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.