Convenience-store slushies — those neon-colored sugar bombs your precious offspring beg for when you drag them with you for gas-station sushi — contain enough glycerol to send your mini-humans into something called "glycerol intoxication syndrome," reports The Guardian.
Symptoms include passing out cold (always a crowd-pleaser at Chuck E. Cheese), low blood sugar, and something called "lactic acidosis," the same substance that exudes from J.D. Vance's pores during rutting season.
Glycerol is a "naturally occurring alcohol" that keeps these frozen monstrosities from freezing solid. It's in other foods too, but apparently slushies have bucketloads of the stuff.
The Food Standards Agency — the UK's version of the soon-to-be Doged FDA in America — already advises against giving these rainbow disasters to kids under four and suggests limiting five-to-ten-year-olds to just one serving of child-knockout juice per day.
Fun-hating researchers at University College Dublin examined 21 kids who ended up in the ER after slurping down these treats. Fourteen became sick within an hour, which is impressive efficiency in the world of child toxins.
And for parents who have been raising their offspring on a steady diet of slushies because they look so darn healthy, the rearchers shared this buzzkill: "There are no nutritional or health benefits from these drinks" and "they are not recommended as part of a balanced diet."
In related news, slushie sales to exhausted parents of toddlers having public meltdowns have mysteriously skyrocketed. "I had no idea they were dangerous," said one mother with suspicious eye-twitch, while her formerly screaming child napped peacefully in the shopping cart.
Previously:
• Pickle juice slushies are coming to Sonic Drive-In this summer
• Cops jailed after filming themselves throwing slushies at people
• Quebec's new pizza-and-spaghetti-flavored slushy drink is 'love in a cup,' apparently
