A man who drank a quart of soy sauce nearly died from too much salt in his body, it was reported.
The 19-year-old, who was not named, drank the soy sauce after friends dared him to do so, reported LiveScience.com, citing a case report published June 4 in the Journal of Emergency Medicine.
The teen went into a coma but had no lasing neurological issues.
He is the first person to have deliberately overdosed on a high amount of salt and nearly died.
“He didn’t respond to any of the stimuli that we gave him,” Dr. David J. Carlberg, who treated the man, told the website. “He had some clonus, which is just elevated reflexes. It’s a sign that basically the nervous system wasn’t working very well.”
Carlberg described the procedure to flush the salt out of his system when he overdosed.
His team placed a solution of water and sugar dextrose in his nasal cavity. When they put the tube in, steaks of brown substance came out of his nose.
They put 1.5 gallons of water and dextrose into his body.
The LiveScience report does not identify the man, but 19-year-old John Paul Boldrick Virginia in March 2011 drank a quart of soy sauce and began foaming at the mouth, reported the Daily Mail.
He was pledging to Zeta Psi fraternity at the University of Virginia when he drank the soy.
“'It can suck water out very acutely depending on how high the sodium level becomes, to the point where the cells are disrupted and may even be killed,” Dr. Lawrence Phillips of the UVA Department of Neurology was quoted as saying at the time.
