Another TikTok trend has gone viral on the popular social media platform for teens and young adults, where users have been sharing videos of their attempt at biting off a chunk of frozen honey.
The videos with the frozen honey hashtags have been raking more than 600 million views, indicating the popularity of the challenge among the youth. While it looks harmless and fun for Tiktok users, dieticians and dentists have warned that people could regret participating in the Frozen Honey Challenge.
The challenge starts easy enough with the teens attempting to squeeze out cold honey from a frozen water bottle and taking a bite off whatever oozes from the container. Since honey has high sugar content, it does not become completely frozen but appears like toffee or thick jelly.
Some users also try to mix honey with corn syrup or candy so that the texture of the concoction looks less dense. However, a few TikTok users said that they were sick to their stomach after eating frozen honey, prompting an expert from the Cleveland Clinic to issue a warning.
Diarrhea, Tooth Problems, and Frozen Honey
According to dietician Kristin Kirkpatrick, it's good to eat honey in moderation since it's a healthy sweetener. However, gobbling up servings of honey from a water bottle could trigger fructose intolerance, which is quite common and experienced by one in three people. Fructose intolerance or fructose malabsorption can cause stomach pain and diarrhea.
Kirkpatrick also said that overeating honey raises a person's risk for foodborne botulism, especially if the kids are doing the challenge more than once to gain viewers and followers. Though botulism is rare, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it could be serious and fatal. Because frozen honey is raw honey, its improper storage might make it an ideal environment for spores to grow and become botulinum toxins.
On the other hand, a dentist from the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine also warned teenagers doing the challenge that eating honey in large quantities is bad for the teeth because of the sugar content. Dr. Mark Wolf said that it could even be more "brutal" on the teeth because of the texture of the food. A sticky but thick toffee-like texture may easily cause cavities or take out the teeth fillings.
Who Started This Trend?
No one knows how the Frozen Honey Challenge started on TikTok, but it has been around for some time on YouTube's autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) channels. TikTok user Davey RZ was one of the first participants to post his video and said that he came up with the idea after watching someone eat a jelly-like substance off a water bottle.
The young man realized that it would come out like that substance he saw in the video if he puts honey in the freezer. Some kids said that it's like having a honey popsicle, and Davey RZ told Today that aside from loving the taste of cold honey, he also likes the golden and transparent texture.
