When it comes to the below foods, overeating is not just unhealthy, it is potentially deadly. You all know that is is bad, but once and a while you do it anyway, those trips to buffets, all-you-can-eat sushi bars, and massive restaurant portions.
There’s no harm done, right? Right, unless you overdid it on any of these common foods, and which can lead to a serious overdose.
7 Foods You Can Actually Overdose On
1. Bananas
Bananas make a great snack or base for any morning shake, but consuming too many bananas can cause sleepiness and headaches, due to their amino acids. In extreme cases bananas can also trigger hyperkalemia, which is a dangerous condition that happens when there is too much potassium in your blood.
2. Carrots
Carrots owe their color to beta-carotene, which is an antioxidant that helps in preventing exercise-induced asthma to cancer. Also, it can make your skin orange, according to nutrition consultant Alejandro Chabán.
While vegetarians are more likely than omnivores to develop carotenemia, due to yellow and orange foods, especially carrots, carotene-rich nutritional supplements can also contribute.
In a case study that was published in The Journal of Dermatology, a woman’s skin turned yellow-orange due to too much consumption of oral carotene supplements.
But, to achieve the same levels in the blood, you have to eat about a 1/2 cup of carrots daily for months on end. It is recommended to cap your consumption at about 2 cups per week.
3. Coffee
This does not only include coffee, but any high amount of caffeine. While most of you have experienced the shakes from too much caffeine, really overdoing it can lead to dizziness, heart palpitations, heart attacks and confusion.
Stick to no more than 400 mg of caffeine daily, to be safe.
4. Star Fruit
There’s plenty of reasons why star fruit is generally used as nothing more than a garnish. Consuming too much of the 5-sided fruit is toxic and causes vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, dizziness, convulsions, and even death, mostly in individuals with kidney problems, according to research out of Brazil.
While experts have not yet determined the exact cause, those persons with kidney problems should avoid star fruit, as even small doses can be fatal.
Are you in good health? It is recommended that you eat no more than a 1/2 cup per week. If you develop persistent hiccups within 5 hours of consuming star fruit, the most common sign of star-fruit intoxication, call your doctor. An overdose, and possibly kidney problems, may be to blame.
5. Soy Sauce
Here’s 1 more reason to reach for that low-sodium option. In a case in 2013, which involved a 19-year-old man who suffered seizures, fell into a coma, and almost died after drinking a quart of the salty stuff.
The opposite of hypernatremia, hyponatremia or what is known as too much sodium in the blood, causes the brain to bleed, shrink and lose water. While very few guys are pounding quarts of soy sauce, just limit your intake to 1 tablespoon daily. Also, removing your salt habit in general.
6. Tuna Sushi
Sushi lovers beware, consuming too much raw tuna can increase your intake of mercury. Large fishes that are on top of the food chain, including as the prized bluefin tuna, can accumulate methyl mercury in their muscles. This is because they consume many smaller fishes.
It is hard to pin down the mercury levels in pieces of sushi. This is because they can vary depending on the species and size of fish. This makes it very hard to set a definitive cap on sushi consumption.
However, tuna sushi from restaurants tends to have higher mercury content levels than supermarket tuna sushi, that is according to research published in the journal Biology Letters in 2010.
Some samples of bluefin tuna or bigeye tuna, which are more common in restaurants, had mercury levels that exceeded or approached levels that were permissible by regulatory agencies in Canada, the U.S., other nations and the World Health Organization, the study reported.
Because mercury can cause severe neurological problems, young children and pregnant women, are advised by the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, to avoid consuming too much tuna. According to the agency’s 2004 guidelines, others can consume up to 6 ounces (or approximately equal to one average meal) of tuna steak per week.
7. Water
The conventional guideline of drinking 8 glasses of water daily has proven to be a myth. But there is such thing as drinking too much water. Water intoxication happens when a person drinks so much that the water dilutes the concentration of sodium in the blood, thus creating an electrolyte imbalance.
Water intoxication, which is also known as hyponatremia, is mostly a risk for endurance athletes. A 2005 article that was publishec in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that 13% of 488 runners in the 2002 Boston Marathon, developed hyponatremia from drinking too much water.
As per the researchers, an easy tip to reduce that risk would be for runners to weigh themselves before and after training runs. This is to to gauge their overall fluid intake and ensure they do not drink too much water during exercise.
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