If you get diabetes after a round of syrup, you were gonna get it anyways. Type 1 diabetes is caused usually by your immune system attacking islet cells. Type 2 is mostly due to obesity, but that takes a while. (See here for a clear desc.).
In this short-term case, I’d be looking at the LD-50 (lethal dosage for 50% of a population) of pancake syrup. And before you laugh, water has an LD-50 too… lemme look for a Material Safety Data Sheet for sugar. You’d think this type of stuff would be free care-of most 1st world national governments, but nuh-uh.
(Please note I am a Comp. Sci. d00d, not a biologist. But I paid attention in Bio. 30, so lemme give it a shot)
K, lets say the syrup is all sugar, and weighs… 0.750kg (1.65 lbs). (Just to be totally on the safe side)
Page says:
I’ll wing it and say that’s oral dose for rats and for some type of muscle injection test. Lets say 25000 mg/kg oral dose for us. (Again, safe side)
This means you can chow .025kg of sugar per kilogram of you before I start buying life insurance on you. Lets say you weigh 70kg (150lbs): 70kg * .025kg/kg = 1.75kg (3.9 lbs) of sugar. You’ll have to pack away almost 4 pounds of sugar before you likely will keel over.
So. If you trust my math and my sources, an order of magnitude calc says you need over twice as much as that before you’re in any danger. (Unless you only weigh 30kg (66lbs)) But I still think you’ll be sick.
BTW, my brother suggests butter flavour, while I’d go more for a flavoured gourmet syrup, like blueberry.
I just happened to witness a syrup chugging event a few weeks ago. The attention starved person chugged a full container of syrup at Denny’s. I would estimate the cylindrical container was about 3.5 inches diameter and 4 inches tall. It was pretty gross and funny at the same time. The expression on the waitresses’ face was priceless.
He ended up in the bathroom about 10 minutes later and no matter how hard he tried, it all came back out.
Ugh it makes my stomach churn just THINKING about it! I think pancake syrup is pretty gross as it is.
So if you consumed too much sugar, what exactly would it be that could kill you? Would it be the body pumping out way too much insulin, to the point where your blood sugar crashes?
I used to have to take glucose tolerance tests when I was pregnant. Usually this involved me chugging, literally, a carbonated syrup solution within 5 minutes. I don’t remember the exact details (it’s been at least 15 years since I’ve had one), I do believe that there were something like 1000 Calories (kilocalories) in each bottle. I also remember feeling that the Lemondex was slightly less repulsive than the Glucola, however, I never really liked cola.
The hardest part of the test was keeping it down. If I threw it up, I had to drink ANOTHER bottle of the vile stuff.
Bottom line, if you feel that you MUST push your body’s limits, why not volunteer for medical experiments? At least then you’d be helping research while getting grossed out. You and your friends could all join in.
I don’t remember the short term problems offhand, and you’d think that I’d know it, since I’ve been diabetic for so long. I can get “high” if I eat too much sugar, or food that turns into sugar too quickly. This is usually not a problem, as I watch what I eat and try to keep an emergency syringe of insulin on me.
The long term problems are much greater. Having a blood sugar that’s even a little bit too high for too long can cause irreversible damage in many organs, including the eyes, kidneys, blood vessels…all sorts of things. My dad is going blind because he didn’t keep his blood sugar within reasonable limits. He gets surgery on his eyes every few months, but there’s a limit as to what medicine can do. My father-in-law had to have dialysis three times a week because of the damage high blood sugar did to his kidneys.
I really don’t recommend messing with your body’s chemistry just for kicks.
Ahh, this brings back childhood memories…
When I was, oh, maybe 6 my much older brother was making breakfast one day (parents already left for work). He then asked me if I wanted to take a drink out of the syrup bottle. WOULD I?? Holy Cow, yes! Mom never lets me drink syrup! Woo hoo! As I got the bottle near my lips, he ran up and WHAM! slapped the sides of the bottle together, resulting in a syruppy blast. I had pancake syrup up my nose, through my hair and even in my ears. Oh, how we laughed. (OK, he laughed)
So being older and wiser, he decides that simple shampoo ain’t gonna wash this out (the fact that syrup is water soluble apparently didn’t occur to him) so he tries the liquid dish soap. That resulted in disaster, so he figured we needed something stronger. What’s stronger, you say? Well, obviously the granular detergent that goes in the dishwasher! he got a fistful or so of that stuff and started rubbing it into my hair (OW!). Noticing that time had gotten late, he announced that it was time to leave for school, nevermind the crusty, sticky gritty yet oddly sweet and lemon scented dreadlocks that were all over my head. In retrospect, it seems odd that at school, no one batted an eye. I guess that the teachers had other priorities in a school where grade five kids smoked and drank (low alcohol) beer at recess.
And for research purposes, neither the syrup nor various cleaning agents seem to have affected my health in any way.
I hold (as far as I am aware) the Cordova High School Choir class record for most packets of sugare to be placed in a regular coke at Denny’s and drunk.
It was not a pleasant thing to do, but I was in it for the attention. after putting about 20 packets in, I had to chug about 1/4 of the glass to get the rest in. I did not throw up, though it was a close thing.
The bottom of the glass was essentially 2 inches of syrup, thick and grainy with sugar.
I know small amounts of glucose injected intravenously are used to induce diabetic shock in the modern version of electro-shock therapy, IIRC. Could enough syrup ingested orally have the same effect? It might not kill you, but it might very well send you into seizures…