Rob Gronkowski tells everyone not to eat Tide Pods 
 
 Something called the "Tide Pod Challenge" has been going viral online recently. It's extremely dangerous and involves people posting videos of themselves putting the toxic laundry detergent pods in their mouths and eating them. 
 
 In an effort to spread the word that the pods are not for eating, Tide got the help of Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski to tell everyone, "What the heck is going on, people? Use Tide Pods for washing. Not eating. Do not eat." 
 
 What should Tide PODs be used for? DOING LAUNDRY. Nothing else. 
 
 
 
 Eating a Tide POD is a BAD IDEA, and we asked our friend @robgronkowski to help explain. pic.twitter.com/0JnFdhnsWZ — Tide (@tide) January 12, 2018 
 
 I’ve partnered with @Tide to make sure you know, Tide PODs are for doing laundry. Nothing else! https://t.co/Oo7n7ZZpbG — Rob Gronkowski (@RobGronkowski) January 13, 2018 
 
 There you have it: Do not eat Tide Pods because Gronk says so. But seriously, don't eat them. 
 
 The managing director of the Florida Poison Information Center in Tampa told USA TODAY that swallowing the detergent could result in a life-threatening situation, and that even putting a small amount in your mouth and spitting it out can cause diarrhea, vomiting or breathing difficulties. 
 
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 Read or Share this story: http://ftw.usatoday.com/2018/01/rob-gronkowski-gronk-tide-pod-challenge-do-not-eat-stop-video 

 A government watchdog is expressing concern over the dangerous misuse of a laundry detergent. In this latest social media fad, teenagers are putting detergent pods in their mouths in what's being called the "Tide Pod Challenge." 
 
 Ingredients in the pods include ethanol, hydrogen peroxide and polymers – a highly-toxic mix of detergent meant to wipe out dirt and grime. Manufacturers have been concerned about toddlers mistakenly ingesting them, but now teens are popping them on purpose and posting videos of the results online, reports CBS News correspondent Anna Werner. 
 
 Nineteen-year-old Marc Pagan, who did it on a dare, told CBS News he knew better but did it anyway. 
 
 "A lot of people were just saying how stupid I was or how – why would I be willing to do that," he said. "No one should be putting anything like that in their mouths, you know?" 
 
 
 
 Ann Marie Buerkle, acting chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, says ingesting any of the liquid carries a deadly risk. 
 
 "This is what started out as a joke on the internet and now it's just gone too far," Buerkle said. 
 
 The pods are bright and colorful and to children they can look like candy. At least 10 deaths have been linked to ingesting these pods. Two were toddlers, eight were seniors with dementia. 
 
 Procter & Gamble, the maker of Tide products, told CBS News: "They should not be played with... Even if meant as a joke. Safety is no laughing matter." 
 
 More than 62,000 children under the age of six were exposed to laundry and dishwasher detergents, between 2013 and 2014. 
 
 The next year, Consumer Reports said it would no longer recommend detergent packets, citing "the unique risks" while urging the "adoption of tougher safety measures." 
 
 Buerkle says her group has worked with manufacturers to make the packets less attractive to children. 
 
 "Making that laundry packet opaque, less attractive, less colorful, reducing the toxicity and the strength of laundry detergent," Buerkle said. 
 
 The CPSC also found that elderly adults with dementia were confused by the product and have also ingested it. The danger to little kids is so high that researchers have recommended the parents of children under six years old not buy these at all and instead use regular detergent only. 
 
 Anyone concerned about the dangers of laundry pods can get more information from the American Association of Poison Control Centers. If you need immediate help, call 1-800-222-1222, or text "poison" to 797979 to save the number in your phone. 

 A kid reaches for a Tide Pod. 
 
 Tide Pods contain detergent. For washing your clothes and your sheets. Not for eating. Doesn’t matter how much they look like a snack, or a candy, or an oversize Gushers. You shouldn’t eat them unless you’d like to, well, potentially die. A child might not know better, so you should probably keep them out of reach of little hands — these things have killed before — for safety. (Or just buy some boring, cheaper, non-pod detergent. It works better anyway.) If you, after all of this, are still looking at a Tide Pod and thinking, Maybe just a little bit … you definitely shouldn’t go on Twitter today. Tide Pod–eating, a long-running internet joke, has reached something of a fever pitch this December. 
 
 someone: were you just eating a tide pod ? 
 
