Too much of a good thing can often turn into a bad thing — guzzling too much soda, for example — something one 19-year-old found out the hard way after his friends dared him to chug a whole lot of soy sauce. How much, soy sauce, you might be asking as your hand freezes with the bottle held over that beef and broccoli? Enough to put the young man in a coma and nearly kill him.

Now, we’re not sounding the alarm and kicking off an anti-salt campaign. After all, recent research has suggested that perhaps we shouldn’t be as worried about our salt intake as we had been in the past. But deliberately overdosing on soy sauce caused a serious excess of salt for the man, says a case report in the Journal of Emergency Medicine (via LiveScience).

He’s lucky enough to be the first person to have pulled such a stunt and gotten away with no lasting neurological problems, say the doctors who investigated his case.

Having too much salt in your blood can cause a dangers condition called hypernatremia, and is usually seen in patients with psychiatric conditions who have an overwhelming appetite for the condiment, said one doctor who treated the man. That condition causes your brain to lose water, as the salt forces water out of body tissues where it’s needed and into the blood. When it leaves your brain, the organ can shrink and bleed.

Luckily enough for the guy in question, his friends took him to an emergency room after he began twitching and having seizures. He ended up in a coma for three days, before waking up on his own. He now seems to be recovered and is back at college, hopefully doing more studying and less indulging in silly, life-threatening dares.

Soy sauce overdose sends man into coma [LiveScience]

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