After a challenge to cook chicken in NyQuil, a cough medicine, went viral on social media in the USA, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a warning against it. The FDA said that cooking chicken in NyQuil or similar medicine can be dangerous even if the chicken is not eaten, and advised parents on how to prevent their kids from trying this unhealthy challenge.
“The challenge sounds silly and unappetizing — and it is. But it could also be very unsafe,” the FDA said in an advisory issued on its website. According to the notification, boiling a medication can make it much more concentrated and change its properties in other ways. Therefore, even if the chicken is not eaten, inhaling the medication’s vapours while cooking could cause high levels of the drugs to enter the body. The FDA warned that it can also hurt the lungs.
“Put simply: Someone could take a dangerously high amount of the cough and cold medicine without even realizing it,” FDA added.
Nyquil Cough Syrup contains acetaminophen, dextromethorphan, and doxylamine, and inhaling its vapour can cause sleepiness, the reason why the recipe challenge that has gone viral on TikTok is called “sleepy chicken”. The challenge involved cooking chicken breasts drenched in NyQuil in a pan.
Wait what the fuck people are cooking chicken in nyquil I’m gunna be sick pic.twitter.com/kXkJauxHYR
— ToasteonYukitake 🦊 Freshly Baked Fox God (@Toasteon_En) September 16, 2022
In one such TikTok video, the person attempting the challenge says that sometimes the steam coming out of the NyQuil-Chicken makes him sleepy. The chicken is seen turning blue, from the colour of the cough syrup. It is notable that in the video that has gone viral, the person is using Nighttime, a different brand with the same composition as Nyquil.
FDA also said that such dangerous challenges involving medicine keep appearing on social media, like a TikTok challenge in 2020 that urged people to take large doses of the allergy medicine diphenhydramine (Benadryl) to try to induce hallucinations. Several teenagers had to be hospitalised after this challenge, and there were even reports of deaths. FDA had issued a warning at that time also.
