Other than water and ethanol?
You have a shot glass in front of you filled with a pure sample of a liquid chemical compound. You pick it up and drink it down. What can be in the glass that won’t injure or poison you?
Most oils would at least be non-toxic, however you would not be doing your digestive system any favors.
Most other compounds are acids or bases dissolved in water, and could be corrosive to organic tissue, rather than toxic. You get trace amounts of them every day, so the quantity and/or concentration in the shot glass could be harmful.
many things are solutions in water such as beverage alcohol. pure (95%) ethanol can cause some damage.
vegetable oils can be drunk in small volumes.
You can drink turpentine. It has been used medicinally for a long time although it may not really be that great for you, a little of it won’t kill you either. You can probably drink a small quantity of kerosene or diesel fuel if you wanted to push things a little further,
Yeah, I’m specifically asking about things that are chemically pure. There are obviously lots of things that you can drink if they are diluted or dissolved in water.
I think most petroleum-based oils are going to be reasonably safe to drink a shot glass full of. Gasoline, naphtha, diesel, jet fuel (which is very close or identical to kerosene), motor oil, heating oil (which is basically the same as diesel), they are all probably not going to kill you or cause severe damage with a few sips. Make you feel ill, sure. Cause health problems if you drink them regularly? Sure.
Previous thread discussing practical and health ramifications of drinking mercury.
Some polyfluorinated hydrocarbons, like perfluorodecalin, are safe to drink, inject and even breathe in liquid phase:eek::eek::eek:
Also, dimethyl sulfoxide is pretty harmless, unless you happen to be hypersensitive.
It looks like Propylene glycol is pretty safe.
Most sugar alcohols (polyols) are safe and are widely used as food additives for their sweetening or anti-staling properties. They include glycerol/glycerin, xylitol, mannitol, sorbitol, etc. Not all of them are safe, though. Ethylene glycol is a toxic example.
You could drink a shot glass of heavy water without too many consequences.
Depends on if it is heavy with deuterium or tritium. Tritium is radioactive and people that work around it tend to have to have monthly urine tests to ensure that they are not getting contaminated. Of course you probably wont die from tritium poisoning for years and years.
Well for the purpose of clarity, you could breath perfluorodecalin, as in fill your lung space with it , only if it had sufficient oxygen dissolved into it. It does love to carry gases, but if it wasn’t exposed to oxygen then its going to suck the O2 out of your blood…
The same problem occurs if you drink it… notionally non-saturated (didn’t achieve equilibrium with air dissolved into it) perfluorodecalin is dangerous as it would starve you of O2.
I’m a bit confused. In the OP you asked about “chemical compounds” - pretty much everything you eat or drink is a chemical compound. In the post above you say “chemically pure”, which is still ambiguous since the definition of chemical is “a compound or substance that has been purified or prepared, especially artificially”. Can you give an example of what you mean?
If you lower the PH of lye in water to the neutral range you can drink it, it would be salt water.
Propylene glycol is so safe you can use it to inject drugs which aren’t water soluble.
You can drink small amounts of acetone without risking your life.
Is the question what would normally appear deadly isn’t?
Doctor Jackson, I believe the OP is asking for liquids that, like pure water, are composed of only a single chemical substance, chemical substance being defined as a compound or element. Most things one eats or drinks are mixtures.
True; I was thinking of D2O (I think that’s generally what’s meant by heavy water, as opposed to tritated water). Researchers have fed it to lab animals–IIRC it only becomes an issue at tissue concentrations in the range of tens of percent.
It’s still deadly to the animals in the long run, though. D2O is expensive stuff and there’s only one way to get it back quickly…
Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is borderline. It’s a solvent commonly used to deliver that are insoluble in water, though I don’t know if that’s done with pharmaceuticals given to humans (as opposed to the fruit flies, nematodes, and cell cultures that I am drugging). It’s also used as a cryoprotectant, to freeze living cells. Wiki quotes a dose of 0.3 mL/kg as the point of noticeable toxicity, while rodent LD50 is 8-28 g/kg. So a 60 mL shot glass would probably be a bad idea but wouldn’t kill you.
But the sugar alcohols might at least cause pretty serious diarrhea, if the tales of “I ate a whole bag of sugar-free candy and got stuck on the toilet as a result” stories are true.
I’m sure a shot glass of mercury would be fine considering how widely it was used