Keep the soy sauce on your food, and use it in moderation.
Aaron Tam/AFP/Getty Images
First, let's spoil this tale right away by telling you the
19-year-old man in Virginia who downed a quart of soy sauce on a dare
survived.
It's a happy ending of sorts. But the guy had a close call. And you definitely don't want to try it.
While there's been quite a debate lately about whether the , there's no question that a massive amount of salt ingested quickly can lead to death.
In fact, suicide by soy sauce is not unknown in Asia. A 2011 in the
Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine
describes the case of a 55-year-old woman diagnosed with depression.
She died after drinking "a large quantity of shoyu (Japanese soy
sauce)," doctors wrote.
Back in the early '90s, Mayo Clinic doctors
on a 41-year-old man who died after swallowing a salty gargling
solution. That case and a look at the medical literature up to that
point led them to caution other doctors about using salty water to
induce vomiting.
A salt dose ranging from 0.75 grams to 3 grams
per kilogram of body weight can kill someone. A tablespoon of salt
weighs about 15 grams, in case you're wondering.
If you're metrically challenged, just consider that the unnamed fellow in the published online by the
Journal of Emergency Medicine, weighed
about 160 pounds and probably consumed around 170 grams of salt by
drinking a bottle of soy sauce. That works out to a little more than 2
grams of salt per kilogram in his case.
After downing the soy
sauce, he ran into trouble pretty fast. Within two hours he was in the
emergency room at a local hospital. He was grinding his teeth and didn't
respond to pain or verbal commands. His arms were stiff and at his
side.
Doctors were worried about seizures and put him on drugs
to control them. They also ran a tube from his nose into his stomach and
sucked out some "brown material with scant streaks of blood," the
report says.
The patient was transferred to a bigger hospital,
the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, within
four hours of the soy sauce guzzling.
His blood sodium level
measured at the medical center was the highest ever seen in an adult who
survived such intoxiciation without lasting neurological problems, the
medical paper says.
But the doctors didn't know if that would
be the case. They opted for rapid treatment with water containing
dextrose, a sugar, to dilute the sodium and encourage urination. The guy
got six liters of IV fluid in half an hour. The sodium concentration in
his blood fell, and he produced more than four liters of urine in short
order.
The doctors took an aggressive approach even though
there was a risk the man might experience brain swelling and other
neurological side effects. They didn't see any.
