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If you love adding soya sauce to almost everything you eat, stop. Overdosing on the salty condiment has the potential to be fatal.
An American youth, 19, drank nearly a litre of soy sauce as a dare and almost died as a result.
He went into a coma and nearly died from an excess of salt in his blood, a condition called hypernatremia, reported The Huffington Post.
The case report was published online June 4 in the Journal of Emergency Medicine.
After drinking the quart (946ml) of soy sauce, the man began twitching and having seizures.
He fell into a coma and his friends took him to an emergency room in the University of Virginia Medical Center, nearly four hours after he had overdosed on the dark liquid.
The team immediately began flushing the salt out of his system by administering a solution of water and the sugar dextrose through a nasal tube. When they placed the tube, streaks of brown material came out.
Within a half hour, they pumped 1.5 gallons (6 liters) of sugar water into the man's body.
The man's sodium levels returned to normal after about five hours. He remained in a coma for three days, but woke up on his own.
A month later, his brain stopped showing residual effects from the seizures, and he returned to college and did well on his exams.
He had consumed more than 160g of salt, the researchers said.
In China, consuming excess salt was a traditional method for suicide, stated the case report.
The youth is believed to have survived due to the team so aggressively reducing his sodium levels.
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