Name: 8 Survival Myths That Will Definitely Make Things Worse
Uploaded: 2018-05-22T04:56:51.000Z
Duration: 11 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Let's say your car breaks down in the middle of the desert, or in a howling blizzard.

and you didn't stock up on food and water like you maybe should've.

If you find yourself in a survival situation, you're going to have certain priorities:

water, not dying of exposure, not being mauled by wild animals, and,

you know, getting back to wi-fi as soon as possible so you can watch SciShow.

For most folks, food can actually be a lower priority.

But there's a lot of bad survival info out there.

Some tips seem too good to be true, and they are.

Others are ingrained enough to be common knowledge, except they're wrong.

So here's a list of 8 survival tips you definitely shouldn't follow,

What about all the snow that's piling up in the blizzard?

Snow can be safe to eat, especially if it's freshly fallen.

While it can collect contaminants as it falls, things like soot from wood fires and coal plants,

that generally won't be enough to hurt you.

Snow that's already on been the ground for a while is riskier, since it might have accumulated,

like, who knows what, pollutants from the road, maybe,

you know, you can insert your own yellow snow joke here.

But eating snow might be a bad idea for a different reason:

It has to melt inside your body, and that uses your body heat.

Water has a high heat capacity, because it has

pretty strong bonds holding the molecules together.

So you need a lot of energy to break those bonds to boil liquid water or melt ice.

Energy your body would otherwise be using to keep you warm.

Plus, you'd have to eat a lot of snow to get enough water, since

So to keep your body temperature from falling too much, find a way to melt the snow first.

But the worst way to do that is to like hold it against your skin to melt it.

Don't do that, it's still going to cool you down.

If you're in the desert, don't count on cactuses as like secret jugs of fresh spring water.

But there's also a bunch of noxious chemicals.

Cactuses use an unusual type of photosynthesis, called CAM.

CAM photosynthesis uses way less water than other kinds, so it's handy in the desert.

CAM plants gather CO2 through pores at night and store it in the form of organic acids.

Then they can close those pores during the day to minimize water loss,

using the stored carbon to get on with the light-dependent parts of photosynthesis.

For storage, they mainly use malic acid, which isn't so bad for you.

It's in various fruits, although too much can irritate your mouth.

But many CAM plants also make oxalic acid.

Oxalic acid is toxic, because it binds to calcium, which can mess up your body.

It can also build up in your kidneys in the form of calcium oxalate,

In addition to the acids, a lot of cactus flesh contains alkaloids, which are a diverse

family of plant chemicals that generally aren't nice to eat and can really affect your body.

Cactus juice won't get you high, like it did to Sokka in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

But it can make you sick enough to cause puking or diarrhea,

which will dehydrate you and make matters worse.

Fishhook barrel cactuses and young prickly pear cactuses contain few enough of the unpleasant

They still don't taste good, but they'll do in a bind.

But you'd better be pretty confident in your botany skills.

Bodily fluids are also mostly water, so you might think you can recycle them.

Drinking urine might help you survive ever so slightly longer,

but it's only safe to do for a day or so.

That's because the waste products in your pee are waste for a reason.

If you put them back in your body, they'll build up faster than your kidneys can eliminate them.

And that can send you into a state similar to kidney failure, with your body unable to

process all of the potassium, nitrogen compounds, and calcium you're throwing at it.

As for blood… it's sometimes safe to eat in small amounts.

In certain places, it's fairly common, but that's more for its

protein and iron content than as a source for water.

In large amounts, which you'd need to stay hydrated, blood contains more iron than your

Your body tries to store it in places like your heart and liver,

but that can lead to organ failure and death.

Plus, you're at risk from bloodborne pathogens.

So going full vampire to survive is probably not the best idea.

But let's say you've found some water, and now you need a way to get home without GPS.

And maybe you've heard that moss always grows on the north sides of trees.

This is one of those things that's true in general, but not 100% reliable all of the time.

Here in the northern hemisphere, the northern side of a tree will get the least sunlight,

That means the northern side of the tree is most likely to be shady, cool, and damp,

Mosses are non-vascular plants, which aren't as good at retaining water as other types of plants.

They essentially lack the plumbing to transport water inside of them,

so they need all the moisture they can get.

So if some other situation is creating good conditions on any particular side of a tree,

It's not necessarily pointing north, it's just the nice-for-moss side.

You're going to need some shelter too, or at least a way to stay warm.

And you might have seen people in old-timey books or shows

giving a swig of booze to warm someone up, especially in a blizzard.

This one almost seems intuitive, because alcohol brings a flush of warmth to your cheeks.

But that is the exact opposite of what you want if you need to stay warm.

Alcohol is a vasodilator, meaning it opens up the blood vessels near the surface of your skin,

probably by altering your brain's blood vessel controls.

That increased blood flow is why you might feel or look flushed when you're drunk.

But it also transports warmth towards the surface of your skin,

where it can conveniently diffuse away from your body and into the colder air nearby.

When your body is trying to stay warm, it actually constricts those blood vessels to

try and conserve warmth in your internal organs and your brain,

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8 Survival Myths That Will Definitely Make Things Worse

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