This college guy was hittin’ the sauce a little too hard. Soy sauce, that is.
Moderation is the key to everything. Too much of something is, by definition, bad for you. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be called “too much.” Everyone knows you shouldn’t down a bottle of sleeping pills on a bet, or try to eat a bowlful of rusty nails because your buddy said you couldn’t (unless you actually want to die). But what many people fail to realize is that even seemingly harmless things can straight up kill you if you have too much of them.
Soy sauce is apparently one of these things.
A 19-year-old University of Virginia freshman learned this the hard way after chugging a quart of soy sauce on a dare. Actually, a simple “dare” might be an understatement. He was pledging to join the fraternity Zeta Psi, and trying to prove his worth while taking life by the balls – so he accepted the soy sauce challenge in a true moment of modern-day Greek existentialism. He picked up the bottle and said, “How say you, is it permissible to pledge this drink to anyone? May I?”
Nope, sorry. Actually, it was Socrates who said that.
We don’t know what this guy said before chugging his condiment poison, but he was soon on the ground, flailing away in a full-on seizure, and foaming at the mouth. Not wanting to be remembered as ‘those Frat Boys who dared their pledge to kill himself,’ they drove him to the emergency room.
Someone failed to mention that consuming excess salt was a traditional method of suicide in ancient China.
After hearing the back-story, it was immediately obvious to doctors that the teenager was suffering from hypernatremia, or acute sodium poisoning. A salt overdose, basically. They immediately pumped 1.5 gallons of sugar-water into his body to flush the salt out of his system, after which he remained in a coma for three days. He eventually made a full recovery, having learned a harsh lesson that 1st period science or 3rd period philosophy should have already taught him.
Biologically speaking, sodium poisoning almost tricks your body into killing itself. When the body detects abnormally high levels of sodium, it tries to balance it out by flushing water into the cells. The more sodium, the more water it needs. One of the side effects of this process is that cells grow and shrink as water is pumped in and out of them. While most cells are pretty flexible when stressed, brain cells are fragile and don’t handle changes quite so well.
Their flexing and inflation can lead to severe neurological damage or death. The salt-coma-Frat-Boy-to-be probably didn’t know that before he went into Socrates-mode and killed that bottle of soy sauce, but it’s safe to say that his near-death experience, and near-miraculous full recovery, was a life-lesson no college class could ever teach.
Via dykn.com
Via dykn.com
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