Cool Guides

Gasoline is better for your health than vitamin C.

If not for the additive to make it inedible.

Fuckin right? If you're 300lbs, you could apparently drink almost 4kg of gasoline and have a 50/50 shot of survival? Yeah right

This only compares the risk of death, not other health problems. Also, gasoline is way more readily available in pure form than most other substances, and nobody would drink it voluntarily.

This list is about lethality, not death counts.

Death rate is society-dependent. If we only paid with lead coins and never washed our hands, cases of lead poisoning would skyrocket even if the element and our bodies remained the same (and so would LD₅₀).

You need to consider that a typical dose of acetaminophen is much higher than a typical dose of thc.

You're confusing 50% lethal dose (medical property of a substance in relation to the body) with death rate (property of a death cause, obtained statistically from a population at a specific time). This is pure medical data which still may be slightly inaccurate, but you can easily check relevant scientific papers for their estimate of the LD₅₀. I think all values presented here are correct within a factor of 2, unless you find a reputable journal stating a very different result. Each substance is available in different concentrations and humans’ exposure to them also varies. You can get lots of pure water, sugar or gasoline easily but not a gram of viruses. Nobody would voluntarily consume a substantial amount of gasoline but nanograms of viruses come and go in the air all the time.

It is somewhat misleading to group poisons, radioactive isotopes and viruses as they work in very different ways, but the gist is correct. And yes, the LD₅₀ is still a statistical estimate dependent on the humans studied, but not on society etc. like the death rate.

It's probably all correct, but super misleading. There's probably no way to overdose on THC other than drinking loads of highly concentrated oil. Just like there's no way to overdose on LSD, since it gets taken smaller doses.

You consume grams of salt, milligrams of meth, vitamin D, …, and micrograms of acid.

So the important part is “how close is the usual dose people take to the lethal dose, and will your body rebel before you get there (e.g. it's hard to eat that much salt or drink much water)” or in other words “how likely is it to accidentally overdose”.

For the THC though it would be grams of pure THC, not grams of weed

LD50 is usually determined using rodent studies. How much Vitamin D causes an overdose in half of a population of mice?

The dose makes the poison.

And with drug safety, in practice LD50 is less important than how close a therapeutic dose is to a lethal one. If a drug takes 2g/kg to kill you but you need 1g/kg to work, that's way more dangerous than one that takes .02g/kg to kill you but only needs .0002g/kg to work.

Yes, that's basically how it works, see my other comment

Yeah, very confusing if you don't understand how the data works.

Specifically from the sun, too. I have never heard of anyone dying from too much sun exposure that's not related to the temperature or skin damage.

Since the maths is wrong with the water sentence, I'm sceptical of the accuracy of the rest.

Yeah, this thing's a bag of crap

It's 9 litters of water ingested at once for a 100kg person.

That's 4.5 large bottles of pop filled with water, chugged down as fast as possible, has a roughly 50% chance to kill a person.

That makes sense.

Would you mind providing a source correcting the graph?

Since the graph has a source listed and you don't...

90g * 100 = 9kg so 9L of water (2 gallons)

That's nine liters for a 100kg person..

Depends on the isotope, of course. There are different ways it can hurt you.

• If you put together a critical mass of ²³⁵U, it undergoes fission and you die in seconds without needing to ingest it.
• Naturally ocurring uranium (²³³U-²³⁸U, mostly ²³⁸U) has a half-life of billions of years, so it's very weakly radioactive. It would take a lot of it to harm you from decay radiation. Or very little if you pick a very unstable synthetic isotope outside the 233-238 range (but every element "has" such radioactive isotopes, though not in nature).
• Uranium is chemically toxic, which is whal will kill you if you ingest a small amount of a common isotope.

I think they are referring to Uranium with natural isotopic abundance. Which is complete bullshit when you put a picture of a nuclear power plant behind it – which in most cases can not function with the natural isotopic abundance (heavy water reactors being the exception, not the rule).

Let's not forget this only refers to LD50 not permanent organ damage.

Ethanol is drinking type alcohol