We have already mentioned here what can happen to a person when excessive amounts of milk are drunk. And now it’s time to overdose on soy sauce. Dying from consuming excessive amounts of soy sauce may sound strange. But actually this is not only possible, but surprisingly easy.
When it comes to versatile foods, the humble soybean impresses. Without this little legume, there would be no tofu or soy milk, Far Eastern dishes such as miso, natto, and tempeh would not be possible, and half of the non-vegetarian options, as well as many of the vegetarian and vegan options that line supermarket shelves, would disappear.
We would also have to give up the delicious salty and umami flavor of soy sauce, which was first discovered more than two thousand years ago and has since conquered almost the entire world.
Like the beans for which it is named, this sauce is extremely versatile: it can be added directly as an ingredient to recipes, added to rice, noodles or sushi, and even popped up in ice cream in some places.
But if none of this sounds appealing, you can also choose to drink it plain. But if you do, you’ll soon find yourself in a coma.
Soy sauce can be deadly
While soy sauce is now a solid condiment in many kitchen cupboards, it’s surprisingly deadly: There have been many reports of people overdosing on saturated salt solutions, and it’s even not unheard of for people to commit suicide with soy sauce in its homeland of East Asia.
The reason soy sauce is so toxic is pretty much the same as it tastes so good: Its salt content reaches almost unbelievable levels. Just one tablespoon of the ingredient contains more than a third of the recommended daily sodium intake, making it easy to turn into an unhealthy dose if overused.
If you push the soy sauce limit too far, you’re headed for disaster. Take, for example, the case of a 19-year-old man who drank almost a liter in 2013 and eventually fell into a coma in the emergency room.
“He wasn’t responding to any stimulus we gave him,” David J Carlberg, an emergency medicine physician who treated the soy sauce casualty at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, told NBC at the time.
“There was just some clonus with heightened reflexes,” Carlberg explained. “Basically, the nervous system wasn’t working very well.”
Too much salt in the blood causes a condition called hypernatremia. In this case, water; It comes out of the body tissues in order to equalize the salt levels between the blood and tissues and is very dangerous. In addition to causing a fatal buildup of fluid in places such as the lungs, the organ can shrink and bleed as water exits the brain, causing neurological symptoms such as seizures and loss of consciousness.
Lucky, this patient was taken to the emergency room and was treated fairly quickly. Within four hours of drinking the condiment, she was given 6 liters of sugary liquid via IV to lower her sodium levels, which quickly did its job. After excreting more than 4 liters of urine in an hour, the patient’s sodium levels returned to normal but remained in a soy sauce-induced coma for some time.
This patient survived the experience unscathed, although the case report noted that the blood sodium level measured at the medical center was the highest ever seen in an adult who had not died or had permanent neurological damage as a result.
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