I normally tell you not to take advice from memes. And I thought this was gonna be one of those ‘inverse law of broken clocks and blind squirrels’ days.
It was. Then I just had to do some fact checking.
Today’s Moment of Science… This meme won’t get you pregnant.
When I was a wee child back in the 1980s, the scariest things we absolutely knew were lurking in the Halloween candy supply were razor blades and drugs. Don’t touch any stickers either, kids, your neighbors are inexplicably giving out free tabs of acid!
It’s still best practice not to take homemade goods. This is less due to any risk of finding razorblade coated drugs and more because your neighbors likely aren’t meticulously controlling for and listing allergens. Or worse, you might bite into what’s surely a chocolate chip cookie to find it’s oatmeal raisin. Trick, motherfucker!
But that’s not the scariest thing you’ll find this spooky season. Ice cream, gummies, “poisoned” candy apples, and witch’s brews of all varieties get a haunting rich black color from the addition of activated charcoal. For some asinine goddamn reason, chugging activated charcoal became a health trend a few years ago. Because it’s gonna remove some undefined unknown toxins, naturally. I’d like to send a candy apple to whoever came up with this fuckery.
Full stop, activated charcoal has some wild properties. Also known as activated carbon, this fine black powder has a massive surface area. Sources vary, but a gram of the stuff has a surface area of about 3,000 square meters. The high surface area, at least in theory, allows it to adsorp toxins before they get the chance to really party in your kidneys and liver.
A few factors are working against it though. It’s been shown to work best if administered within an hour of poison ingestion. The efficacy drops off precipitously after that.
The other main factor is the poison ingested. The black carbon sludge in suspension is sometimes viewed as an all-purpose intestinal scrub brush. That’s outdated information at best and just plain bad medicine at worst. It’s been shown to work to reduce the adsorption of certain drugs by quite a bit if taken shortly after ingestion. Howthefuckever, in several randomized control studies there’s scant evidence for its efficacy in patients admitted to the ER for poisoning. It’s not protective against ingestion of strong acids or bases, iron, lithium, cyanide, arsenic, and several organic solvents.
But goddamnit, I remember activated charcoal being administered to some kids at my high school who had a bit too much to drink before class one day (small town New Hampshire, man). A quick poke through the literature reveals that it does fuckall for alcohol poisoning. Huh.
So because of the overblown idea that this stuff can adsorp any and all nebulous toxins, people are brushing their teeth with it and drinking health elixirs made of it and probably shoving charcoal suppositories… where suppositories go. I haven’t fact checked that last one, I just know it’s true.
This little trend is probably what led some well-meaning person to make the meme going around, warning that activated charcoal can interfere with birth control pill efficacy. Because if it’s used in medical settings to adsorp poison, why couldn’t your activated charcoal pumpkin spice whateverthefuck get you pregnant?
It seems unlikely because of those two factors mentioned earlier- timing and the drug. In the few studies I could find, it appeared that activated charcoal did not cause ovulation in people taking the birth control pill. That said, these were small studies, and they took the activated charcoal a few hours after the pill.
Would I entirely rule out the possibility that someone could gorge themselves on activated charcoal cookies every day right after the birth control pill and have an ‘oops’ ovulation? I would not, given the paucity of data here. If you’re dying to try that pitch black ice cream and you took your pill many hours ago, you shouldn’t worry about it too much though.
But if you’d like to indulge and absolutely want to avoid the arrival of a belated Halloween treat in nine months? I recommend condoms.
This has been your Moment of Science, never quite prepared to find out I’m wrong about everything halfway through writing the article
Join the discussion!