• Decoy321@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I went and looked this up, turns out drinking acetone isn’t as outright dangerous as I expected. Our bodies produce a little of the stuff when breaking down fat, into ketones. It’s only a problem when there’s too much of the stuff for the liver to process.

    So basically it’s like drinking rubbing alcohol.

    … Which you still shouldn’t do.

    • ornery_chemist@mander.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think your comment emphasizes enough how like drinking rubbing alcohol drinking acetone would be. Rubbing alcohol (isopropanol) is, in fact, metabolized directly to acetone when ingested. The acetone can be metabolized further, but a good chunk is also simply exhaled.

      • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        All right then, chemically and metabolically speaking, (this is hypothetical and I never have any intention of drinking rubbing alcohol or acetone), what is the maximum amount of these liquids a person could drink before it becomes dangerous?

        • ornery_chemist@mander.xyz
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          1 year ago

          ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I was just trying to highlight a fun fact about how they act similarly metabolically.

          But since you asked, according to wikipedia, the oral LD50s for acetone and isopropanol (taking average of values for rats, mice, and rabbits) are 4713 and 3655 mg/kg, respectively. Extrapolating to a 75 kg human, that’s 451 and 349 mL for a 50/50 shot at permanent night-night. For comparison, ethanol is ~7300 mg/kg -> 694 mL by the same metric.

        • onion@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          There usually isn’t a single point where something goes from safe to dangerous