Can eating more than six bananas at once kill you?

[Northerner]

It's sometimes said that eating a lot of of bananas at once could be dangerous - it has even been suggested that eating more than six in one sitting could kill you. Can this really be true?

Bananas are one of the world's most popular fruits, stuffed with vitamins and minerals. On the face of it they are good for you, so why do some people think they could be fatal?

One well-known figure who has spread this idea around is Karl Pilkington, the grumpy friend of comedian Ricky Gervais.

"Before when you were talking about bananas... I had that fact, about if you eat more than six, it can kill you," he said in one of his conversations with Gervais and fellow comedian Stephen Merchant.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34225517

Phew!

 

[HOBIE]

If you have just ran a Marathon fine but if you are sitting on your ---- all day No

 

[HOBIE]

Its good for cheeky monkeys 😉

 

[Ralph-YK]

That was on More Or Less (BBC Radio 4 raido programme) not very long ago. I'd never heard of the the idea that bananas were no good for you before.
Incidentally, bananas came up with the Diabetic Diatition at the beginning of this month. She said there's no problem with them, or fruit in general, for diabetics.

 

[Sally71]

I love bananas, but I wouldn't want to eat 6 at once!

 

[DeusXM]

Incidentally, bananas came up with the Diabetic Diatition at the beginning of this month. She said there's no problem with them, or fruit in general, for diabetics.

This isn't strictly true.

There is an extremely pervasive school of thought that if sugar is 'natural', then it apparently takes on some magical properties.

Unfortunately, your body can't and doesn't differentiate between 20g of table sugar and 20g of sugar as found in a piece of fruit. Many food manufacturers try to take advantage of this school of thought by always putting a disclaimer on the product along the lines of 'although this product is high in sugar, these sugars are naturally occuring within fruit', which is about as meaningless as saying that cobra venom naturally occurs within the snake .

Therefore if you're eating fruit, you HAVE to take into account the amount of carbs it contains, which frequently means anything larger than quite a small amount is a bad move. Don't forget, fruit (particularly bananas) and fruit juice are often recommended as hypo treatments. This is because they can deliver quite a lot of sugar into your blood very quickly - so that should tell you how whether or not generally eating a lot of fruit is good for your blood sugar!

Two bananas contain about 46-50g of carbs. A Mars bar contains 36g of carbs. So the reality is that in terms of your blood sugar, it is actually healthier to eat a Mars bar than two bananas. By the same logic, a Mars bar is also actually a better blood sugar choice than a 'healthy' smoothie.