Soy Sauce Overdose Puts Teen In Coma

The world needs a public service campaign to discourage kids from eating or drinking things on dares. It almost never ends well, and sometimes it can have extremely dangerous or life-threatening results.

A teenager in Virginia recently drank an entire quart of soy sauce on a dare, and the excess of salt in his body put him in a coma and nearly killed him.

An excess of salt in the blood — a condition called hypernatremia — is dangerous because the salt sucks water out of the brain and body tissues and into the blood, which causes the brain to shrink and bleed.

The boy's friends took him to the emergency room when he started having seizures, and doctors flooded his body with a water and sugar mixture. According to the Huffington Post, after about five hours his sodium levels returned to normal, but he remained in a coma for three days.  

For several days after he woke up, he was still showing residual effects on his brain from the seizures. But after a month doctors said he made a full recovery.

According to the doctors who treated him, his was the first known case of a person deliberately overdosing on that much salt and surviving with no lasting neurological problems.