Watch: Here’s What Eating Tide Pods Can Do to Your Body

We know you are far too intelligent to participate in idiotic trends like the Tide Pod Challenge.

But we saw this informative (and highly entertaining) video about what can happen to the body when a person actually ingests Tide Pods, and had to share it with our readers.

In the video, Chubbyemu (also known as Dr. Bernard) explains what happened to a 17-year-old boy who showed up to the emergency room unconscious and struggling to breathe after he ate three of the laundry pods on a dare.

IFLScience explained what happened to the teen:

His mom found him when his lips had turned blue and he had fallen unconscious. She rang emergency services, who told her to head to the ER.

He was suffering from a caustic esophageal injury (burning of the esophagus) caused by the detergent. As Dr. Bernard explains, the liquid within detergent pods can be “at least a 100,000 times more basic than human blood”. So it’s not something you want entering your system.

“Contact with mucosal surfaces like the esophagus produces liquefactive necrosis”. This means that the tissue is dying and turning to a liquid puss, which runs further into the body. Essentially, the lining of the esophagus gets disintegrated.

“All of this happens within one second of contact”.

Damage to his windpipe also made breathing difficult, and without immediate treatment, the 17-year-old would have died.

Dr. Bernard explains that as the boy coughed, the detergent got into his lungs. The more he coughed, the more it lodged deeply into his airways, and the cell lining of his lungs began to strip away.

The boy survived, but others have not been so lucky.

Back in 2013, the Consumer Products Safety Commission issued a warning about the dangers the poisonous pods pose to young children. “Children who have ingested detergent from the packets have required medical attention and hospitalization for loss of consciousness, excessive vomiting, drowsiness, throat swelling, and difficulty breathing. Eye contact has also resulted in reports of injury, including severe irritation and temporary loss of vision,” the warning stated.

Tide has a page on the company website that is dedicated to warning people to NOT eat their product, including a video featuring football player Rob Gronkowski:

In 2017, poison control centers received reports of more than 10,500 exposures to highly concentrated packed of laundry detergent by children 5 and younger, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers.

The pods can also pose a danger to older adults who have dementia, as Consumer Reports warned last year:

In one case, an 87-year-old woman with dementia, living under the care of her son and daughter-in-law, in a small town in Texas, was rushed to the hospital after being found slumped over and unresponsive at home. She had eaten two liquid laundry detergent packets. She died two days later.

CR learned about her case, and others, after filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission. The CPSC information showed that there had been a total of eight deaths related to ingesting laundry pods in the U.S. between 2012 and early 2017—including six adults with dementia and two young children.

While it is understandable that young children might think laundry pods are candy and could be tempted to eat them (as this satirical piece from The Onion depicts), older children and young adults…really? Come on, shouldn’t you know better? During January of this year, there were at least 86 reported cases of teenagers eating the damn things.

Jokes about the Tide Pod stupidity have been circulating for weeks. Tom Champlin, who owns the libertarian news aggregator The Liberty Review and runs its associated Facebook page, received a 30-day Facebook ban for posting the following meme:

And because stupid people make it so we can’t have nice things, now lawmakers in New York are introducing bills that would require detergent pods to be all one color, have non-see through packaging, and have warning labels on each pod.

Senator Brad Holyman (D-Manhattan) explained why he wants the pods to look less appetizing:

“They might as well say ‘bite me’ on them because that is what they offer.

It’s not a big deal for them to use uniform colors to make them look brown.

You don’t need them to look like gummy bears in order for consumers to use them.”

And in came a voice of reason: Assemblyman Karl Brabenec (R-Orange County) says he will not be buying brown laundry detergent and thinks the state should be focusing on other priorities:

“The key is you just shouldn’t eat it. I mean brown, red, green, whatever the case might be, it’s just ridiculous.”

We couldn’t agree more, Mr. Brabenec.

Here’s a parting shot, because it had to be said.