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.
The reason that polar bear liver has toxic levels of vitamin A is that seal liver does and polar bears eat those.
So don’t eat seal liver either.
But I want super gout to demonstrate my wealth!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=sGRZ29YZl68
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And what’s the reason that seal liver is so high?
Seals developed a high tolerance for vitamin A and the ability to store large amounts of it as a defense mechanism, knowing that high levels were toxic to certain other animals, but they forgot the polar bears don’t give a fuck.
Vitamin AHHHHHHH MY SKIIINNNN
💀
“Tolerable upper intake” is based on more than a single does. One gram would almost certainly be fine. There’s some slightly sketchy 1940s “fuck them lab-rats” science going on, but some scientists at Cambridge guesstimated it would take making it into a significant side-dish or main course to REALLY fuck you up:
It is questionable what factor should be taken to convert doses used for rats to the corresponding doses for man, but the ratio of 75 taken from the relative food intakes of the 100 g. rat and 70 kg. man would seem reasonable. If we take 100,000 i.u. of vitamin A as sufficient to cause immediate illness in the rat, then about 7,500,000 units should cause illness in man. This amount would be present in 375 g. of bear liver containing 20,000 i.u. of vitamin A/g., not an excessive portion to be eaten at a single meal.
scientists at Cambridge guesstimated it would take making it into a significant side-dish or main course to REALLY fuck you up
I actually heard about this from a YouTube channel referencing the diary of Gerrit de Veer from 1597 where he recounted his expeditions’ encounter with eating polar bear liver and nearly dying from it in 1596.
I can’t find the actual diary entry, but I think it’s behind a pay wall on the Wikipedia link as a reference.
The story the YouTuber told was presumably in the diary. He said their ship got stuck in ice and they used wood from the ship to make a cabin. Sometime later, they had a run-in with a polar bear and ended up shooting it from inside the cabin. Sometime after that, they had a group meal consuming the polar bear liver and everybody’s skin started falling off.
Luckily, if you try to eat a polar bear liver, the polar bear will stop you.
But don’t worry, human liver is safe for polar bears to consume.
That problem is easily solved. Don’t eat polar bear
Theat found the bone-hurting juice. It’s a polar bear liver milkshake
Foie Gras d’ours blanc
Am I the only one seeing the opportunity regarding billionaires? Of course we have to use a polar bear who is already dead so we don’t have to kill the poor thing to get rid of billionaires. We can start by leaking the rumors that when a polar bear dies due to old age its liver releases certain enzymes that make it extremely delicious. Also eating a spoon of that liver each day for a week has been shown to elongate telomeres and greatly reduce, even revert, aging.
I’d sacrifice a polar bear to get rid of a billionaire, ngl.
…greatly reduce, even revert, aging.
There’s a case to be made that it does stop its consumer from aging much further if applied correctly.
Having murderous fantasies about people just because they’re wealthy hardly makes you any better person than the ones you despise.
Not all wealthy people, just insanely wealthy ones, so wealthy that it becomes an act of aggression against all the rest of humanity at that point. Imagine someone hoarding all the water during a drought, that is what these people will be trying to do if there is ever a drought.
It is also fatal to the bear.
Is 2 grams safe?
Shalt thou count to one no more no less
How many people are trying to eat polar bear liver?