 me: pic.twitter.com/SOLTaegBnx — fat bully (@ricardojkay) December 25, 2017 
 
 I thought y’all were so weird for talking about eating Tide pods but now I been thinking about how weird it is for so long that now I’m thinking it might not be weird and I wanna eat one too what is this — h (@halsey) December 28, 2017 
 
 ┏┓ 
 
 ┃┃╱╲ in 
 
 ┃╱╱╲╲ this 
 
 ╱╱╭╮╲╲house 
 
 ▔▏┗┛▕▔ we 
 
 ╱▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╲ 
 
 eat tide pods 
 
 ╱╱┏┳┓╭╮┏┳┓ ╲╲ 
 
 ▔▏┗┻┛┃┃┗┻┛▕▔ — rosie mcmahon (@rosiemcmahon_) December 27, 2017 
 
 Vincent van Gogh used to eat Tide pods because he wanted happiness inside him — swedish forest monster (@elkalumpy) December 27, 2017 
 
 when the tide pod hits in pic.twitter.com/PgycdouooQ — riley || 46 (@babypetalwt) December 28, 2017 
 
 tide pods 
 
 -satisfying gush 
 
 -amazing mouth feel 
 
 -pretty colors 
 
 -delicious smell pic.twitter.com/EFlFSnScSq — morg (@fevervinyI) December 28, 2017 
 
 The earliest origins of the Tide Pods–as–food bit date back to an internet forum in 2013, according to Know Your Meme. The topic of said forum, however, was less about Tide Pods as a delicious snack and more about old people and kids accidentally eating them. In the years following, sites like CollegeHumor and the Onion both created content around the idea of edible laundry pods. See here: “Don’t Eat the Laundry Pods” from last March. Communities of people — on Twitter and Reddit — have since become very into talking about eating, or how badly they want to eat, Tide Pods. (I’m assuming that very few to none make good on these conversations, given the whole Tide Pods are poison thing.) 
 
 This December, there have been a number of viral tweets about Tide Pod–consumption that seem likely to have been the impetus for the detergent renaissance this week. The most important being a person who tweeted at Gushers on the day after Christmas with something “very important” to tell them. They sent a DM asking if Gushers would consider making a fruit snack shaped like a Tide Pod — which is a great idea if you ask me — so all of the would-be Tide Pod–munchers could satisfy their pod hunger. Gushers blocked the user after receiving the DM. 
 
 i really tried and died for the cause pic.twitter.com/WxtF27BMjP — ً (@nightfiIm) December 27, 2017 
 
 me when i see tide pods at my friends house pic.twitter.com/QzqaH8ggE3 — fat bully (@ricardojkay) December 23, 2017 
 
 anyone: are u eating those tide pod detergents 
 
 me: 
 
 pic.twitter.com/NXNQZ4628M — sarah (@fastjelIyfish) December 22, 2017 
 
 no more eating xanax in 2018 we eating tide pods from now on — alex tan (@mineifiwildout) December 9, 2017 
 
 If anybody knows a gummy company looking for a hot new product, I think we might be onto something here. And again … don’t eat the dang Tide Pods. Though if you do, please have somebody film you and send us the video. 

 In January 2018, millions of cable TV viewers had their first encounter with the “Tide pod challenge”—an online and social media phenomenon in which someone with a camera (usually a teenager) films themselves biting into one of the laundry detergent pods. 
 
 “A government watchdog is expressing concern over the dangerous misuse of a laundry detergent,” CBS News reported on 12 January. “In this latest social media fad, teenagers are putting detergent pods in their mouths in what’s being called the ‘Tide Pod Challenge.'” 
 
 “I can’t even believe I have to say this right now,” said Good Morning America‘s Diane Macedo. “They are brightly colored and they’re very nicely wrapped, but these Tide pods are not candy or pizza toppings or breakfast cereal—they are not edible.” 
 
 We’ve received several enquiries from readers wanting to know whether people really were putting laundry detergent in their mouths on camera. They are. 
 
 Amid a wave of news coverage in January 2018, safety watchdogs — in response to media enquiries — warned of the dangers associated with biting Tide pods. 
 
 Ann Marie Buerkle, Chairperson of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, told Good Morning America: “Teens trying to be funny are now putting themselves in danger by ingesting this poisonous substance.” 
 
 A spokesperson for the American Association of Poison Control Centers told us that in the first 11 days of 2018, there had been 40 reported exposures to liquid laundry detergent pods by 13- to 19-year-olds. That figure represents 20 percent of the total number of similar incidents in all of 2017. 
 
