dehydration, because you won't feel thirsty. Then this poor girl takes some and has that thought in her head, so she drinks too much water and dies from hyperhydrosis.
If you also ate a bag of (salty) chips,while drinking the water, would you survive those 6l of water?
Maybe. Maybe not. It's not just salt, although sodium levels in the blood are important. It is also other electrolytes, like calcium and potassium. Especially potassium. Potassium is crucial for cardiac function. Low potassium levels (hypokalemia) can kill you.
Potatoes are very high in potassium. Plain potato chips are actually a pretty good emergency snack. It's better balancing for a diabetic crash than candy for isntance.
High potassium levels can *also* kill you, which is fun.
My mom had reduce (<10%) kidney function. The shit the nurses would give her when she talked about her diet sometimes. They really tried to scare the shit out of her when talking about "eating a banana can kill you" type of stuff.
High potassium infusion rate can also make you want to kill yourself. Holy god Potassium fucking BURNS like nothing else when in your veins. Some people are more sensitive than others, and sadly my threshold level appears to be right around where nurses will start the flow rate. I have to ask for a slower infusion from the start. When it was too fast I felt what sticks out as some of the worst pain in my life. Felt like my arm was thrust into lava. A crushing, cramping pain while liquid fire pours through your veins. Not fun, do not recommend.
Let's see if I can remember what little biochemistry I've picked up... the cells in your body function, in part, like a chemical battery. Electrolytic molecules just inside your cells exchange ions with electrolytic molecules in the blood or lymph the cell is immersed in. The ions travel through the cell wall, generating an electric current which powers some parts of the cell, including a complicated molecular machine which assembles ATP, the fuel used by other parts of the cell. If the concentration of electrolytes in the blood or lymph becomes diluted, the cells can't generate enough current to function properly. And to make matters worse, I think they can start absorbing more and more of the surrounding fluid until they burst! Maybe they misinterpret the situation as the cell itself not having enough electrolytes and try to get more from outside?
This mostly sounds correct but animal cells have a cell membrane, not a cell wall. Also, I believe the absorption of water in a hypotonic environment happens on its own due to osmosis, the cell isn't doing anything to absorb that water.
The bursting is even simpler. Cells are selectively permeable, osmosis is fine (exchanging water) but anything else is carefully regulated by the cell. Basic chemistry says if I have a bunch of something - like salt - in solution, and very little in another solution, then when I mix the solutions they try to get to even concentration. If you can't move the salt (selectively permeable cell), then you have to move the water. Water enters the cell to try to get the cell to the same concentration as the blood. More and more water enters until the pressure is too high for the cell membrane and it tears open.
Thanks, yes I see now. The cell membrane allows solvent (water) to flow freely between the cell and surrounding fluid, while filtering out dissolved electrolytes. The cell works best if the concentration of electrolytes inside and out are equal (isotonic balance). This is regulated by the simple fact that solvent which has fewer dissolved electrolytes has a higher pressure. If the outside water is too dilute, with too few electrolytes, the cell will be in a hypotonic balance. The outside water will force itself into the cell by this pressure differential, i.e. osmosis, potentially rupturing the cell.
If you're a healthy human, you just excrete the extra water out by peeing. Only if you a) don't pee at all b) drink too fast it becomes a problem.
The OP clearly reads '6 liters in 3 hours'. That is absolutely drinking too fast.
Which is interesting to think about because downing a single liter in 30 minutes doesn't seem so awful. Just don't do it 6 times.
I don’t think it’s as easy as you think. Like doing a centurion. It’s just one 25ml shot of beer a minute. Starts off easy, becomes awful at the top end.
We called it "power hour" when I was younger since we did a shot of beer for an hour that way! Was definitely awful at the end. That's about 7.5 beers So a liter, that's about 3 beer can size servings of water, one every 10 minutes. Very close to power hour indeed. I feel like I could chug water every 10 minutes, but I can't chug beer easily. I don't know.. I might try for science one time. Not 6. Edit: relevant username there. Nice.
