A Woman Drank A 1 Liter Soy Sauce Colon Cleanse
In 2 Hours. This Is What Happened To Her Brain. CG is a 39 year old woman, presenting to the
emergency room with a rapidly deteriorating mental status. Her husband, Julio is in a panic because his
wife’s heart stopped beating in the ambulance. Earlier that day, CG was performing a soy
sauce colon cleanse. She was in poor health. She lost 25 pounds over the last 3 weeks. She was iron and vitamin deficient. Her husband states that she had started eating
only white bread and canned fish 6 months ago. And most recently, she was discharged from a psychiatric
hospital for what they thought was paranoid schizophrenia, but it wouldn’t respond to
medicines. Believing that the government had poisoned
her, she read somewhere on the internet about a soy sauce colon cleanse, where anyone who
could drink 1 liter of soy sauce within 2 hours, would be able to evacuate their entire
body of toxins. This malicious internet disinformation was
exploiting gullible people for gags at the expense of those people’s lives, and unfortunately,
CG was convinced, she was going to have the cleanest colon possible. Soy sauce is a brew of wheat, soy and 20%
of it, is made from salt. The internet was crystal clear: wherever salt
is, the toxic water will flow towards it. So a liter of soy sauce in her colon will
100% draw out all the toxins, and expel them from her body. Immediately after finishing the whole liter
of soy sauce, CG could feel her heart beating faster. She felt pins and needles in her hands and
legs. She resisted all urge to drink any water. Over the next 30 minutes, while driving home. CG stops on the side of the road and begins
to cry. Her stomach is cramping hard. There’s nothing
to cry about she thought, because toxins were clearly leaving her body. At home now, her vision begins to warp. She is dizzy and confused as she begins to
stumble around. Her husband, oblivious as to what had been
happening, is unable to get any coherent words out of her. He lies her down in bed where she mumbles
unintelligibly. While he steps off briefly to use the restroom. A minute later, a loud crashing sound and
chaos ensues in the other room. Julio runs to the kitchen where he finds CG
unconscious on the floor as he calls for 911. Inside the ambulance, her heart begins to
flutter and she goes into cardiac arrest. Paramedics scramble to resuscitate her with
CPR as she’s brought to the emergency room where we are now. Given this history of present illness, there
are several clues as to what's happening. Most immediately, CG is suffering from Acute
Hypernatremia. Hyper meaning high
Natre referring to sodium or more formally natrium as indicated by its symbol on the
periodic table of elements And emia meaning presence in blood High sodium presence in blood. Acute meaning there were no underlying pathophysiologic
conditions that are leading to the problem, except for the 1 liter of soy sauce in her
body at the moment. A 15 milliliter serving of soy sauce has 2
and a half grams of salt. The recommended daily intake is 5.8 grams
of salt. A lethal dose is 40 grams of salt. A gallon of Jilly Juice has 120 grams of salt. And the one liter of soy sauce that CG drank
in 2 hours has 200 grams of salt. Five times the lethal dose. Half of table salt is made from sodium giving
way to the name of her condition Hypernatremia, High sodium presence in blood. The troll claim on the internet, embodies
the golden rule of disinformation, it’s partially correct at first, and establishing
that initial credibility, dramatically increases the chances of someone believing the entire
thing. And unfortunately for CG, she believed the
entire thing. The correct part is that wherever sodium is,
water will flow towards it. In this small science experiment, I dissolve
salt in this water and place it into a tube. I submerge the tube in a pool of water that
has no salt dissolved in it. You’ll see that water flows into the tube,
that water flows towards the sodium. This phenomenon is possible in part because
of a concept called tonicity. Tonic from Ancient Greek Tonos meaning to
stretch, but in this context referring to tension. A tension of water, due to the presence of
sodium. Nature tends toward a relaxed state, so a
relaxation of this tension occurs when the concentration of sodium decreases, meaning
hypotonic water, will always flow towards hypertonic water. Wherever sodium is, water will flow towards
it. But lets go to all the other parts, which
are all wrong. CG was told that the soy sauce would stay
in her colon. Toxin-filled water would flow in and that she’d
