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.

  • NABDad@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

  • iAvicenna@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      …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.

        • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          11 months ago

          Sure, tons of them in zoos. Well more than billionaires.

          Tho I’d like to see them in zoos instead. Rare animal and all. Worth gawking at the way people back in the day would gawk at the strange “savages” from distant lands…

          • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            People who hoard money like that are just a rare variant of the crazy cat lady.

            • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              11 months ago

              No need to get misogynistic, friend.

              “Crazy cat ladies” (formerly known as: witches, spinsters, old maids, among others) have historically been women who don’t marry, and prefer low-key companionship with cats (who demand a consensual relationship, and won’t tolerate being imposed upon) and other animals, as well as woman-to-woman friendships, over traditional domestic duties as a brood mare and household servant.

              The whole hoarding thing is a trope, as it can happen to men and women alike, just like all hoarding tendencies. It may be slightly more common in women because women are raised to be more nurturing and compassionate, and often taught to ignore the practical boundaries of their efforts in pursuit of perfection, but that doesn’t mean it is exclusive in any way.

              But either way, “crazy cat lady” is highly problematic language, and if you care at all about such things, you may want to avoid using it in the future.

              https://www.kqed.org/arts/13891913/how-the-crazy-cat-lady-became-one-of-pop-cultures-most-enduring-sexist-tropes

              • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                You’re way overreading what I wrote and pretty much replacing what I meant with something else from your own mind.

                I just meant it as a well known example of hoarding.

                I actually live in the same building as a lady who is crazy (i.e. has deep psychological problems, if I’m not mistaken schizoprenia), has LOTS of cats and even regularly feeds the local strays - quite literally a crazy lady that loves cats.

                No need to go into your cultural assumptions and presumptions about some local stereotype most of which doesn’t even apply in my own culture.

        • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          By an order of magnitude.

          WWF estimates around 26,000 polar bears remaining (22,000-30,000). And there are 2640 billionaires globally according to Forbes.

    • Twinklebreeze @lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Do you even need to involve an actual liver? We could just start a rumor and then skin some billionaires the old fashioned way.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      11 months ago

      You don’t even need to make all the marketing bullshit, just slap a US$ 5k price per serving and the rich will flock to it

    • prole@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      Would be amazingly ironic too… To be killed by eating the flesh of a species that they played no insignificant part in making endangered.

    • flop_leash_973@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Couldn’t we just skip the middle man so to speak and feed some billionaires to a few polar bears out right?

    • Null User Object@programming.dev
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      11 months ago

      No, no, no. “It’s extremely delicious to the hunter, and only the hunter, when the hunter kills the bear with their bare hands. Oh, look, there goes a cuddly delicious liver bear right now. Bon Appetit, Mr Bezos.”

      • bane_killgrind@kbin.social
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        11 months ago

        It’s 1g, you could do laparoscopic biopsy to get that amount of liver, and you wouldn’t expose the bear to trace cocaine and hair loss supplements

    • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      There are much simpler ways of removing billionaires than spreading rumors that might convince one or two of them to try a new delicacy. And typically those methods of removal cost under 50cpr.

    • Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Having murderous fantasies about people just because they’re wealthy hardly makes you any better person than the ones you despise.

      • iAvicenna@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        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.

      • Jessica@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        11 months ago

        Having murderous fantasies about people just because they’re wealthy

        How do you think that billionaires amass such wealth? Hard work? Proper budgeting?

        The ONLY way someone can get that rich is by the exploitation of millions. I hope they get EVERYTHING that is coming to them—feet first so they can savor the moment. ☺️

      • prole@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Yeah no, it definitely does. Thinking about someone dying isn’t even close to the damage billionaires do to the planet and everyone who lives on it on a daily basis.

  • bob_lemon@feddit.de
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    11 months ago

    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.

  • jak@sopuli.xyz
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    11 months ago

    Theat found the bone-hurting juice. It’s a polar bear liver milkshake

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    11 months ago

    “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.

    • JessicaOP
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      11 months ago

      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.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrit_de_Veer

    • JessicaOP
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      11 months ago

      Very few actually! Apparently some Dutch explorers back in the 1500s trying to sail over the top of the globe got stuck in ice and ended up killing and eating a polar bear and documented their illnesses

      We didn’t figure out what happened to them until the 1940s