How Many Oranges Can You Actually Eat Before the Vitamin C Will Kill You?

How Many Oranges Can You Actually Eat Before the Vitamin C Will Kill You?

Everything in moderation. You could say that about, well, everything. But sometimes you want hard numbers. How many socks can you stick up your nose before the police get involved? Is a frog in one’s bidet one too many? Oh and what amount of orange consumption would result in death?

Well over 9,000, it seems.

YouTube channel AsapSCIENCE is doing awesome stuff, like tackling the interesting question of “How much?”. As in, how much of a regular thing is enough to do you harm or even kill you? The video is a sequel of sorts to one the channel did a few years ago.

While an earlier video covered classics such as overdosing on caffeine and water intoxication, this one goes a little further, looking at the extreme consumption of pepper, oranges and even X-rays.

Turns out 129 spoons of pepper will probably kill you and all the vitamin C from 11,000 oranges would do you in. As for X-rays, you’d have to cop over 7100 back-to-back before the radiation would enter lethal territory, though I’m guessing you’d feel pretty terrible long before you hit the high thousands.

Like most of AsapSCIENCE’s videos, this one is less than four minutes and sort of educational, so give it a watch… particularly if you’re planning to go overboard with the seasoning for dinner tonight.

This article has been updated since its original publication.


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