How Long Can You Live???

How long can you live without these important things? Read on and find out!

1)  FOOD: This depends on a lot of things. Your weight, age, gender, height, body composition, and tons of other things influence how often you need to eat and even how long you could live without food. It’s said that one guy named Gandhi fasted for twenty-one days straight! He didn’t even die! But most people aren’t normally like that. Doctors say that the average human can survive without food for about eight weeks (but that’s if you drank water like you normally would).

2)  WATER: How long you can live without water also depends on many things. A baby locked in a hot car or someone who is physically overexerted in the heat without hydration can actually die within a few hours. But the average person in normal temperatures and conditions could live about five days without water. If you didn’t drink anything for a really really really long time, scientists say that your skin could turn a cold, blue-grey color.

3)  OXYGEN: Those who are in very good physical condition can survive without oxygen for a longer period of time than those who are not. Also, smokers and obese people generally have a harder time holding their breath than others. There have been rumors of people holding their breath up to eight minutes, but  most people can only go for a minute or two. How long can you go without oxygen and still survive? Let’s not test it!!!

4)  SLEEP: One experiment on this was by Peter Tripp in 1959 who stayed up for more than eight days! A few days in, he began to hallucinate and said he saw things like cats, mice, cobwebs. A few years later in 1964, seventeen year old Randy Gardener wanted to break the Guiness Book of World Records. He stayed up for 11 days, but didn’t have any hallucinations. But it was reported by doctors that he couldn’t focus his eyes had slurred speech, and had a very short attention span by the last day. Studies have been done on rats and they can live about a month without sleep. Scientists say that humans can live just a few days shorter.

* I found my information at: http://adventure.howstuffoworkds.com