Suppose there was a competitive eating contest, but instead of hotdogs or mayonnaise, there was just a giant bowl of salt.
What’s the most salt a human could ingest in 10 minutes?
How dangerous or fatal would it be to the competitors?
Fry: That’s the saltiest thing I ever tasted, and I once ate a big heaping bowl of salt.
Bender: The salt level was 10% less than a lethal dose!
Uh oh, I shouldn’t have had seconds…
But could a person will themselves to ingest a lethal dose of salt? Or would the body react to stop someone from doing so?
5 grams of salt would be about a teaspoon. It would certainly NOT be easy for a child and almost impossible for an adult.
I actually did something akin to this once. In my younger and much stupider days (college), I opened a one pound container of salt and poured it directly into my mouth. I am not sure how much there was, but trying to swallow it with saliva alone was impossible. Imagine the saltine cracker challenge, but with salt instead of crackers. I was literally chewing the salt, trying to generate enough saliva to get it down.
Eventually, I had to walk down the hall to the water fountain so that I could swallow it. It was definitely more than a few teaspoons, probably more than a few tablespoons.
I felt nauseous for hours afterward and drank a truly massive amount of water.
A 200 lb man is roughly 90 kg. 18 teaspoons is only 0.375 cups. Easily doable, especially if dissolved in water, but still an extraordinarily bad idea.
Yeah, so doing the math, it looks like about 5-6 tablespoons for an adult around 185 lbs, going by the one gram per kilogram of body weight rule.
Sooo… could you kill someone this way and make it look like a suicide? (Don’t need answer fast–just curious!)
I salute your can-do moxie, if not your judgement. “I was literally chewing the salt.” That’s not something many can say. I’m glad you survived.
Out of curiosity, why in the name of sanity would you do such a thing?
But doesn’t salt water trigger vomiting? How would you keep it down long enough for it to do its work?
I went to a club meeting at which there was supposed to be free food, but when I got there all that was left was salt. I wanted my free food (it was college after all). On the spur of the moment, I decided that I would take the only free food available.
It was a very stupid decision.
To contribute to the thread, I weighed probably about 175 lbs then. I couldn’t have eaten more than a 2 tablespoons. I did not vomit, but like I said I felt very nauseous and was guzzling water afterward.
I’ll say! 
There was an experiment done by the Nazis where they forced about 90 Roma prisoners injest to nothing but sea water
shudder
(Of course, then there’s the opposite – remember that radio station that held a contest to see who could drink the most water? One woman actually killed herself from drinking TOO much water)
If it’s the same one I am thinking of it was competition to win a Nintendo Wii. The contestants had to consume some amount of water (say 3 liters) and the winner was the person who could avoid going to the bathroom for the longest. The woman who won died from holding it in for too long, kidney failure or something along those lines if I remember rightly.
Yup, it looks like water intoxication; they had to drink as much as they could over time and hold it. Her level of consumption and body size were probably factors.
I was dared to eat a spoonful of salt as a kid, and I love salt, and I was very quickly puking.