• Question: Is it true that if you eat too many bananas you will die?

    Asked by Evee to Clare, Glafkos, Paul, Samantha on 16 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Glafkos Havariyoun

      Glafkos Havariyoun answered on 16 Mar 2015:


      Eating too much of anything may promote diseases i would think coz you would have an inbalanced diet! You need proteins, carbs, sugars, salts, fibres and even fat ! All in the right amounts! So I guess eating only bananas would cause a few things to go wrong in the human body! Like for example apparently if you have 100 bananas a day you are overdosing in vitamin B6 which can cause nerve damage!

    • Photo: Clare Devery

      Clare Devery answered on 16 Mar 2015:


      There are so many rumours about this but I don’t think anybody needs to worry! There are three main things we need to concentrate on here –

      1) Bananas are high in potassium. This is technically a good thing! We need it to survive. Generally when you hear people say that someone is eating too many bananas they refer to a ‘potassium overload.’ The lethal dose of potassium chloride is roughly 2500mgs per kg of body weight in 30 seconds. This is pretty much impossible to reach from bananas alone! A 50kg person would need to eat over 300 bananas in 30 seconds to reach this lethal limit …I don’t care how hungry you are, that just isn’t possible!

      2) Bananas are pretty high in calories for a fruit. If you were to feast endlessly on them you would gain weight (about 25 bananas would cover your entire daily calorie requirements) and there are health problems associated with being overweight.

      3) Radiation dose! Ha this is a bit of a strange one! Because of their high potassium content, bananas are naturally slightly radioactive (don’t panic – only very slightly!) You should look up ‘banana equivalent dose’ on the internet and see what you find out. If you go ahead and eat 10.000.000 bananas at once, you will get radiation poisoning. You will end up with chronic symptoms if you eat 274 bananas a day for seven years.

      But all of these examples are outrageous…so I think we are pretty safe to say that normal banana consumption is okay 🙂

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 16 Mar 2015:


      Well if you eat too much of anything you will die!

    • Photo: Samantha Terry

      Samantha Terry answered on 16 Mar 2015:


      If you eat too much of anything you die! Even if you drink too much water too quickly you can drown.

    • Photo: Paul Booker

      Paul Booker answered on 16 Mar 2015:


      Bananas have quite a bit of Potassium in them, so in theory if you ate enough you could alter the levels of Potassium in your blood to a sufficient extent that you would get hyperkalemia and potentially alter natural heart rhythms (then leading to a cardiac arrest). In practice you couldn’t really do this as your body is so good at regulating itself! In the United States (where they have the death penalty), they do actually use an injection of Potassium to stop people’s hearts. Short answer is yes, but it’s not possible. Having had a bit of a look it turns out you could also get quite severe constipation from eating too many bananas, which although doesn’t sound serious, could potentially kill you.

      Another interesting thing about bananas is that some of the Potassium is radioactive, so you actually get a small radiation dose from eating one. There’s a fairly good chart which converts the dose you get from a banana to what you get from a medical X-ray and other sources of radiation – have a look! http://xkcd.com/radiation/

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