Youth is many a splendored thing–if you survive it. On May 28, Buzzfeed reported that Briatney Portillo suffered a heart attack after replicating the TikTok trend of dry scooping pre-workout powder.
For those of you who don’t do heavy exercising or were born before trends that could kill you were the thing, dry scooping is when instead of mixing the pre-workout powder with water in a cup as the directions state, people scoop the dry powder directly into their mouth and slosh a sip or two of water around and swallow. Portillo, 20, learned the hard way that following directions matters.
The problem is that many pre-workout powders have up to 250 milligrams of caffeine which is three times that of a cup of coffee. In addition to caffeine, other ingredients like creatine and herbal extracts that will cause an accelerated heart rate are common in the powders. The purpose of the water is to dilute those ingredients and take them in at a rate that the body can handle. As Portillo found out, those formulas are not meant to be crammed into the body.
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Portillo, an OnlyFans “model,” recounted her experience and said that she began to experience chest pains during her workout but ignored them. Eventually, she felt itchy. That itchy feeling is an effect of the beta-alanine in many of the powders used to decrease neuromuscular fatigue and cause a non-fatal tingling sensation.
After going to her job as a dancer, Portillo experienced the signs of a heart attack, namely chest pain, left arm pain and limpness. Doctors found that she had suffered an NSTEMI, a less dangerous heart attack where blood flow is only partially blocked. NSTEMI is short for non-ST segment elevation myocardial infarction (say it three times fast).
Portillo lived to tell the tale and is lucky for having done so. Besides a cardiac event, choking is also a possible consequence of swallowing pre-workout powders, similar to the Generation Z cinnamon challenge of 2015-ish. To our Generation Z followers, if you learned about it in a 30-second social media video, don’t do it.
