Woman Dies for a Wii

[Xantar]

She died of hyperhydration. It's rare, but you can in fact die from drinking too much water.

*puts on glasses and pulls out blackboard*

You see, your bodily fluids are mostly made of water but they also have a lot of electrolytes (mostly salt). This is very important because your body cells are also filled up with water and a certain amount of salt. The amount of salt inside and outside your cells has to be regulated very closely because if there's (say) too much salt outside the cells, then the water inside will go out to try to dilute the salt. Water rushing out of your cells = shriveling cells = bad.

In this case, the opposite happened. She drank too much water, so her bodily fluids had a very low concentration of salt (and other electrolytes). So there wasn't enough salt outside the cells which caused the water outside to rush into the cells to try to restore balance. When enough water gets pumped into a cell, it bursts like a balloon.

You'd have to drink A LOT of water for this to happen to you, but this is basically the reason why Gatorade advertises that it has lots of electrolytes in it. When doing extreme physical activity, just water alone won't replace the salt you lose when you sweat.

This PSA brought to you by my Biology class and the Wikipedia