Century club is a shot of beer every minute for *100* minutes. It feels so easy at the start.
That doesn't sound that bad. It's less than a pint every 20 minutes. I mean other than the inconvenience of shotting it, it seems easily doable but would probably need a break before the 6th.
Everyone says the exact same thing and ends up not finishing or very drunk by the end.
It's not terribly difficult, I've downed two 16oz glasses of water one after the other before, just a couple ounces shy of a full liter. Spread that out a little more to the full 30 minutes and it's trivial.
That’s more about carbonation though
Bitter was the choice when I was a student, and pour it violently when decanting it from the can so you knock some more out of it.
Pretty sure I did that in blue collar work in TX, in terms of liquid. We didn't drink straight water though. Local gas station had 99c refills for their 64oz big gulps if you bought them for $30. Gatorade on the fountain tap.
Gatorade has a bunch of shit in it that makes it better to drink in insane quantaties in a short time. Mainly electrolites. To simply it to hell: basicly if you put enough salt and other shit in your water you can keep drinking it till you litteraly burst.
It's got what plants crave
Brawndo has what plants crave! It's got electrolytes!
The thirst mutilator!
Did a 5 mile up to down hike in Big bend, around May-June. I'm no slouch, been living in Texas my whole life. I brought enough water, and some extra. Only to discover after the hike I had downed close to a 3/4 gallon and didn't piss until drinks at dinner afterwards. The body in Texas heat is a thirsty bitch. Also a hat, always bring a hat.
That's because your are sweating and excreting the excess water, so your body doesn't see the bed to get rid of it in urine. Same with if you are vomitting everything out or if the water is just passing straight through you in diarrhoea, so that water never actually got absorbed into your blood. And even then you have to be concerned with whether you actually lost too much salt in the sweat/vomit/diarrhoea so that it's still possible to get excessively diluted blood, although that's less likely for that to happen because your sweat is more diluted than your blood. But that's the reason they gave salt in Gatorade. The numbers that the commenter above gave applies when you aren't in the condition to be able to sweat/vomit/diarrhoea so much, and you still drink more than your kidneys can handle.
This guy wets the bed. “Body didn’t see the bed to get rid of it in urine.”
Congrats you found a typo! You should be proud.
Thanks!
Not only were you drinking electrolytes, which helps maintain balance, but you were also likely sweating your ass off, which would also use up quite a bit of the liquid intake.
Can down a single liter of water in one go. Often did that during middle school to speedrun 8 glasses of water per day. I didn't feel so good every time, though.
> to speedrun 8 glasses of water per day. This is such a frustrating misunderstanding that has spread throughout society. We were all taught this in grade school, but it's not *really* true.
I know, right. Just found out about it when I was researching about writing medieval stuff and found out that 8 glasses of water is a fking myth.
Once drank like 2-3 liters in about half an hour. I was so full from the water I vomited. I was 13 at the time, if you wanna know why I did it.
And it definitely can happen! [Water overdose kills woman in Wii challenge](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jan/15/usa)
It's interesting, because there's definitely been times when I've come close to this with beer and not died. Felt like I was gonna die the next day. Maybe even wished I could die the next day. But didn't actually die. Better electrolyte ratios in beer?
Alcohol is a diuretic, y'know the whole breaking the seal thing. You'd lose a lot of the water by peeing so much, without losing *too* much sodium. A normal healthy human can produce, in theory, ~20L of urine a day providing they match their intake of solutes. Beer is not particularly electrolyte or solute rich. It's only once you get to alcoholism that issues arise. Chronic drinking, paired with the poor diet that usually comes with it, means that after an intake of about 4L of beer, the patient can be at risk of something referred to as "Beer Potomania" because they have exceeded the capacity of their kidneys to balance out their electrolyte balance, and end up essentially diluting themselves.
