Tylenol is easier to overdose on than NSAIDs. I really don’t think this guide is accurate. I’m really questioning the placement of cocaine and especially ketamine. Vitamin D from the sun? Lethal? I don’t believe black widows are that venomous, either. How are they even measuring this? Cocaine will give you a heart attack, Tylenol will shut down your liver, venom acts like an infection… are they basing lethal dose on how much it takes to cause some kind of fatal reaction, or under a controlled administration with a defined “fatal dose” based on a specific measurement, like damage to a human cell?
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.
1 IU is 0.025 μg, or 0.000025 mg. 50k IU is 1.25 mg.
I buy bottles of 5k IU vitamin D pills. Each bottle has 90 pills. That’s 11.25 mg of vitamin D per bottle. I’d need to take well over 200 bottles of these pills to have a 50% chance of dying.
Yes, an objectively small amount of purified vitamin D will kill you. But it’s quite safe in practice because the environment only has objectively tiny amounts of the stuff. Even high dose pills contain a tiny amount of the stuff.
I think that you’re missing the dosages. Most of these are orders of magnitude higher than the most someone would consume. Like, the caffeine value per kg of bodyweight is as much as most caffeine addicts likely have in a day. So approximately 2 orders of magnitude higher than how much we consume.
MDMA is similar. An ecstasy pill is up to 100mg (apparently; I just looked it up), so an adult would need to pop something like 130 pills to hit the LD50.
Acetaminophen is 500mg/pill, so that’s like a Costco-sized bottle to kill an adult.
Vitamin D is crazy low. 1000 IU is 25 mcg, so 1000 pills is less than the LD50 for 1 kg of body weight. It’s hardly toxic at all, in the dosages we consume. You’d need to pop multiple cases of bottles of Vitamin D to overdose. All
Tylenol is easier to overdose on than NSAIDs. I really don’t think this guide is accurate. I’m really questioning the placement of cocaine and especially ketamine. Vitamin D from the sun? Lethal? I don’t believe black widows are that venomous, either. How are they even measuring this? Cocaine will give you a heart attack, Tylenol will shut down your liver, venom acts like an infection… are they basing lethal dose on how much it takes to cause some kind of fatal reaction, or under a controlled administration with a defined “fatal dose” based on a specific measurement, like damage to a human cell?
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
Also: notice the LD50 for vitamin D is 37mg/kg.
Based on https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8709011/, a therapeutic regime for very low vitamin D levels is taking 6k IU per day for 3 months, or 50k IU once a week for 2 months.
1 IU is 0.025 μg, or 0.000025 mg. 50k IU is 1.25 mg.
I buy bottles of 5k IU vitamin D pills. Each bottle has 90 pills. That’s 11.25 mg of vitamin D per bottle. I’d need to take well over 200 bottles of these pills to have a 50% chance of dying.
Yes, an objectively small amount of purified vitamin D will kill you. But it’s quite safe in practice because the environment only has objectively tiny amounts of the stuff. Even high dose pills contain a tiny amount of the stuff.
I think that you’re missing the dosages. Most of these are orders of magnitude higher than the most someone would consume. Like, the caffeine value per kg of bodyweight is as much as most caffeine addicts likely have in a day. So approximately 2 orders of magnitude higher than how much we consume.
MDMA is similar. An ecstasy pill is up to 100mg (apparently; I just looked it up), so an adult would need to pop something like 130 pills to hit the LD50.
Acetaminophen is 500mg/pill, so that’s like a Costco-sized bottle to kill an adult.
Vitamin D is crazy low. 1000 IU is 25 mcg, so 1000 pills is less than the LD50 for 1 kg of body weight. It’s hardly toxic at all, in the dosages we consume. You’d need to pop multiple cases of bottles of Vitamin D to overdose. All