TIL eating 1 gram polar bear liver can be fatal due to an overdose of vitamin A that makes your skin fall off
TIL eating 1 gram polar bear liver can be fatal due to an overdose of vitamin A that makes your skin fall off
If your favorite diner's blue plate special is ever sauteed polar bear liver, you may want to stick with salad. This meal can cause symptoms far beyond indigestion.
A healthy human liver contains 575 international units (IU) of vitamin A per gram while a polar bear's liver contains between 24,000 and 35,000 IU per gram. Compare that to the tolerable upper level of vitamin A intake for a healthy adult human: 10,000. Signs of toxicity generally occur when approximately 25,000 to 33,000 IU are consumed.
Illness severity depended on how much liver the explorers consumed, but symptoms typically included drowsiness, sluggishness, irritability, severe headache, bone pain, blurred vision and vomiting. While milder cases merely involved flaking around the mouth, some accounts reported cases of full-body skin loss. Even the thick skin on the bottoms of a patient's feet could peel away, leaving the underlying flesh bloody and exposed. The worst cases ended in liver damage, hemorrhage, coma and death.
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How many people are trying to eat polar bear liver?
Very few actually! Apparently some Dutch explorers back in the 1500s trying to sail over the top of the globe got stuck in ice and ended up killing and eating a polar bear and documented their illnesses
We didn't figure out what happened to them until the 1940s
I'm more surprised with how they managed to kill a polar bear. Those things are ferocious.
Guns? Like a lot of them?
Or a few lucky bullets. Or maybe a clever trap.
Broken bottle taped to their hands.