If ever there was a reason to eat blue M&M’s and possibly get blue skin, this has to be it. Even if just getting blue skin to freak out your friends and family wasn’t enough, it appears as though, after some surprising laboratory tests, blue M&M’s not only turn your skin blue, but also may be able to heal spinal injuries. So just how is this possible? They are only a sweet treat and hardly medicine. Well it all comes down to the color.
If you’re like me you don’t really care about the color of the M&M’s that you eat. At the end of the day, they all taste pretty much the same, and the color is the last reason that you would want to eat them. But never in my wildest dreams would I have ever expected that one particular color could be so beneficial, and deliver such surprising results.
Researchers discovered the wonders of Blue M&M’s when they were conducting tests on lab rats with the compound that gives the M&M’s their blue color called “Brilliant Blue G.” The rats that they were working on all had spinal injuries (don’t ask how they got their injuries, it’s a question I don’t particularly want an answer for). But instead of giving rats the delicious hard-shelled chocolate to eat, they cheated the rats out of a tasty little meal and injected the blue dye, Brilliant Blue G, directly into the rats.
When they injected the rats with the compound the researchers found that it not only improved recovery, but also reduced lesions from the injury to the spine. This is a pretty spectacular result, but how does it work?
The compound blocks a chemical that causes more cell damage during an injury. By blocking this chemical, it reduces the secondary spinal cord damage that the chemical causes. So with an already damaged spine, just how effective was the treatment for rats?
The results were astounding. The rats that were given the treatment of Brilliant Blue G were able to recover from their injuries and walk again, the control group of rats weren’t as lucky. So clearly the test worked. But, and this is the real clincher, it isn’t as simple as eating a heap of blue M&M’s and hoping for the best.
If you were wondering why they aren’t giving everyone with spinal injuries blue M&M’s, the M&M has nothing to do with the treatment. And just eating a heap won’t do anything at all either. So don’t rush to add them to your first aid kit just yet. Essentially, the compound has to be injected intravenously and within fifteen minutes of the injury occurring. And, as we have already mentioned, the blue M&M’s will turn your skin blue.
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