Woman Drinks Coke Instead Of Water For 16 Years

A 31-year-old Monaco woman was recently admitted to the hospital after
suffering arrhythmia and fainting spells. Her potassium levels were
found to be absurdly,dangerously low. These are bad warning signs, but
the woman had no family history of heart problems. Further
investigation revealed that the patient had not had a sip of water in
16 years; instead she drank only cola.


The doctors told her to stop drinking cola, and then promptly wrote a
paper describing the case.
This is one of those instances, like in the movieSuper Size Me, that
isn't really indicative of anything besides the specific case it
describes. In Super Size Me, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock consumed
nothing by McDonald's for a full month, and found that his health
rapidly deteriorated. And, well, yes, of course it did; probably not
even McDonald's executives would suggest that anybody actually do
this.


That, though, was a movie about an experiment, not someone's actual
life. And so it's fascinating to see just what kind of damage such an
extreme diet choice can doto a person's body. The patient apparently
drank about two liters of cola every day! Here were the effects:


The patient's blood-potassium level was 2.4mmol/L. Norma
blood-potassium levels for awoman of her age should have been about
twice that.


A QT interval is the time in between the start of the Q wave and the
end of the T wave in a patient's heart. It's dependent on heart rate
but indicative of other things; a lengthened QT interval suggests
severe arrhythmia and could indicate death. This patient's QT interval
was 610 ms. A normal QT interval for a woman her age should have been
no more than 450 ms.


The patient suffered severe fainting fits.
Amazingly, as soon as the doctors took the patient off of her bonkers
cola habit, her potassium levels and QT intervals returned to
near-normal. Within one week, her QT interval was 430 ms, and her
blood-potassium levels returned to 4.1 mmol/L. Amazing how much
torture the human body can bounce back from!


The case was reported at a European healthconference this week, though
it hasn't yet made its way to a peer-reviewed journal.