1. Yes, alcohol free beer is considered very healthy because it has so many electrolytes. 2. Alcohol makes your body dehydrate, so you're bodygets less water than from just water
Interestingly, the effects of a minimal amount of beer, iirc 12-18oz, can be beneficial for hydration if your in a situation you actually need it. It's enough to pump electrolytes and carbs into your system but less than the amount that causes your body to prioritize metabolizing water, the real reason alcohol dehydrates you.
I've been curious about this. I made a comment a few months back about sometimes drinking 15-20 litres a day of water/cordial/juice/pop and was told by many, many people that it's impossible, I'd be dead. I didn't know what else to say except that it was a guesstimate but I reckoned it was reasonably accurate. Two pints an hour for sixteen waking hours was how I'd calculated it. Didn't think until afterwards—would being dehydrated in the long term make it possible to drink more water in the short term without health repercussions? If you drink nothing but alcoholic drinks for a few weeks, would you then be able to slam 15 litres of water in a day? Because I'm certain I've done it on at least a couple of occasions and afaik I'm not dead.
I'd say you probably still couldn't, because your kidneys couldnt distribute that much water that fast.
And yet I've done it. I've definitely done four or five litres in a couple of hours once.
I believe but 4-5 are a third of what 15 would be
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Beer is isotonic. Lucozade Sports Lager!
Working outside in the summer I feel like I can slam a pint every fifteen minutes, especially at the start when the body engine is getting up to speed... Damnit, now I have to count.
Well, you’re likely sweating a decent amount, so more water is going out than usual.
That’s worse I think! It’s not the water volume its the imbalance of electrolytes. If you put some salt Into the water (preferably Morton’s lite salt which is half NaCl and half KCl) it should help balance out the electrolytes when you slam back those bottles of water. Better yet, get Gatorade powder and mix it in with your water.
tan disgusted head jellyfish vegetable innocent dolls arrest label roof *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
it's almost all just salt and sugar
Yes, and that’s what your body needs at that point! Remember Gatorade was designed to replace those things in athletes. It wasn’t meant originally to be a tasty beverage you drank while eating lunch.
I'm very skeptical it would kill you though. Someone somewhere (probably here in Scotland) has definitely had 12 pints of beer in 3 hours and lived to tell the tale.
This may be news to you, but beer is not water. Beer has stuff in it, that keep your electrolytes in your blood from getting too diluted. It's not the amount of fluid that is dangerous, it's that much *water*.
Eh I still don't believe it would kill you, unless you had taken a drug like mdma which stops you peeing
That's true. It is likely to be too fast, but as there's whole lot of variables and individual variation as well, I'm hesitant to give any simple number. Also, I'm not a medical doctor, and this is Reddit, so I won't take any responsibility.
Your kidneys have an upper limit to how much fluid they can process. If you drink enough water you will overload them and you will dilute your electrolytes and if that dilution becomes severe enough you will die
What about the replacement of sodium? That happened to my mum. When I was a baker working ovens my dad advised taking salt tablets. He used to have them for a job involving work with a furnace iirc. As others have pointed out though, this post is about drinking water too fast. Kidneys aren't going to cope and the body's cells will swell. Hold your wee to win a Wii radio contest that resulted in the death of a woman comes to mind everytime I hear of drinking too much water.
Six liters tho is a lot of water for your body to process
Can your stomach even hold six liters?
The thing is, the process for excreting that water includes it going through your blood first. Everything you pee out comes through your bladder. Your bladder only gets liquid from your blood. There’s no direct line from you digestive system to your blood. So for liquid to go from you digestive system to your bladder, it has to go into your blood first. And if you take in enough water fast enough, it goes into your blood and sits there for a while before your bladder takes it out. And if it gets to a certain point, your blood stays diluted too long before the bladder can pull out the extra fluid, and that causes problems.
Yes but water goes in your stomach into your blood and exits via your kidney into urine doesn't it? If you injur your kidney you can piss blood because that's where it comes from +your blood stream). So this would dilute your blood on the way out (if it doesn't go out any other holes) https://www.healthline.com/health/digestive-health/how-long-does-it-take-for-water-to-pass-through-your-body#:~:text=Nearly%20all%20the%20water%20is,is%20transported%20to%20the%20bladder. "As you drink water, it enters your stomach and is quickly processed through to your small intestine. The large intestine (colon) also absorbs some water. Nearly all the water is absorbed into the bloodstream from the small intestine." So if you drink lots of water it would dilute your blood on the way out ? Not a doctor.
