FDA Warns That TikTok NyQuil Chicken Challenge Could Be Deadly (But Does Anyone Dumb Enough to Eat This Really Deserve to Live?)

If you believe in evolution, you know that some things in life are meant to weed out the herd. Clumsy people fall off cliffs, people with weak immune systems fail to recover from illness, etc. Natural selection is supposed to determine what genes are and aren’t passed on. There’s just one flaw (OK, maybe there are more; we’ll just focus on one today) with this reasoning: stupidity still exists. If Darwinism proved true, shouldn’t idiots have been edited out of the gene pool by now? Alas, not only are the intelligence-impaired still among us, they’re practically trending daily on social media. The latest example is the NyQuil Chicken Challenge on TikTok.

Poultry plus cough and cold syrup. There’s a combo you never thought you would see in print together, much less on your plate. And yet, TikTokers with too much time on their hands (and too few brain cells) have devised a recipe that involves cooking chicken in the over-the-counter medication, whose active ingredients include acetaminophen, dextromethorphan HBr, and doxylamine succinate. Cutting those potent compounds with chicken isn’t going to temper the effects of the cough and cold remedy, which can result in breathing problems, dizziness, and liver issues – not to mention death – if you ingest too much of it.

“Boiling a medication can make it much more concentrated and change its properties in other ways. It could also hurt your lungs,” the FDA warned in a recent statement. “Put simply: Someone could take a dangerously high amount of the cough and cold medicine without even realizing it.”

That’s because when you “cook” NyQuil, the alcohol and water burn off, leaving only a concentrated version of the drugs in it. Why you’d want to marinate chicken in that is beyond us. We’ll enjoy our chicken dinners and nighty-night medication separately, as God intended, thankyouverymuch. But if you’re dumb enough to try this TikTok challenge, well, maybe you get what you deserve.

Cover Photo: Deagreez (Getty Images)