A man drinking a quart of soy sauce on a dare went into a coma and nearly died. A typical quart of soy sauce has more than 0.35 pounds of salt and drinking the excess soy sauce caused the teen to go into a coma.

The soy sauce overdose involved a 19-year-old who drank the soy sauce on a dare with friends. He is the first person known to have deliberately overdosed on such a high amount of soy sauce and survived with no lasting neurological problems. After a three days coma the teen is unharmed from the soy sauce incident.

Too much salt in the blood, a condition called hypernatremia, is usually seen in people with psychiatric conditions who develop a strong appetite for the condiment. 

Hypernatremia is dangerous because it causes the brain to lose water. When there is too much saltin the bloodstream, water moves out of the body tissues and into the blood by the process of osmosis, to try to equalize the salt concentration between the two. As water the leaves the brain, the organ can shrink and bleed.

Consuming excess salt was a traditional method for suicide in ancient China.

After the man drank the soy sauce, he began twitching and having seizures, and his friends took him to an emergency room. He was already in a coma when he was taken to the hospital. The hospital administered anti-seizure medication.

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.

He stayed in a coma for three days.

After a month after the event, he showed no sign of the overdose: He was back at college, and doing well on his exams.

He is lucky though. Kids ingesting unusual foods on dares seem to a trend these days including the deadly Cinnamon Challenge.

The Cinnamon Spice Challenge has gone viral, and doctors are warning teens that inhaling the spice is very dangerous, evenly deadly. The fad involves daring someone to swallow a spoonful of ground cinnamon in 60 seconds without water. The dry nature of the cinnamon causes fits of coughing and sneezing, and while the results may be humorous, the prank presents serious health risks.

Cinnamon is caustic, and trying to gulp it down can cause choking, throat irritation, breathing trouble and even collapsed lungs.

Cinnamon is made from tree bark and contains cellulose fibers that don't easily break down, which can cause internal scarring.

Worse, if cinnamon gets stuck in your lungs it may be hard to clear out and it's possible that your lungs can collapse on you. There have been several cases reported where kids needed ventilator support because they weren't able to maintain their airway.

A search for "Cinnamon Challenge" on YouTube will bring you thousands of videos of young teens challenging themselves to defeat a spoonful of cinnamon, with mostly failed attempts as orange powder spews out of their mouths much to their friends' amusement.

At least 30 teens nationwide needed medical attention after taking the challenge last year, and 222 calls to Poison Control Centers have been made so far.

Last night, ABC News did a full report on the viral challenge. It was a warning to parents, school administrators, and medical experts about the dangers of the recent fad.

Dejah Reed, a freshman at Huron High School in Ann Arbor, Mich., spent four days in the hospital with an infection and a collapsed right lung after she ingested the spice on a dare.

"She was going in and out of consciousness. She couldn't breathe. She was turning pale," her father, Fred Reed, said. "I hope parents and kids learn that it's not fun and games. She could have died."

These fads will pass, along with all of the other YouTube sensations and doctors and news reports across America will have to fight the next dangerous trend. So let's stop blaming the symptoms and get to the cause. Raise our children to be more intelligent than this!