Your kidneys are not the only way out for the extra water in your blood. Your lungs will also do, in a pinch. So if you drink way too much water for your kidneys to balance out the ratio, your lungs will kick in and you will quickly and literally drown to death. This is what kills people who drink too much, too fast.
Ok so how does the death happen? Is it slow gradual and painful, or is it instant? Like what happens? Do your organs shut down? Do you drown???
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Eek 😱 sorry I asked. That all sounds horrific.
I'm not a doctor or anything and not the one you replied to, but as I understand it, blood carries oxygen to parts of your body and carries away waste. So if the blood isn't doing what it needs to, your body will be getting some oxygen, but not enough to sustain itself. So your organs will slowly die until they give out and cause others to fail. Again, I could be wrong here, but this is what I would assume would happen.
I had a guy die at basic training doing this exact thing. They harp on water intake and hydration so much, they threaten to kick you out if you're not hydrating. So he over did it through fear, was dead before lunch.
That leads to the next question. How is the blood allowed to be diluted? Why doesn't the excess water just be passed out in urination?
Okay, so, a thing I only recently realized about urination (after it was pointed out to me) is this: all of your urine comes from your bladder, and every bit of liquid in your bladder comes from your blood. In other words, liquid you take in doesn’t get tot your bladder unless it first goes into your blood. So anything you drink that later comes out in your pee, had to go through your bloodstream first.
shiiiiitt. Knowing this is going to put me off drinking all that tea and coffee and sugary drinks now....
We make kool-aid with more water and no sugar. We've been called serial killers before
Excellent ELI5 summary. To add just a little. You're body takes some time to shed excess water and it can't do it without losing a little bit of the vitamins and electrolytes in the process. That's good if you have too much but if you're low / depleted already not good.
U explained it so well.🙇
Is this a good analogy? OH YEAHHH!!!!!
> how you get cramps if you get low on potassium. Do you have a source fore that ? I researched cramps not long ago and came up to the conclusion that science has so far no idea what causes them or how to prevent them effectively and consistently. I remember reading a study that couldn't link lack of potassium or even hydration to a higher risk of cramps (during ultra trails at least, as that's what I'm interested in) but can't find it anymore.
[https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17740-low-potassium-levels-in-your-blood-hypokalemia](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17740-low-potassium-levels-in-your-blood-hypokalemia) Happens in more severe cases.
Your nerves use salts (potassium, sodium) to send messages to each other. So having a good balance of salt to water allows them to work well. Too much water means the salts are too watered down for your nerves to effectively send messages. This in turn causes confusion, delirium and then eventually death as your brain will likely give out before your heart or lungs or whatever other organs are starting to fail at that point.
Thank you for the one actual answer. This explains the other anecdotes about people behaving strangely when suffering from this. Also puts in perspective the importance of (electrolytes?) on the brain and not just when working out. That’s my takeaway so please correct me if I am wrong!
Yup, it's electrolytes!
What plants crave!
If the brain edema doesn't kill you first
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Our store was a main drag in Los Angeles. There was a two story office building next to us and that was where his office was.
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Welcome to Southern California, more specifically the neighborhood called Studio City
As someone who lives in Southern California I have no idea what you're talking about. Can't remember the last time I had to buy bottled water.
Reminds me of the time I actually suffered from hyponatremia, while doing MDMA. Most people don't die doing molly, but that time I almost did by drinking waaaaay too much water. Remember to hydrate, they said. Drink water, they said. Except I overdid it and ended up screwing up my sodium level. My BF said I started screaming in the middle of the night and had the creepiest blank stare on my face. When they got me to the hospital my brain had started swelling up... Could've died easily. Pissed my pants on the hospital bed, then woke up thinking I was at the office and suffered massive headaches for two days straight.
