Social media challenges are excellent sources for gaining attention and validation. It’s all fun and games until a youngster ends up seriously ill in the hospital. Teens have started to swap out ingredients during the cooking preparation. Instead of the traditional oil, they use over-the-counter cough and cold products, like NyQuil, to sauté chicken for an online audience.
“One social media trend relying on peer pressure is online video clips of people misusing nonprescription medications and encouraging viewers to do so too. These video challenges, which often target youths, can harm people — and even cause death,” the FDA said.
Youths are ditching the grocery store for the pharmacy shelves. They are cooking chicken and it’s a recipe for a disaster blending in a mixture of acetaminophen, dextromethorphan and doxylamine. “Boiling a medication can make it much more concentrated and change its properties in other ways,” the FDA added. “Even if you don’t eat the chicken, inhaling the medication’s vapors while cooking could cause high levels of the drugs to enter your body. It could also hurt your lungs.”
Teens are coming up with creative ways to kill themselves and the American Academy of Pediatrics cites these impulsive actions as a result of an underdeveloped teenage brain. Rational thought, problem-solving and consequences, doesn’t fully develop until the mid-twenties so it explains their dumb decisions.
Peer pressure leads to poor decisions. “What they will focus on is that a popular kid in class did this and got hundreds of likes and comments,” the AAP website stated. “Social media rewards outrageous behavior and the more outrageous, the bigger the bragging rights.”
The teens are strongly encouraged to stay out of the kitchen before the parents have to deal with a different kind of meat.