It’s been nicknamed “sleepy chicken.”
A bizarre cooking technique appears to have taken over TikTok — and you absolutely shouldn’t give it a try. The FDA released an official warning after videos of people cooking chicken soaked in NyQuil — nicknamed “sleepy chicken” — caught the media’s attention.
“A recent social media video challenge encourages people to cook chicken in NyQuil (acetaminophen, dextromethorphan, and doxylamine) or another similar OTC cough and cold medication, presumably to eat,” the FDA wrote in an appropriately meaty statement. “The challenge sounds silly and unappetizing — and it is. But it could also be very unsafe.”
The agency pointed out that boiling meds can drastically increase their potency, and alter their properties in other ways. Even if you just cooked chicken but didn’t eat it, you could take in vast quantities of the medication just by inhaling the fumes released as it cooks — which could also hurt your lungs.
“Put simply,” the statement says, “someone could take a dangerously high amount of the cough and cold medicine without even realizing it.”
In one video of the challenge that’s still up on Twitter, the creator warns ominously: “Sometimes the steam can make you sleepy.”
Reassuringly, TechCrunch has pointed out that there don’t seem to be that many videos of people attempting the trend in earnest, and that a lot of the content recirculating online actually features users condemning the absurd recipe.
It’s easy for things to get blown out of proportion this way, as last fall’s spurious “slap a teacher” TikTok trend demonstrated. The craze supposedly encouraged students to — you guessed it — slap their teachers, and prompted enough concern for schools and police to issue warnings addressing it. Yet upon closer examination, there didn’t actually appear to be much relevant content on TikTok, and in the end, it seemed more likely the whole thing was a rumor spread on Facebook.
That being said, it’s wise to take these things seriously — especially since this isn’t the first time that a social media-spurred cooking trend has had the potential to wreak havoc. In one TikTok challenge that caught on in 2020, people took large doses of the allergy medicine typically sold under the name Benadryl. The aim was to induce hallucinations, but the effects were potentially devastating. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration was forced to step in with a warning following reports of teenagers winding up in the emergency room — and in one tragic case, the challenge reportedly led to the death of a 15-year-old in Oklahoma.
