• Question: Is water intoxication common?

    Asked by 377bcme44 to Jess, Harriet, Chris, Andy on 11 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Christopher Blanford

      Christopher Blanford answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      Hey, nice to see this after our chat today.

      Not very common. You feel pretty ill before you get to serious problems, but it’s a good reason not to drink completely pure water with no electrolytes (salts) in them.

      I would start feeling the symptoms when I used to cycle a lot and would drink a gallon or two of water. I starting having to add glucose (for energy) and salt (for electrolyte balance) to my water so I wouldn’t feel dizzy.

      WebMD is a reliable resource: http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/water-intoxication

      Chris

    • Photo: andy chapman

      andy chapman answered on 13 Mar 2016:

      I have interpreted this question in a different way in order to give a different answer. You could mean, is drinking too much water (and therefore intoxication by it) common? – No, because you need to drink lots of water for this but it can happen: hyponatraemia. This is a very low sodium concentration in the blood which is a result of the blood being excessively ‘diluted’ by the water. Nothing can stop osmosis

      (On a unrelated note of unstoppable osmosis, check out these pictures of mushroom bursting through concrete….its all osmosis:

      https://sporesmouldsandfungi.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/the-powerlifters-of-the-fungal-world/)

      Many toxic compounds are given an ‘LD50’ number – the amount of the substance being tested in grams, per kilogram of body weight of the test subject (lets face it…probably a rat or mouse) that kills 50 % of the test population. So lets take botulinum toxin, the one some people use in their faces to fix wrinkles. The LD50 is something like 3 ng/kg. This means in a test group of say 10 subjects, 5 would die at this dose. Or in numbers we can appreciate: 1 g would probably kill 1 million people. Water has it’s own LD50, even though we are basically made of the stuff: about 90g/kg. So for me, I would need to consume about 6-7 litters (guess my weight based on that…) It is not very easy to do luckily, but people have died from this. There was a famous case where a girl was thought to have been killed by excessive water consumption whilst taking ecstasy.

    • Photo: Jessica Groppi

      Jessica Groppi answered on 13 Mar 2016:

      Hi!

      water intoxication is almost impossible.
      Water itself it’s not toxic, unless it has been spiked with toxic substances or it comes from a source where there has been some sort of biological contamination.
      The negative effect of water comes from the osmosis process occurring in our body as Andy said.
      Our cells, as you might know, present an external membrane which allows nutrients, water, minerals and “waste” materials to move back and forth from the inside to the outside in order to maintain a perfect equilibrium. If one drinks a really huge amount of water in a short time, there is going to be an imbalance between the outside of the cell and the inside. Because of osmosis water is going start to flow inside the cells to fix the equilibrium, making them swell up until they explode. This would not cause death, but it would make someone feel really unwell at least for the time it takes for the body to expel all the excess water.

      Jess.

    • Photo: Harriet Reid

      Harriet Reid answered on 14 Mar 2016:

      Like everyone said it’s pretty rare.

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