It should come as no surprise that a Reddit user named MonkeyMan5539 had bananas on the brain when he posed this question to the Shitty Ask Science community:

“If potassium explodes in water and humans are 70% water, how many bananas does it take to blow up a human?”

Like Diet Coke and Mentos, the pairing of potassium and water is best known for causing big explosions.

[adjusts nerd glasses]

The exothermic reaction forms potassium hydroxide and yields excess hydrogen gas that, when heated, combines explosively with oxygen in the surrounding air.

That’s all fine and well when it’s a laboratory experiment with isolated ingredients—but could this reaction take place in our stomachs?

If you remember the girl who ate 51 bananas a day (who did not, in fact, explode), you can probably guess at the answer here, but this question was in Shitty Ask Science, so it received an accordingly shitty explanation.

It started out promisingly enough.

Reddit user Rather_Unfortunate, who claims to hold a “Pheoretical Degree in Biolectrical Scenes,” began with a careful measurement of the potassium content of a single banana.

“Google says a banana has 358 mg of K in it,” Rather_Unfortunate noted. “We won’t question that. Shush.”

The next step? Figure out how much water there is in the test subject.

“Now, an average person weighs 80.9 kg … a human body is 70% water. We won’t question that either. Shush.”

Then came the tricky part.

“So, how do we blow a person up?” Rather_Unfortunate asked. “Well, a good idea might be to boil all the water in their body at once. That should do it.”

With this new goal and a “willing test subject strapped securely to the science chair,” Professor Unfortunate did the math—taking the amount of water in the body (56.63 liters), multiplying that by the amount of energy required to boil it (334.88 kilojoules), and dividing that by the amount of heat energy released by the potassium of a single banana (1.76 kilojoules).

The resulting number? “10,775.14 bananas.”

As user dacoobob explains, there are a few plot holes here:

And even if the oxidation state wasn’t a problem, user privatly points out that the human test subject would probably “start pooing out the bananas before getting a significant part of the way through eating that many.”