Why will drinking 6 liters of water in 3 hours kill you?
In: Biology
Your body tries to maintain homeostasis. That’s, broadly, a balance of water, electrolytes and sugar in the blood. One of the biggest problems of drinking too much water is that the water dilutes the other two, and that causes things to malfunction. Too little sodium (by volume) causes water to enter cells to be stored, which causes them to swell. That can happen in the brain, and once the brain starts to swell up you’re screwed.
Your blood needs a certain concentration of certain things for it to keep running your body right. Like how you get cramps if you get low on potassium.
Drinking too much water dilutes those things. So it’s like if you’ve got a nice, tasty glass of koolaid, with just the perfect amount of sugar and flavor mix. It’s exactly what you need it to be. But if you add a bunch of water to the glass without adding more sugar and mix, it’s gonna be so bad you can’t really even call it koolaid any more. It certainly isn’t gonna serve its purpose any more.
That’s basically what you’re doing to your blood if you get too much water. But instead of tasting bad like the koolaid, it stops doing what it needs for your body.
That would be considered water intoxication.
Your body needs water to do a ton of functions, especially as a necessary fluid for plasma. Plasma carries your red blood cells, nutrients, and other important compounds like electrolytes through your body. Electrolyte and glucose balance is the biggest key for proper bodily function and an imbalance can be created from acute water intoxication. Electrolytes are compounds used for neurological and muscular function, for example your heart or brain, as well as cellular function. When you drink too much water, the concentration of those electrolytes in your plasma thins out, reducing their distribution and organ effectiveness. If the excess water is not purged and electrolytes not replaced, you’ll start to have organ failure as they misfire, cellular death, etc. Sweating can increase electrolyte loss as well.
I had a bet in university that I could gain 10 lb in an hour. I drank two and a half 2L bottles of water. I had the worst headache ever and peed every 10 minutes for the next 6 hours straight. Won the bet though.
Too much of anything will kill you. Water poisoning is an interesting thing because you think hey we are 60% water anyway. But your body has systems in place to deal with too much water or not enough water. We all know what it’s like to be dehydrated. When you are hyper hydrated we just kinda pee more, and then we are back to normal. But way too much water, way too quickly, overloads these systems and the water has got to go somewhere. For other things like too much food or alcohol we vomit to get it out. Water on the other hand is absorbed far too quickly by our stomach. Part of the system that keeps your stomach acid acidic. This water that’s absorbed goes everywhere in your body, remarkably fast, drink too much water too quickly and you start to run out of places to put it, that’s when the water poisoning sets in.
Here’s a response a five year old may actually understand
Cells are made to drink water, but are not very good at letting water out, a cell can only hold so much water before it pops
So if you drink water faster than a cell can drain it, it will eventually pop
What the heck y’all have never talked to a five-year-old. Drinking 6 liters of water in three hours is like putting too much air in a balloon. Just like the balloon can pop if it’s too full, drinking too much water too fast can make your body’s inside parts unhappy. Your body has a special balance, like having just the right amount of toys in your room so you can still walk around. Too much water messes up this balance, and your body can’t handle it, making you very sick.
Your nerves use salts (potassium, sodium) to send messages to each other. So having a good balance of salt to water allows them to work well.
Too much water means the salts are too watered down for your nerves to effectively send messages. This in turn causes confusion, delirium and then eventually death as your brain will likely give out before your heart or lungs or whatever other organs are starting to fail at that point.
Let’s imagine two extremes:
* if you drink 6 liters of water gradually over 72 hours, that’s easily fine. That might even be a healthy about to drink depending on your lifestyle and the weather.
* if I pump 6 liters of water into your stomache in a micro second, your stomach might suddenly burst. If we do it a bit slower to give you *some* time to digest, then a lot of water goes into your blood, drastically diluting the chemicals in your bloodstream, chemicals that your body needs to function.
So, as we go from 0 hours, and 72 hours, the act of drinking 6 liters of water changes:
* from being violently dangeorus as (your blood fails and/or organs burst open)
* to being totally safe (you pleasantly and calmly avoid dehydration).
3 hours is on the fast end of that scale, so it is not surprising that it is very dangerous.
–
For a point of comparsion, you have 5-6 liters of blood. That is the amont of circulating liquid your body is used to.
Suddenly putting in 6 more liters is going to tough for your body to deal with.
You health is based on balance, not having too much or too little of anything inside your body
If you have too much water there are things that can’t do their work properly and that is harmful
Without going into not so ELI5 details, you dilute your minerals and salts and your body and your brain can’t function with a low amount of sodium.
Latest Answers