Ask Me

It's going to kill you, you know.

Always_Fangirl62442

What? Answer in your book please.

To clarify, Emily is asking me to tell the story of the popcorn argument, which I think is the weirdest argument Nico and I have ever had.

One day, we were going to watch a movie in the Hades cabin, and Nico wanted to make popcorn. I was completely fine with that, until I found out that he meant microwave popcorn.

I told him that he shouldn't make it, and he asked me why.

See, microwave popcorn has a chemical called diacetyl on the inside of the bag. This is what gives the popcorn a buttery flavor. 

The problem? Diacetyl can kill you.

It's not harmful to eat, which is why the FDA hasn't taken microwave popcorn out of stores, but when heated, it vaporizes.

Breathing around vaporized stuff often results in inhaling that stuff, and that causes a lot of problems.

Bronchiolitis obliterans is one. Also called 'popcorn lung,' it's a lung disease that restricts your air flow by about sixty percent.

Sixty percent.

To give you an idea what that's like, the average human breathes around fifteen times a minute. When that's cut down by 60%, you breathe about six times a minute.

Instead of breathing around every four seconds, you breathe around every ten seconds. Try it. 

Breathing problems and lung disease aren't the only things you can get from microwave popcorn. 

Other chemicals like perfluoroalkyls, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) which are used to line the popcorn bags to prevent grease from soaking the bag wet, fuse into the popcorn and can cause another boatload of health nightmares like messing up your endocrine system, causing thyroid issues, bladder cancer and much more.

Oh yeah, did I mention that diacetyl can cause Alzheimer's? It hasn't been proven to be a direct cause, but it does cause things that lead to Alzheimer's. 

You might be able to tell why I don't want my boyfriend eating that.

I did a very bad job of summing my argument up, though. All I said was, "It's going to kill you."

"You say everything is going to kill me, William!" Nico shot back. (He was kind of right.) "And look, I'm very much alive."

"Yes, you are, because I'm here to heal you from the things that are going to kill you!"

"You-ugh!" Nico stormed out, and it dawned on me that I'd probably made a mistake. I didn't know what to do, so I sat down and stared at a blank screen until he came back. 

We both apologized, and I went and got pretzels. Then we watched our movie.

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