As the weather gets hotter and hotter, everyone starts to pay attention to relieving the heat, and many parents with children are afraid that their children will get hot, so they will think of giving their children some drinks to relieve the heat.
Recently, a “grandmother with placed 4 years of winter melon water feeding granddaughter poisoning” news screen parents’ circle of friends, the reason is that the grandmother that “winter melon water” is the summer cooling “treasure”! The reason is that the grandmother believes that “winter melon water” is a “treasure” to cool down the summer heat, so she fed her baby about 100 milliliters of winter melon water that had been placed for four years, which led to nitrite poisoning.
So the question is, why does winter melon water lead to nitrite poisoning? In the end it can not solve the summer heat? What is good to drink to relieve summer heat?
Why does drinking winter melon water cause poisoning?
Winter melon water, is the fresh winter melon washed and cut into small pieces into a pot, tightly closed lid, plus red mud sealing the gap, put in a cool place, three or four years before opening to drink. After a long time of fermentation, precipitation, dissolution, winter melon becomes melon juice.
I don’t know whether winter melon water can relieve summer heat, but it is true that drinking winter melon water is easy to be poisoned. The production process of winter melon water, will produce a large number of nitrites, if you drink it is easy to lead to nitrite poisoning.
Nitrite toxicity, mainly because it can oxidize hemoglobin into methemoglobin, thus causing hypoxia, leading to cyanosis. If a normal person ingests a large amount of nitrite in a short period of time, it is easy to cause acute poisoning, which oxidizes the low iron hemoglobin in the blood with normal oxygen-carrying capacity into high iron hemoglobin and loses its oxygen-carrying capacity, thus causing tissue hypoxia, which is known as “methemoglobinemia”. Normally, if adults consume more than 200mg of nitrite at one time, a toxic reaction may occur.
In addition, under the same circumstances, the risk of nitrite poisoning in young children is much higher than that in adults. This is because young children’s digestive system and methemoglobin reductase system are not yet mature, therefore, they are more susceptible to nitrite-induced methemoglobinemia, which is commonly known as “blue baby syndrome”. This is a rare condition in which hemoglobin fails to carry oxygen to the tissues of the body, resulting in purple skin and lips. Since the enzyme methemoglobin reductase has not yet been formed in infants, it is unable to alleviate the lack of oxygen in the blood due to the excessive intake of nitrites, resulting in the bluish purple coloration of the ends of the fingers and toes. Once the lack of oxygen affects the brain, the baby will be left with many sequelae, which may lead to mental retardation and motor disorders.
Similar poisoning incidents have occurred in some parts of Guangdong, China. There are some home-grown customs in these areas, where it is customary to make homemade winter melon water, prunes and cabbage. In the process of making them, nitrite is very easy to be produced due to the use of well water and tap water for soaking for too long.
In fact, both healthy, but also can achieve the effectiveness of summer heat relief “drink” is plain water. The human body should consume 6 to 8 cups of plain water every day, plain water does not contain sugar and calories, can be directly absorbed by the body, is the best summer “drink”.