What Happens If You Eat Gunpowder?

First off, if you or your pet has eaten gunpowder and you’re looking to see if you or your pet should go to the hospital, you have stumbled upon the wrong search result. Sorry. You’re going to want to look somewhere else.

Now.

What happens if you eat a bunch of gunpowder? Do you explode?

I asked this to The Internet™ this morning, and The Internet™ guided me to Quora. Remember Quora? Clickhole or The Onion had a good bit about Quora recently. I’ll leave it to you to find it. Don’t really want to link to it here.

On Quora, a guy calling himself Timothy Sly and saying he’s a professor emeritus of public health and epidemiology at Toronto Metropolitan University answered this, plus upwards of eight thousand other questions. Is he really Timothy Sly? Is he really a professor of public health? Was there a gunpowder-eating epidemic in Canada in 2017, when he answered this?

We did google him, and a Tim Sly comes up on Toronto MU’s website. (Canadians, I do not care whether anyone actually calls it Toronto MU, it is Toronto MU now and good luck getting me to change my mind. What are you gonna do? Shoot me? You already consumed all your gunpowder back in 2017.)

According to TorontoMU.ca (that’s Canadian for “.com”), Tim Sly is a professor emeritus with expertise in epidemiology, food-borne illness, and risk assessment and communication. In other words, if this Quora guy is the real Tim Sly, we have found the perfect man to assess and communicate to us the digestive risk of ingesting gunpowder.

Clicking on his Quora profile, it appears that eight-thousand-answers number is outdated. He’s above 9,100 now. And he’s climbing. Just seven hours ago, he answered a question from a person asking if they could eat unopened Heinz canned beans whose sell-by date passed more than a year ago (he said yes, but only if the can was “100% intact with no corrosion, perforation, or leakage.”

*long pause as I scroll through Tim Sly’s other answers*

*pause continues*

*I recoil at the number of cockroach questions he’s answering*

*I’m intrigued as I can’t decide whether he’s being witty or mean to these people*

*Oh he’s fighting Russians on Quora this is rad*

Ok look, guys, I don’t know if it’s the real Tim Sly, but I think we can go with his answer on the gunpowder question. He says the sulfur and charcoal will pass through just fine. He does say, “The nitrate can be a problem, especially if it becomes partially reduced to nitrite. It depends on how much of course, but in the short term, too much nitrite can produce methemoglobinemia which can be fatal because it prevents the red blood cells from transporting oxygen. In the longer term, too much nitrite ingested without sufficient ascorbic acid at the same time, can be transformed to nitrosamines, which are known carcinogens.”

Shit.

That’s what I was afraid of.

He does say, “Especially be careful if you are prone to intestinal flatus!”, so maybe the exploding thing’s still on the table. I’ve heard of lighting farts, but maybe they could come pre-lit?

Hopefully this isn’t the real Tim Sly. Not because I hope his answer is wrong (I do, but that isn’t why), or because I want bad things to happen to Tim Sly (I don’t want that at all, I love this guy), but because it would be incredible if someone had been impersonating a specific Canadian epidemiology professor on Quora for upwards of half a decade. Imagine spending your time doing that. What a noble pastime.