What you thought was a tasty lunch can actually land you in the emergency room. It turns out that a lot of kids actually end up with severe burns due to instant noodles and other quick lunches.
You probably know instant noodles best in the form of ramen and Cup Noodles. They typically consist of a block of pasta that’s heated up, often in the microwave but sometimes by stovetop, flavored with powder. For many, it’s a quick and filling meal. And since it’s so cheap, it’s a well-known staple with college students. Others have actually mastered instant noodles by creating pretty exquisite dishes with additional vegetables and spices. Really — ramen is a lot more versatile than you might think.
But here’s the thing. You need to boil water in order to make these noodles, meaning that things can get dangerous very quickly. You don’t want to mess with hot liquid. And no offense to kids, but sometimes they seem to underestimate how hot something can be. That, and they’re often in a hurry to eat quickly.
At the 2018 American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference, it was reported that a whopping one in five scald burns reported by emergency rooms were due to instant noodles and soups. So this is a bigger problem than you might have realized.
Dr. Courtney Allen, a pediatric emergency medicine fellow at Emory University, Atlanta, did a study on the amount of preventable burns that children get. She and her team paged through ten years of data provided by the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. For children between the ages of four and 12, roughly 9,500 injuries were reported each year that were in relation to instant food products. Within that range, the average age was seven.
So, how can you help lessen the number? Make sure children are monitored if they’re cooking these products themselves.
If you’re doing the cooking, make sure the product has cooled before bringing it over to the table. As torso burns were the most common, it could be said that a lot of burns happened by spilling the hot soup once it was on the table. To help prevent this, you might want to relocate the soup from its original container (for Cup Noodles, at least) into something a bit more sturdy and reliable.
