Dewshine
- Thread starter Rabbuk
- Start date
I specifically remember my chemistry teacher in high school telling us "Don't you idiots get any ideas, cause this stuff will kill you!". He knew us pretty well.
This is what I was wondering as well. They do kind of make it sound like, all joking aside, Mountain Dew is just as bad as drinking the racing fuel. Methanol is seriously poisonous. They say this is a regular concoction? If that's true, how are these the first to die from it? It doesn't take much methanol ingestion at all to at least make you go blind.
Lightweight! Come on over and we'll party right with the 116 octane stuff.
On a serious note, if you want to know potent racing fuel is, I use it in the off season to clean all the parts on the race car. It will eat grease and oil off a part with very little scrubbing. Stand around my racecar when it is idling in the garage, I bet you have the fumes start to burn your eyes and throat after about 5 minutes, and will need to step outside to fresh air..
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Regular ethyl alcohol, the stuff you drink, is poisonous too. It's just a matter of exposure. Let's not pretend that "normal" alcohol doesn't result in thousands of deaths and chronic diseases each year.
That said, you gotta know that drinking something you put in a race car is a bad idea.
That said, you gotta know that drinking something you put in a race car is a bad idea.
So does food, but in matters of acute toxicity lets not pretend like either one is like methanol.
The thing is, treatment for methanol poisoning is ethanol. You need to out compete the enzyme that oxidizes methanol. I've heard stories of alcoholics drinking sterno and then going to the hospital to get "treated" and get their fix.
Guess what - water is poisonous as well. Drink a gallon of it in one shot and you might as well book a room in the emergency room. Drink 2 in one shot and you might as well book a room in the morgue. And your body is made of at least 75% of the stuff.
Yeah, if we are traveling down that road, Oxygen is not good for your longevity either.
It is kind of funny that regular ethyl alcohol was mentioned in this thread though. Spending time on Homebrew message boards, there is constant conversations on toxins in the beer we brew. From plastic bucket issues, to aluminum, lead, etc. There was a toxicologist who did a number of tests from brewing in an aluminum pot to pouring hot wort into a non food grade bucket. His results were conclusive. The only toxin that could be found in any measurable form in any of the beer he made, was the ethyl alcohol.
Ethyl alcohol certainly is a toxin, but just like anything, in moderation, it's not going to kill you. That can't be said for methyl alcohol though. Athough, there is methyl alcohol in beer as well, the concentration is just to small to make an impact. It is a bi-product of fermentation.
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