A seemingly harmful dare became a life threatening scare and exposed the dangers of ingesting too much salt, and in particular, soy sauce, when a 19-year-old Virginia college student nearly died after consuming a quart of the sauce. According to Mother Nature Network (MNN), the incident was first reported in the Journal of Emergency Medicine, and is of particular note because the teen is the first person known to have intentionally consumed such a large amount of sodium and survive without any brain damage.
While soy sauce has been a controversial ingredient due to the increasingly prevalent rates of genetically modified soybeans (almost all of American soy crops are genetically modified) that are often used to make it, and because it frequently contains one of “the Scary Seven” ingredients–monosodium glutamate, soy sauce is also very high in sodium, and one quart of it typically contains more than one-third of a pound of sodium–far too much salt to consume in one sitting. [In the e-book Label Lessons, we compared La Choy soy sauce to natural brand, San-J and looked at those problem ingredients.]
Read more about The Scary Seven ingredients
As a result of ingesting so much sodium, the Virginia college student began to suffer from hypernatremia which causes the brain to lose water and in turn to start shrinking and bleeding. According to MNN, in this case the teen began seizing very soon after drinking the soy sauce and slipped into a coma shortly thereafter. He was fortunate that his quick-thinking doctors began flushing the sodium out of his system by pumping 1.5 gallons of a combination of sugar and water into him which restored his salt levels to normal within five hours. However, he remained in a coma for three days before coming out of it naturally. The report says that the teen’s brain still showed side effects of the overdose when he came out of the coma but within a month it had regained normal functionality.
While this teen was lucky, it’s scary to think that many of us use this ingredient in our cooking fairly regularly, and even if we don’t use such huge quantities of it, anything that can have such a devastating impact on your body is cause for concern to ingest at all. In an effort to unjunk your junk food and make healthier choices, eliminate soy sauce whenever possible and try replacing it with fish sauce, sesame oil, or even balsamic vinegar. And when soy sauce is the only ingredient that will do, use a high quality, preservative free soy sauce such as tamari.
Read more about the dangers of soy sauce
Photo Credit: palindrome6996
