oF cOkE & mEnToS

It has been reported recently that a 4 year old girl in Brazil had died due to a deadly mixture of consuming mentos and coke at the same time... The reaction of the two substance caused her mouth to explode and die...

True or false??

The answer: It's a false rumour!! The story is a half-true, and GREATLY exaggerated...

You might have seen the video of a 'stuntman' pouring a whole tube of mentos into a big bottle of coke, and the immediate effect was a huge fountain of gassy foam gushing out from the bottle... This lead you to believe that having mentos with coke will cause a hugh gassy eruption in your mouth/body, causing you grevious hurt... All these are just bad chain emails and rumours that are greatly exaggerated...

the foam explosion stunt...

The real explaination to the stunt is that the sugar coating on the mentos reacts with the carbon dioxide gas in the coke... Only when this sugar coating reacts with the carbon dioxide will this 'stunt' happen... When all these reactions happen, gas is released, which pushes all of the liquid up and out of the bottle into an incredible foam blast... If we were to put the mentos in our mouth, our saliva would have broken down the sugar coating... By drinking coke at the same time, there wouldn't be much reaction to speak of... Besides, if you wan the 'explosion' to occur in your mouth, you'd first need to have a mouth that can contain the hugh amount of coke (roughly 1.5 litres) and a whole tube of mentos...

Another reason why the 'stunt' is so believable is because most of the carbon dioxide stays in the liquid (coke) that has been pumped into it during the bottling process... During the stunt, when the coke bottle is opened, the mentos is immediately dropped into the bottle, leaving the unescaped, almost full composition of carbon dioxide to react with 1 full tube of mentos, causing a hugh eruption... However, during normal consumption, after we opened the bottle of coke to consume it, some of the carbon dioxide will escape into the air... therefore, it is very safe to drink coke with mentos in your mouth as the remaining carbon dioxide is not enough to react hardly with juz 1 or 2 pieces of mentos, which would have pre-broken down by the saliva in your mouth...

There you go, the scientific explanation... Moral of the story: Never fully believe what is reported in the new media as it could be a rumour... Do some logical thinking and research before you make your final judgement...