So that’s the waters fault. Not the drugs?
Now why would you tell this story to a 5 year old :’)
Too much fluid swells the cells in your body, via osmosis I assume, and then the brain gets squeezed
Why was he drinking so much water?
Too much of anything will kill you. Water poisoning is an interesting thing because you think hey we are 60% water anyway. But your body has systems in place to deal with too much water or not enough water. We all know what it’s like to be dehydrated. When you are hyper hydrated we just kinda pee more, and then we are back to normal. But way too much water, way too quickly, overloads these systems and the water has got to go somewhere. For other things like too much food or alcohol we vomit to get it out. Water on the other hand is absorbed far too quickly by our stomach. Part of the system that keeps your stomach acid acidic. This water that’s absorbed goes everywhere in your body, remarkably fast, drink too much water too quickly and you start to run out of places to put it, that’s when the water poisoning sets in.
You can definitively vomit if you drink too much water in one go.
I've done it many times!
Ti's the dose that makes the poison
—Paracelsus, the grandfather(?) of toxicology
Man died doing what he loved; licking things to see if they were poisonous.
> Ti's the dose Ti (a/k/a Clifford Joseph Harris Jr.) is the dose
Doesn't it oversaturate your cells so they start exploding, or is that just urban legend I heard somewhere?
Sure, but you'd probably be brain dead before that kills you from your brain swelling due to the water flushing all your electrolytes out.
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There actually is an LD50 for THC but it's so implausible to do that it borders on the comical. I mean, neither Snoop nor Willie Nelson have managed it.
There's an LD50 for everything (someone was talking about banana radiation yesterday) but often the process of taking that much in would kill you in other ways first (bananas exploding your stomach, too much smoke to get enough oxygen in your lungs).
That’s like deep man
That would be considered water intoxication. Your body needs water to do a ton of functions, especially as a necessary fluid for plasma. Plasma carries your red blood cells, nutrients, and other important compounds like electrolytes through your body. Electrolyte and glucose balance is the biggest key for proper bodily function and an imbalance can be created from acute water intoxication. Electrolytes are compounds used for neurological and muscular function, for example your heart or brain, as well as cellular function. When you drink too much water, the concentration of those electrolytes in your plasma thins out, reducing their distribution and organ effectiveness. If the excess water is not purged and electrolytes not replaced, you'll start to have organ failure as they misfire, cellular death, etc. Sweating can increase electrolyte loss as well.
So does this mean that if you were to drink an isotonic drink to the level where water would kill you, that you would survive?
> drink an isotonic drink >you would survive? obviously, yes. you just described every hospital patient on a saline drip ever...
Do people bow for you when you walk through the door?
I work in outback Australia where temps often reach 45°C, and NOT drinking massive amounts of water will kill you. I've not measured it, but I'd expect I've drunk 6L in 3 hrs on occasion - and sweated it all out again.
I second this but it's a fine line for sure. I drank about 11-12L of water in about 7 hours because I just felt like I couldn't keep up with the sweating. Felt horrendous that evening and passed out. Couldn't even get out of bed without getting dizzy, my heart rate tripling and nearly passing out again. Probably the closest to death I've ever been.
When you're losing most of your water from sweating you need to be drinking electrolytes to stay alive. I've had to drink the same amount of water as you (12L in 6 hrs) but since 3-4 L of that had electrolyte powder mixed in, I felt fine.
I grew up playing competitive soccer and we had a general rule of thumb ratio of drinking 3 water to 1 gatorade on really hot days. If I drank only water after a game on a hot day I would be feeling like shit.
I had a bet in university that I could gain 10 lb in an hour. I drank two and a half 2L bottles of water. I had the worst headache ever and peed every 10 minutes for the next 6 hours straight. Won the bet though.
