40 Ordinary Things That Can End Your Life If You Accidentally Have Too Much

So, Redditors have recently been weighing in with their favorite “this much of this will kill you” facts in a now viral AskReddit thread. Folks were listing mostly edible things and very ordinary foods, but there was the occasional activity of sorts, like sleeping, driving and even breathing.

Anywho, the post garnered 6,200 upvotes and generated a discussion that included 3,600 comments.

So, throughout your lifetime, you will consume a lot of things. And that’s not just eating—it’s also things like breathing and absorbing (say, via the skin), among other things. There’s multiple ways things enter your body, is what I’m saying.

And there are a lot of different faculties in your body to process all of it—the good, the bad and the ugly. While you might think eating a banana is healthy and great, it does include a certain amount of toxins that the body should be able to take on as well.

So, the traditional and most known detoxifying faculties in the body are the kidneys and liver, which filter out toxins from the blood and direct into your bladder to be expelled (the kidneys) and change the chemical nature of toxins altogether (the liver).

But there’s also the lesser known detox centers like the lungs, which have a capacity to remove certain gasses, the skin, which keeps water-borne nonsense at bay, and the digestive system, which is capable of eliminating toxic foods through vomit and the runs.

If not for these faculties, we’d all be sick all the time. But they are no superheroes either. There is a certain limit of toxicity that they can manage and any more than that could lead to a slew of problems depending on the circumstances. And even if you’re not consuming any toxins since you live in a clean environment, your body could be creating its own toxins—after all, it’s all a game of breaking down chemical compounds, and sometimes they can break down into toxins, despite not being such in the first place. And toxins in excess essentially weaken the body, and thus cause things like illness and speed up aging.

And if we’re not putting toxins into our body, we’re maybe simply overeating—and that’s just as bad.

The obvious effect of overeating is gaining excess weight in the form of fat. Whenever you overeat, the body converts those extra calories into fat for later use. And if you like hoarding fat and never really using it, then obesity will be right around the corner, and that will put a strain on your body (e.g. the cardiovascular system).

Overeating might also disrupt the way hunger is regulated in your body. Long story short, constant overeating might cause a chain of events that would eventually lead to training your body to give you dopamine to encourage you to overeat. This in turn creates a vicious cycle when hunger is no longer in the equation. But portioning your food more reasonably might help avoid this.