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.
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.
That’s an interesting statistical question, too. Are there more polar bears still alive than billionaires?
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…
