NyQuil chicken 'very unsafe,' FDA warns of viral TikTok trend

If you were considering cooking chicken in NyQuil, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is begging you to reconsider.

In response to viral videos of people filming themselves sauteing chicken in a pan with the over-the-counter cold medicine, the FDA issued a statement calling the practice not just gross, but also dangerous.

As of Tuesday, the #sleepychicken tag has garnered over 1.3 million videos on TikTok, with many users reacting to the cooking practice, and a safety warning appears when users search the tag on the app. Videos of people making NyQuil chicken have been widely mocked online, with NyQuil trending No. 1 on Twitter Tuesday following the FDA's statement.

"The challenge sounds silly and unappetizing — and it is," reads a Sept. 15 post on the FDA's website. "But it could also be very unsafe. Boiling a medication can make it much more concentrated and change its properties in other ways. Even if you don’t eat the chicken, inhaling the medication’s vapors while cooking could cause high levels of the drugs to enter your body. It could also hurt your lungs."

The FDA added: "Put simply: Someone could take a dangerously high amount of the cough and cold medicine without even realizing it."

The FDA went on to call out other dangerous social media trends such as the Benadryl challenge, which emerged in 2020 and encouraged people to take an excessive amount of the medication in an attempt to hallucinate.

The FDA also encouraged parents to keep both over-the-counter and prescription medications away and locked up from children, and advised parents to "sit down with your children and discuss the dangers of misusing drugs and how social media trends can lead to real, sometimes irreversible, damage."

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The NyQuil chicken challenge isn't the first dangerous trend to emerge on social media. The coronavirus challenge encouraged people to lick surfaces in public, and the Blackout challenge, in which people choke themselves until they become unconscious, has resulted in multiple deaths.

"Kids are biologically built to become much more susceptible to peers in adolescence, and social media has magnified those peer influence processes to be much, much more dangerous than they were before," Mitchell Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association, told USA TODAY last year. "These kids are being influenced at a level that's beyond their conscious awareness."

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Contributing: Alia E. Dastagir