10 Ridiculous Fake Status Updates Your Friends Shared On Facebook

7. Instant Noodles Coat Your Stomach With Wax

This foreboding warning to watch the content of your Pot Noodles first surfaced in email content dating back fourteen years, but the idea of the hoax itself dates back even further than that. Some snopes.com readers have reported hearing about it twenty years ago. Essentially, it boils down to advising the unwary snacker that instant noodles have an edible waxy layer that is toxic to us. When we allow it to build up, it lines our stomachs and can prove deadly. We€™re advised either to leave it a few days between noodly meals, or to boil our noodles in a container different to the one that they arrive in. Snopes performed their own tests on two different brands of ramen and found nothing untoward, and back in 1997, the New York Daily News did likewise and found nothing either. Moreover, there€™s simply no wax layer used in the Styrofoam containers that these noodles come in €“ the Styrofoam itself handles the heat just fine without it. Finally, wax doesn€™t have the harmful effect that the hoax warns us about anyway. Even if it were toxic (which it isn€™t €“ plenty of foodstuffs contain forms of wax as a matter of course), it would be passed during the normal digestive process anyway. A similar hoax has been doing the rounds concerning hot beverages in Styrofoam containers, with an equal nonsense factor built in. The same lesson needs to be learned €“ check the facts before passing these hoaxes on to others.