What Really Happens If You Mix Pop Rocks And Soda

If you've been on the Internet long enough, you've probably heard about a particularly shocking urban legend involving Pop Rocks. If you haven't, the story basically goes like this: if you swallow Pop Rocks and soda together at the same time, your stomach will explode from the inside out. Pretty morbid for something that's basically crystallized sugar, huh?

The legend varies depending on who's telling it. It may involve a friend's cousin's classmate in some town you've never heard of, but the most common star of the story, Thrillist tells us, is "Little Mikey," that bright-eyed picky-eater from the Life cereal commercials, who supposedly got his stomach (or in some cases, his head) turned to colorful popping mush after ingesting Pop Rocks and a six-pack of soda. This version may also be the oldest, considering it goes back all the way to 1979 and Pop Rocks were only introduced in 1975. 

While bizarre deaths involving candy have happened before, such as one Massachusetts man dying from eating too many bags of black licorice candy (via AP News), you might come up short if you're searching for actual people who have died from eating Pop Rocks and washing them down with soda. What really happens if you mix the famous fizzing candy and a bottle of cola together? Is it just a messy experiment or is it an actual danger to your life?

To understand just what makes this urban legend of exploding child actors and sugary time bombs tick, we must first understand the science behind Pop Rocks. What causes those little sugary crystals to pop as soon as they hit your tongue?

According to Mental Floss, when you rip into a bag of Pop Rocks, you're actually eating tiny, sugary pockets of carbon dioxide. During the manufacturing process, highly pressurized carbon dioxide is added, which becomes trapped inside the candy as the hard exterior solidifies. This, in turn, creates a compressed bubble of carbon dioxide, similar to the fizz in a can of Coca-Cola. Once the candy pocket is broken or dissolved, the carbon dioxide bursts out, creating the trademark popping sensation against your tongue.

The Liberty Science Center undertook its own "Little Mikey" experiment, to see if a mixture of soda and Pop Rocks would be enough to hurt you in any way. A mixture of soda and Pop Rocks is funneled into a balloon (which acts as the "stomach") to see if the balloon would be able to handle the explosive reaction. While the balloon did inflate from the Pop Rocks dissolving in the carbonated soda, it didn't come anywhere near exploding. In the end, the Liberty Science Center claims that, while your stomach certainly won't explode, you'll still have lots of gas in your stomach. Worst case scenario? You'll find yourself belching quite a bit.

"But if Pop Rocks and soda don't cause your stomach to explode," you may be wondering, "whatever happened to Little Mikey? Is he okay?" You'll be happy to know that John Gilchrist, better known as "Little Mikey," is perfectly okay and still alive today.

According to Snopes, it's unclear where this blatantly false rumor originated. It is widely assumed that thanks to Gilchrist being a well-known face on TV at the time, it was easy to attribute a fake rumor to him and let Gilchrist's popularity take it from there. Rumors about celebrities are instantly way more popular than stories about some kid that you've never met who goes to a different school.

Unfortunately, the rumors did have an impact on the sale of the candy. According to Pop Rocks, parents were so horrified that their children would become the next "Little Mikey" that they flooded the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with hysterical calls. The FDA ended up creating a special call center just to handle these calls and reassure parents.  The company sent the creator of Pop Rocks (who also invented Tang and Cool Whip, according to Thrillist), William A. Mitchell, on a public tour across the country to dispel the idea that Pop Rocks were some kind of sugary biological weapon. For a brief time in the '80s, Pop Rocks were discontinued before returning to market a few years later. 

Rumors tend to make people's imaginations fizzy, don't you think?