A new study in the Journal of Emergency Medicine, says that a teen who drank a quarter quart of soya sauce as part of a fraternity initiation prank in 2011 is the first person to have survived having that much sodium in their blood stream without suffering severe brain damage.
That’s right – too much sodium can cause severe brain damage.
The condition is called hypernatremia and it causes the body to go into a coma after being shocked with a mass amount of sodium in the blood channels.
It’s what happened to the then 19 year old freshman at the University of Virgina. His initiation for the Zeta Psi fraternity had him eating dog food, gefilte fish (presumably alive), and matzo balls, alongside drinking a bottle of soya sauce.
The soya sauce put him into a coma like state with seizures for 2-hours. Rushed to hospital he was saved from the sodium overdose and remarkable made it through without brain damage and he’s the first one to have lived to tell the tale.
The fraternity was shut for two-years following the incident.
And now we know, all those times Mom told you that too much salt was bad for you she really wasn’t kidding. [ Source ]
