Silica Gel: What If You Do Eat It?

The surprising science of the forbidden snack:

Extra dry

Firstly, let’s quickly cover what it actually is: silica gel is made from silicon dioxide (silica), a naturally occurring mineral found abundantly in the Earth’s crust. It starts as silica sand, which is processed and transformed into hard, porous beads.

Chemically, silica gel is the same as beach sand, but its microscopic network of pores gives it an enormous surface area and exceptional moisture-absorbing ability. Indeed, a single gram of silica gel has more than 700 square meters (7,500 square feet, for the non-metric preferrers) of internal surface area, allowing it to trap large amounts of moisture.

This moisture-trapping is an active process: the polar silicon dioxide molecules attract water vapor, which is pulled into the bead’s tiny pores through capillary condensation.

For this reason, silica gel helps keep foodstuffs and supplements dry, reduces odors in cat litter, protects museum artifacts from rust and mold, and is even used as aerogel to insulate spacecraft and collect comet dust.

Why packets say “Do Not Eat”: the warning is mainly because the packet is a choking hazard, not because standard silica gel is poisonous (except insofar as everything is poisonous at a certain dosage, even water or oxygen). But to be clear, silica gel is chemically inert, so your body does not break it down into toxic substances, and it usually passes through the digestive system unchanged.

That said, eating a large amount can still dry and irritate your digestive tract, but it’s nothing good hydration won’t fix, unless you really go to extremes.

One important exception: some silica gel contains cobalt chloride, a moisture indicator that changes color as the beads absorb water. Cobalt chloride is toxic, so don’t eat that.

We still don’t recommend eating any silica gel, but people consume much worse-for-the-health things every day.

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Take care!