be cleansed. But, that’s not how it happens. To get to the colon, or large intestines,
food passes first through the stomach and then the small intestines. Her stomach was starting to cramp because
she had a massive amount of sodium inside the lumen, or hole of, the stomach and water
from the muscle lining was getting violently sucked out because wherever sodium is, water
will flow towards it. After the stomach, the soy sauce continues
into the small intestines where it's absorbed into the blood stream meaning that the 200
grams of salt began to release into her blood. As the salty blood flows throughout CG’s
body, it begins to suck water out of every single organ. Her kidneys are dehydrating and failing. But that’s probably not going to kill her
immediately. Her heart is dehydrating and failing because
her plasma is expanding. That can kill you immediately and her heart
did go into cardiac arrest while in the ambulance. Although, that arrest largely in this case can be reversible as CPR can resuscitate her. But what is irreversible is the damage caused
on brain shrinkage, as the blood vessels in her brain begin to crush up against each other,
she’ll begin to stroke. Blood no longer flows through her brain tissue
as it begins to starve of oxygen and die and means permanent brain damage in CG's case. Salty people have shrinking brains, as the
water gets sucked out the contents of the skull and then are put into the blood. 200 grams of salt contains about 80,000 milligrams
of sodium. Given that the average sodium content of one
8 gram slice of cooked bacon is 137 milligrams of sodium, then to get to about 80,000 milligrams,
you’d need to eat about 4.5 kilograms, or 10 pounds of cooked bacon (550+ slices) to match
the amount of sodium that CG consumed. As her mental status continues to deteriorate,
she’s still semi-conscious. It may not yet be too late, she may yet not have
stroked. Is there a way, we could remove that salt
in her blood? Maybe. This brings us back to tonicity. The water in your body is mostly inside your
cells and is made of 0.9% salt, something we call isotonic. Soy sauce is 20% salt. If the water outside CG’s cells has high
sodium, and water flows towards sodium, then it means that the solution should be to dilute
her blood with less salty water. She is infused with 5 liters of water with
5% dextrose, known as glucose, or sugar. The sugar will be absorbed by her cells turning
into free water which will lower the concentration of sodium. She is also given water with 0.45% salt to
dilute what’s already in the blood. Over the next 72 hours, CG begins to stabilize. She opens her eyes to say hello to her husband
but drifts in and out of consciousness. The sodium in her blood, is no longer high
and everything seems to be ok. But it’s not. It’s four days later. CG opens her eyes. The nurse instructs her to move her arms,
but no response. She tries to speak but words can’t come
out of her mouth. Neurology consult reveals a marked dysarthria. Dys meaning wrong and arthria from Ancient
Greek arthron meaning articulation. Her ability to articulate words in speech
is absent. This was combined with dysphagia, an inability
to swallow, and a flaccid quadriplegia. Quadri from Latin quattuor, denoting the quantity
of four referring to two arms and two legs. And plegia from Ancient Greek plissein (πλήσσειν)
meaning disabled. Flaccid meaning she is floppy, with no muscle
tone. None of these are signs of a stroke. Despite correcting the hypernatremia, it still
appears that her brain has been damaged. MRI reveals that CG has developed central
pontine myelinolysis. Lysis meaning breaking down of myelin, the
conductive sheath covering nerve cells. And central pontine referring to the central
pons where the brain connects to the brain stem to deliver nerve impulses throughout
the body. This means that something was wrong during
the correction of her blood sodium levels. When the brain shrinks in acute hypernatremia,
it tries to compensate for that water loss. We know this happens in other mammals. If sodium draws water out of the brain, then
the brain can fight this, and maintain its volume by pumping sodium into its cells. Incidentally, It also draws in other chemicals
to help prevent further water loss in an attempt to adapt to its environment. If less salty, hypotonic water is used to
suddenly dilute the blood to prevent organs from shrinking, but the brain has already
compensated by pumping extra salt into its cells, then it means that diluted water in
the blood will actually swell into the brain, causing it to push up against the skull something
