In my previous post about soy milk making boys gay, I said I’ll post about the danger of water, so here it is.
It’s not a rumour, there have been real cases of people who died because they drank too much water. In these cases, the victims drank a lot of water in a very short period of time, resulting in water intoxication in the body that led to their death.
How this happens is explained by these few easy to understand paragraph:
In humans the kidneys control the amount of water, salts and other solutes leaving the body by sieving blood through their millions of twisted tubules. When a person drinks too much water in a short period of time, the kidneys cannot flush it out fast enough and the blood becomes waterlogged. Drawn to regions where the concentration of salt and other dissolved substances is higher, excess water leaves the blood and ultimately enters the cells, which swell like balloons to accommodate it.
Most cells have room to stretch because they are embedded in flexible tissues such as fat and muscle, but this is not the case for neurons. Brain cells are tightly packaged inside a rigid boney cage, the skull, and they have to share this space with blood and cerebrospinal fluid, explains Wolfgang Liedtke, a clinical neuroscientist at Duke University Medical Center. “Inside the skull there is almost zero room to expand and swell,” he says.
Thus, brain edema, or swelling, can be disastrous. “Rapid and severe hyponatremia causes entry of water into brain cells leading to brain swelling, which manifests as seizures, coma, respiratory arrest, brain stem herniation and death,” explains M. Amin Arnaout, chief of nephrology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
You can read the full article at Scientific American where the true stories of the death of those who drank too much water are written about.
So for sports people out there, do take note not to over flush your body with water thinking that you are perspiring a lot more than your water intake! For anyone else who has any reason to down lots of water, you also should take note not to drink excessively.
We should all practise taking things in moderation. Whoever would’ve thought that drinking too much water can kill?
