Instant noodles are a classic favorite that people around the world enjoy. We eat them when we are in college, or if we need a quick snack, and we feed them to our children.
It is the younger group that has raised some concern, and researchers from the University of Chicago Medicine have something to report on it. They published a report in the Journal Burns regarding a new study.
Instant noodles, which find their way to the table of many families, are a leading cause of burns among children. To look into this, researchers closely studied 790 burn injuries in children between 2010 and 2020.
Interestingly, 245 of those cases, which is 31%, involved instant noodles. They also discovered that if children were allowed to cook on their own and not supervised, it resulted in a higher level of being burned. 40% of burns happened when children were not overseen.
Sebastian Vrouwe, the study’s senior author, shared in a press release: “Anecdotally, it felt like every other child we were consulted on for a burn was injured by instant noodles, so we wanted to dive into the data to see what the trend really was.”
He explained that the noodles generate a lot of heat while cooking, which could easily lead to second or third-degree burns. It was also more likely to happen in young children, who have thinner skin and are more vulnerable.
The most likely to suffer burns are black children living in areas of low income. This fact was brought out in the study, but more details were not given.
The liquid, which contains a lot of starch, also causes unique burn patterns. This type of burn is more likely to lead to a child being hospitalized and needing surgery.