There’s been the ice bucket challenge and the cinnamon challenge, but now, probably the most dangerous challenge to date, the Tide pod challenge.  Anyone that takes this challenge has to bite into Tide’s laundry detergent pod.  People have begun calling it the ‘forbidden fruit.’  The challenge has become so popular, it has made news stories, and the Tide company has made a commercial about not eating their product.

The pods were released in 2012, and poison control centers started getting calls that children were accidentally eating the pods.  The actual trend started around early 2017 as a meme about how it’s tempting to eat Tide pods because of the way they look, which is almost like a candy.  This joke turned into a reality when teenagers started showing up at hospitals and even dying from biting into the detergent packs.  CollegeHumor, a comedy website, posted a video about the craze.  It included a man seeing the laundry pods and having the urge to eat them after being told not to, and after doing research about them, eating a bowl full of the pods.  There are even pictures of people boiling the tide pods and baking them into a pizza.  Once this challenge gained popularity, Businesses and companies have taken action to try to prevent people from chewing on this poisonous detergent.

The Tide pods are made up of many chemicals which make them highly concentrated and toxic.  In 2017, there were more than 10,500 children under five that were exposed to the pods.  The teens had around 220 recorded cases of being exposed, and around 25% of that was intentional.  There are now still cases of it in 2018, and the poison control centers are heavily urging to keep the detergents out of people’s mouths and away from children.

Tide has picked up on the challenge and has done many things such as a commercial that includes NFL player Rob Gronkowski.  The point of it is saying that the pods should be used only for cleaning clothes, not anything else even if it’s just a joke.  In addition to this, they have also made child guard packs, which makes it harder for small children to get into the package the pods are in.  Youtube and Facebook are both taking down videos of the Tide pod challenge to get teens to stop doing it and because it goes against their guidelines of encouraging dangerous activities.  Companies are seemingly doing as much as they can to kill off this dangerous challenge.