We all know that staying hydrated is an important factor in staying healthy, but it turns out you can have too much of a good thing.
That’s because while water is vital to life, it can be incredibly dangerous if you have too much of it. In extreme cases, it has even killed people.
A simulation shared on YouTube by Zack D. Films shows what would happen to your body if you drank a lethal amount of water and it’s left people terrified.
The short video explains: “If you drink too much water, the excess will fill up your stomach and get absorbed into your bloodstream.
“This can eventually cause your braincells to swell up which pushes your brain into your skull and increases the pressure.
“Depending on your size, if you drink about six litres of water in a few hours, your brain would swell up so much that you could go into a coma and die.”
While that’s a pretty scary fact, it would actually take a lot to drink so much in a short period of time – the recommended daily water intake is between two and two-and-a-half litres.
Regardless, when the clip was shared in Reddit’s r/Damnthatsinteresting thread, it left people feeling spooked.
One user wrote: “Zack’s animation should be in horror movies,” while another commented: “New fear unlocked: drinking too much water.”
And a third shared their terrifying experience after accidentally drinking too much. “While breastfeeding I drank nearly two gallons of water to boost production and suffered a seizure,” they said. “Had no idea.”
The process is explained in Scientific American. According to the publication, drinking too much water can cause hyponatremia, which means there isn’t enough salt in the blood.
If there is too much water in your body, the blood becomes waterlogged. It then gets drawn to regions where the concentration of salt is highest and enters the cells, which swell to try and make room for it.
While most cells are able to stretch, the skull prevents this from happening in the brain. As a result, any swelling in the brain can be extremely dangerous.
M. Amin Arnaout, chief of nephrology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, says: “Rapid and severe hyponatremia causes entry of water into brain cells leading to brain swelling, which manifests as seizures, coma, respiratory arrest, brain stem herniation and death.”
