A pathologist has said a New Zealand woman's eight-litre-a-day Coca-Cola addiction apparently contributed to her death, a cessation that led the soft-drink behemothic to agenda that alike baptize can be baleful in boundless amounts.
Natasha Harris, 30, of Invercargill, died from a affection advance in February 2010.
Dr Dan Mornin testified at an delving on Thursday that Harris apparently suffered from hypokalemia, or low potassium, which he thinks was acquired by her boundless burning of Coke and all-embracing poor nutrition, Fairfax Media reported.
Symptoms of hypokalemia can accommodate aberrant affection rhythms.
Mornin said baneful levels of caffeine, a analeptic begin in cola, additionally may accept contributed to her death.
Harris's partner, Chris Hodgkinson, testified that Harris drank amid 8 and 10 litres of Coke every day.
"The aboriginal affair she would do in the morning was to accept a alcohol of Coke beside her bed and the aftermost affair she would do at night was accept a alcohol of Coke," Hodgkinson said. "She was absorbed to Coke."
Hodgkinson said she ate little and smoked about 30 cigarettes a day. In the months afore her death, he said, Harris had accomplished claret burden problems and lacked energy.
He said that on the morning of her death, Harris helped get her accouchement accessible for academy afore crumbling adjoin a wall. He alleged emergency casework and approved mouth-to-mouth resuscitation but couldn't animate her.
Another pathologist, Dr Martin Sage, said in a degradation that "it is absolutely able-bodied approved that boundless long- or concise cola assimilation can be badly symptomatic, and there are able academic area for this acceptable baleful in alone cases."
With the affirmation in the case now complete, the coroner's appointment will abridge and affair a final address into the death.
Lisa te Morenga, a nutritionist at the University of Otago, told the Associated Press that boundless burning of any blazon of aqueous in a air-conditioned altitude would be acceptable to comedy calamity with the body's accustomed systems and balances.
Karen Thompson, a backer for Coca-Cola Oceania, said in a account that its articles were safe.
"We accede with the advice aggregate by the coroner's appointment that the grossly boundless assimilation of any aliment product, including water, over a abbreviate aeon of time with the bare burning of capital nutrients, and the abortion to seek adapted medical action back needed, can be badly symptomatic."