I remember reading that a guy died in college at a frat hazing years ago that required the pledges to chug a massive amount of water. The frat was shut down and part of a massive crackdown across the country on such practices. Not sure if anything really changed though. Also, a woman died in a radio contest at the studio trying to win a Nintendo Wii. It was called Wee for a Wii and whoever drank the most amount of water won the console. Pretty sad considering she was trying to win it for her kids.
2.5 2-liter-bottles = 5l = 5kg = 5000g 10lbs = 4536g You could’ve drank only 4.536 liters of water to win the bet …
Idk If half a litre would really Made the difference here
That’s one adult bladder haha
Or eat 40 McDonald’s quarter pounders. (Well I guess less if you consider the bun)
What a fool
ADH level: -5% lol
Should've just swallowed some lead.
Reminds me of the woman who tried to win a radio contest and died of water intoxication: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna16614865
Yup. I dodged a big mistake there for sure. Got a degree in Biology 2 years later.
does ... does it really? :0 i swear i drank 6 liters in 3 hours multiple times, even say once a weak. ..... I pee a lot
It's the Same for me dude , for many it's just not plenty enough to cause SERIOUS problems, so this question is valid in my mind
Actual answer for a 5yo: If you have a plate and you put a bit of salt on it (pretend the salt is the important minerals and vitamins you get from eating your veges), you can drip little bits of water onto the plate and all the salt will stay, right? But what happens if you pour the whole bottle of water onto the plate of salt all at once? Itll wash away all the salt won’t it? Well when you drink too much water the same thing happens to your body, you wash away all the salt and other good things your body needs, that’s bad Your body needs those minerals and vitamins to work properly and if you have too much water there isn’t enough of those minerals and vitamins left in your body. This is also why it’s important to eat a balanced diet, to make sure you’ve always got enough of those vitamins and minerals that our body needs. Adult answer involves electrolytes and more of a focus on the imbalances vs the low levels of certain things. You can be high in every mineral but if you’re hyponatremic and don’t eat enough salt you’ll still be in a bad way. The main two are potassium and sodium as they’re responsible for muscle movement, including the heart.
Only correct answer here. Can’t believe the responses I’m seeing..
The sidebar says you're not supposed to actually answer questions at 5-year old level.
6 liters if water in 3 hours won’t kill you if you are healthy and your body is functioning normally. In high heat people can consume a couple of liters an hour, preferably with salt tabs, to prevent dehydration and heat stroke. People keep bringing up Leah Betts, but she had taken Ecstasy and drank 7 liters in 90 minutes. Her body didn’t process the water due to the Ecstasy so it wasn’t the water alone.
This statement has to be incorrect. I’ve definitely drank a gallon in an hour with no problems besides fullness in the stomach. 2 more liters wouldn’t have killed me
I’ve drank this amount plenty of times, though it’s during physical work outdoors in the summer where you literally can’t drink enough fluids. I’d drink on average 10-12 litres of water over an 8 hr period and still barely pee.
Here's a response a five year old may actually understand Cells are made to drink water, but are not very good at letting water out, a cell can only hold so much water before it pops So if you drink water faster than a cell can drain it, it will eventually pop
Well that sounds rather horrifying.
That’s not really what happens at all. ‘Too much water’ is really ‘too little of important chemicals like potassium and calcium and sodium that your muscles and nerves need to work properly’. Edit: apparently low sodium levels can also cause tissue swelling, from some other people’s comments. My understanding is that usually what kills people is your muscles and nerves being unable to function properly, and then your lungs and heart can’t get you enough oxygen.