called cerebral edema. But her brain isn't swollen. On the flip side, if the less salty hypotonic
water is used to slowly dilute hypernatremia, but the brain has compensated by pumping other
chemicals into it’s cells, those chemicals don’t easily clear the brain. This triggers
changes in the brain cells that lead to cell death cascading into myelinolysis. Meaning CG’s brain still functions, but
she is unable to send nerve impulses to the rest of her body resulting in dysarthria,
dysphagia, and flaccid quadriplegia. Meaning either way, if you try to correct
hypernatremia when it’s too late, it will always end in poor neurologic outcome, and
for CG, it looks like it was corrected too late. None of this answers why she drank a 1 liter
soy sauce colon cleanse in 2 hours. Was it disinformation? Maybe. Was it that she was gullible? Maybe. But almost no normal functioning
human could drink nearly a half pound of salt without vomiting, meaning CG had some
quality to her that could separate her mind from the visceral reaction to drinking soy sauce,
which brings us to her last problem. Medical records indicate that she unintentionally
lost 25 pounds in 3 weeks, that she was vitamin and iron deficient. That she was just discharged from the psychiatric
hospital for paranoid schizophrenia refractory to medication. Anytime someone loses a lot of weight unintentionally,
in the medical world one of the first things we think of is cancer. She didn’t have any evidence of tumors,
so that was ruled out. If she was also vitamin and iron deficient,
then maybe she wasn’t absorbing her food and if you combine that with delusional symptoms
refractory to medicines, then maybe she wasn’t able to absorb those medicines either, meaning she
might have had a gastrointestinal problem. And given the fact that she started eating
only canned fish and white bread that coincided with the onset of her delusions and white
bread is rich in the protein gluten, then she may have had celiac disease, a disease
centered around a gluten allergy that causes intestinal inflammation, preventing absorption
of nutrients, and manifesting extra-intestinally as psychosis and delusional disorder. Looking at cells from her intestines under
a microscope revealed marked villous blunting and atrophy. Increased presence of white blood cells in
the surface were found indicating inflammation and giving strong evidence of celiac disease. This means she developed gluten sensitivity
sometime in her mid-life, became delusional and was misdiagnosed, didn’t get the care
she needed in the psychiatric hospital, and was led to internet disinformation leading
to her drinking a liter of soy sauce as a supposed colon cleanse, demyelinating
parts of her brain, causing her to become quadriplegic. Clinically relevant gluten sensitivity doesn’t
happen to everyone. Celiac disease can develop at any age, some
are genetically predisposed to it. This isn't to incite dietary fears in anyone. Celiac disease is a diagnosis that involves serologic
testing, endoscopy, and biopsy. It’s not a diagnosis after reading an online
food blog. And unfortunately for CG, she was sold on
a sham claim of a soy sauce colon cleanse. We can take out the words “soy sauce” out of that
and apply the word sham to “colon cleanse" A normal functioning human has kidneys and
a liver. The liver breaks down chemicals by metabolizing
them, meaning it makes them more water soluble so that they dissolve in water, get filtered
by the kidneys and are urinated out. In the emergency room, you often see people
who bought in to false detox claims. You see people perforate their rectum from
an enema they thought was going to clear them of toxins. Or they drink some weird cabbage juice brew
with copious amounts of salt that was supposed to cure them through some fake
claim, that ends up leading to hypernatremia, causing cerebral hemorrhage, stroke and permanent
brain damage. With proper treatment and follow-up, supportive
care from the medical team, her loving husband, and adherence to a gluten free diet which
was appropriate for her diagnosis, CG sustained a recovery. Thank you so much for watching. Take care of yourself. And Be Well.
soy sauce colon cleanse - jeezus christ
"salty people have shrinking brains."
You just know from the title that it's gonna be this guy
How complete of a recovery? It sounds like she remained quadriplegic for life.
Jilly Juice? is this a well known fad diet drink?
She has a dope crib
Salty people have shrinking brains, confirmed.
i like how done he is with the internets heinous tomfoolery
....I should cut back on the soy sauce