Food you likely keep in your cupboard could kill you if you eat a surprisingly small amount
There's a common type of food that could kill you if you consume a surprisingly small amount - and it's probably sitting in your cupboard.
It's very much a fans' favourite food item, and it improves almost every dish that it's a part of.
There are several types of food and drink that we know shouldn't have too much of at one time, whether that be chocolate, alcohol, chips - the list goes on.
They're the main culprits when it comes to 'unhealthy foods' that we should try to have in moderation, with some people cutting it out of their diets completely to try and lead a cleaner lifestyle, as they contain high amounts of sugar.
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However, there is another food ingredient apart from the aforementioned carbohydrate that you should also actively watch the intake of - and that's salt.
Salt can be found in 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, despite being a tasty addition to most foods, can be very dangerous if you have too much of it at once - all due to the sheer amount of salt that it contains.
In fact, you could even die if you're not careful.
Luckily, it is quite an obscene amount, 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 a whopping 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 handle.
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 at risk.
A cup of soy sauce contains 14 grams of salt alone.
There have been a number of documented cases where people have had just too much soy sauce.
One 19-year-old man downed approximately two pints of soy sauce and ended up in the emergency room in a coma.
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.
There was another woman who wasn’t as lucky, as she consumed a large quantity of soy sauce after suffering from depression.
Though doctors tried to help, she died from a pulmonary oedema as a result of the fluid on her lungs - although doctors observed that she also had severe brain damage.
Joshua Nair