 Furthermore, more than half the incidents so far this year have been deemed deliberate, as opposed to around a quarter in 2017, the spokesperson added. Even Tide itself had to intervene with a plea to not eat their detergent: 
 
 What should Tide PODs be used for? DOING LAUNDRY. Nothing else. Eating a Tide POD is a BAD IDEA, and we asked our friend @robgronkowski to help explain. pic.twitter.com/0JnFdhnsWZ — Tide (@tide) January 12, 2018 
 
 Google (which owns YouTube) and Facebook both announced on 18 January that they are deleting Tide Pod Challenge videos from their platforms because they encourage dangerous activities. 
 
 We haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact origins of the Tide pod challenge as a viral social media phenomenon, nor the allure of eating Tide pods as a meme. 
 
 Online pranksters and daredevils have been messing with laundry detergent for years. We don’t want to encourage any dangerous activity, but some relevant keyword searches on YouTube and Facebook will yield videos dating back to 2011 which show people ingesting detergent of various kinds. 
 
 In 2012, the Proctor and Gamble-owned brand Tide introduced Tide pods — brightly-colored plastic pods that contain liquid laundry detergent. Following reports that young children had been mistaking them for candy and putting them in their mouths, the company added a safety latch to the pod containers. 
 
 The rising popularity of Tide pods brought more online stupidity, with the bursting texture of the pods an apparent focus of attention for daredevils. We found videos on YouTube and Facebook from as far back as 2012 and 2013 that involved squeezing the pods until they burst. 
 
 The earliest instance we found of the “Tide pod challenge” as a concept involving eating the detergent pods was in September 2012, and we found a YouTube video dating to June 2014 which showed a prankster biting into one. 
 
 Since 2014, every video-hosting social network has been replete with clip after clip of teenagers biting into Tide pods, only to discover that what they had been told (“Don’t eat Tide pods”) really was sage advice. 
 
 A 2015 article on the satirical web site The Onion (an op-ed by a young boy vowing to eat a detergent pod as soon as his parents drop their guard) reintroduced the concept into what you might call the internet’s collective unconscious. 
 
 It’s also possible that some pranksters were inspired to use the name “Tide pod challenge” on their pod-eating videos as a subversion of the “Tide pod challenge” series, an online video marketing campaign that Tide itself — perhaps unaware of the other viral phenomenon of the same name — launched in 2015. 
 
 A viral 2017 video by the College Humor web site captured the somewhat perverse allure that biting into Tide pods holds for some people. (It also accurately described the possible consequences, showing a young man being rushed to hospital afterwards.) 
 
 The concept of eating Tide pods, the bizarre temptation to eat them, warnings not to eat them, and the serious physical damage done by eating them, all spread more intensively as an online meme and cultural touchstone in the later months of 2017, as New York Magazine documented. 
 
 Worryingly, the actual practice of biting into Tide pods appears to have intensified as well, prompting the wave of warnings and news coverage in January 2018. 
 
 Call the national poison help hotline at 1-800-222-1222 or text POISON to 797979 to save the number in your phone. 

 Here to chat with you about how to keep everything bright and clean – your clothes, your fabrics and even your life. # TidePower
– Dear reader, it appears the teens are at it again. ABC News reports the US Consumer Product Safety Commission and Procter & Gamble are asking young people to please not put Tide Pods in their mouths "even if meant as a joke." And Tide even enlisted an NFL player to warn teens not to purposefully ingest its laundry detergent, according to USA Today. "What the heck is going on, people?" the New England Patriots' Rob Gronkowski pleads in the video. "Use Tide Pods for washing. Not eating. Do not eat." The "Tide Pod Challenge," in which teens are apparently filmed putting laundry detergent pods in their mouths, seems made up—too dumb for even the most YouTube-addled youth. But Snopes says it checks out. And New York reports what what started as "a long-running internet joke" has, years later, "reached something of a fever pitch." Nineteen-year-old Marc Pagan tells CBS News he took part in the Tide Pod Challenge on a dare. "A lot of people were just saying how stupid I was," he says. Ann Marie Buerkle with the CPSC says the internet joke has "gone too far." “Teens trying to be funny are now putting themselves in danger by ingesting this dangerous substance,” she says. Tide Pods are highly toxic—and potentially fatal. The American Association of Poison Control Centers says it has already had about 40 cases related to laundry pods, "of which around half were intentionally ingested," in 2018. So, kids, please listen to Gronk and stop eating detergent.