Food you likely keep in your cupboard could kill you if you eat a surprisingly small amount
Don't panic, but the odds are there's a killer lurking in your kitchen cupboard right now.
It won't taken the form of a breadknife-wielding maniac, though, it actually lies in wait in a small plastic bottle.
The worst part is, it's a firm favourite amongst most families and will usually improve any dish it's dashed over.
Throughout our daily lives, there's several types of food and drink that we know shouldn't have too much of at one time, whether it's chocolate, booze, sweets - the list is seemingly endless.
Advert
They're undoubtedly the main culprits when it comes to 'unhealthy foods' that we should at least attempt to cut down on, with some people removing them from their diets entirely in order to lead cleaner lifestyles.
This is, in part, due to the scary amounts of sugar present within them.
And yet, there's another food ingredient that you should carefully watch the intake of, and that's salt.
Salt hangs around inside several meats, most condiments and even items as common as bread or cereal.
And speaking of condiments, there is one that we all likely store and use regularly to enhance the taste of dishes that could have fatal results if you consume too much of it.
It turns out that soy sauce - of all things - despite being a tasty addition to meals, can be super dangerous if you have too much of it at once. And it's all to do with salt content.
Consumers could even die if they don't wise up.
Luckily, it is quite an obscene amount that would finish you off, so you won't have to be too worried the next time you drizzle it over your chicken noodle soup.
It can be toxic if you consume too much at once, however, as there is 900 milligrams of salt in a single tablespoon of the sauce, so drinking a large amount of it will be too much for your body to process.
The lethal dosage of salt is roughly between 0.75 grams per kilogram of body weight to four grams per kilogram of body weight, so the average person, with a weight of 68 kilograms, would need to consume 135 grams of salt, or about seven and a half tablespoons of the stuff to put themselves in the line of fire.
A cup of soy sauce contains 14 grams of salt alone.
In fact, there have been numerous documented cases where people have enjoyed just too much soy sauce.
One 19-year-old guy gulped approximately two pints of soy sauce and ended up comatose. Dr. David J Carlberg, the doctor who treated him, said: "He didn't respond to any of the stimuli that we gave him. He had some clonus, which is just elevated reflexes. Basically the nervous system wasn't working very well."
He was suffering with hypernatremia, which in science terms is when the body tries to regulate salt levels between blood and tissue, moving fluid out of that tissue.
It can result in fatal build-ups of fluid in places such as the lungs, while causing bleeding in the brain as it shrinks when water leaves it.
Luckily, the man was treated very quickly, but still had three days prior to regaining consciousness and mental faculties, though he was lucky to be alive as fatal levels can often be lower than what he consumed.
Topics: Food And Drink
Dan Seddon