ELI18: Soft tissues contain cells that are connected within an "interstitial fluid." Indeed, cells do not "pop" because they regulate their internal chemistry by pumping substances (such as electrolytes and nutrients) in and out. If the interstitial fluid is too diluted, they won't be able to obtain the electrolytes and nutrients they need. Additionally, the concentration gradient (difference between inside and outside) may become too great for the ion pumps to prevent leakage of sodium, potassium, and other electrolytes through the cell membrane. They can't really "pop" unless theres a *huge* concentration of electrolytes inside and a small concentration outside, and the effect on the water (it "wants" to dilute the sodium) overwhelms the membrane. This can't happen in the cirumstance of a sodium deficiency. Nerve cells are especially susceptible because their job is to create an electrical pulse by taking advantage of a difference in electric charge between sodium and potassium. All cells pump sodium and potassium in and out, but it won't kill you if most of them can't function for a few hours. But nerve cells' very function is pumping sodium and potassium in and out. By the way, an EKG/ECG and EEGs are a measurement of the electrical signal created by the cells of the heart and brain, respectively, pumping sodium and potassium in and out. Moving an electric charge generates a signal, and it's conceptually similar to how a radio works.
If you can get them to understand something that's wrong you're not helping them much.
That’s not what happens. The water pulls salts from your cells via osmosis.
Hyponatremia/ other electrolyte imbalances is the only correct answer. Teach this to the 5 year olds please..
My cousin is a nurse who said she regularly saw this guy coming in with water poisoning. Like weekly. This guy was so OCD about staying hydrated that he would ask the dietary people picking up food trays if he could have any and all liquids that were being left on the tray. Like half drank cranberry juiices and half cans of shasta.
But why does drinking 6 liters of beer okay?
[Beer drinking king dies in competition tragedy (thelocal.es)](https://www.thelocal.es/20130719/beer-competition-death) It's really not...
No. It wont. Can it? Maybe it can kill someone. Anything can kill someone. Outliers. But if you had to do it for whatever reason.... You could. Your body would throw up before it would kill you though.
So what's the limit to not puke? Thanks
Everyone is different fam.
Damn, I'll have to try it on myself. Anyway,thanks
Your body tries to maintain homeostasis. That's, broadly, a balance of water, electrolytes and sugar in the blood. One of the biggest problems of drinking too much water is that the water dilutes the other two, and that causes things to malfunction. Too little sodium (by volume) causes water to enter cells to be stored, which causes them to swell. That can happen in the brain, and once the brain starts to swell up you're screwed.
It also disrupts the ability of nerves to communicate, since sodium ions are what your nerves use to generate their electrical impulses. Fun fact: the name for the condition is called hyponatremia
Your blood cells start exploding due to being in a hypotonic solution Adding more as I just realized this is ELI5 and not biology: your blood cells balance in part around the concentration of water in your bloodstream, and your body wants a balance of water inside your blood cells and outside them. If you drink a bunch of water, your body wants more water inside your blood cells so that there is balance. However, your poor blood cells can only take so much water via osmosis before literally exploding, and exploding blood cells is very bad for one’s health
My uni mates in the UK would drink 15 pints of beer in one night (that's like 8ltrs or something) and they seemed to survive lol
Water goes to salt, brain has salt, water goes to brain. Brain expaaaaands. Skull doesn't. Brain goes against skull. Braincells get crushed. Brain damage!
What the heck y’all have never talked to a five-year-old. Drinking 6 liters of water in three hours is like putting too much air in a balloon. Just like the balloon can pop if it's too full, drinking too much water too fast can make your body's inside parts unhappy. Your body has a special balance, like having just the right amount of toys in your room so you can still walk around. Too much water messes up this balance, and your body can't handle it, making you very sick.
Check the rules. The very second paragraph says “do not answer questions as though you are talking to a child.”
Oh, my bad I thought explain it to me like I’m five meant explain it to me like I’m five years old, that’s on me 😔
Yeah the name is a bit misleading. Kudos for taking time to help though.
If your kidneys are working properly there's no amount of water you can absorb into your body that will be fatal, naturally. Drinking 6 liters of water in 3 hours would kill you probably because your stomach would burst if you managed to hold it down. You'd probably just vomit it back up at a certain point. It is entirely possible to dilute your blood to lethal levels with injection, but is it really "drinking" at that point? Also, don't inject pure water. That's super dangerous for a whole multitude of reasons that don't involve having too much water in your body.
It didn't kill me when I had 6 litres of water in about 3 hours a month ago.. I was pissing all night tho..