Hotdogs, Biggest Choking Hazard for Kids: Parents Need to Prepare Them Well

An expert warned about this typical food being fed to kids, saying it is the biggest choking hazard.

A paramedic from Australia and CEO of Tiny Hearts Education, Nikki Jurcutz, just revealed hotdogs are the one food that is the biggest choking hazard for kids. This food has caused choking deaths more than any other food.

Jurcutz took to Instagram and posted a video educating parents on the potential danger of feeding kids hotdogs.

"If you were to design a perfect plug for a child's airway you couldn't do much better than a hot dog," she emphasized in the video's caption.

Minimize the risk

Jurcutz not only informed parents about how risky hotdogs are but also suggested how to minimize the risk.

She stated that by changing how parents prepare them, children could be safer from choking.

The paramedic used a clear tube to represent a kid's airway and illustrated how hotdogs could easily block and get stuck when consumed whole or even in sliced circular discs.

She then illustrated how it would be less risky if hotdogs were sliced lengthwise, leaving more space for the food to go down without getting stuck in a child's airway.

Hotdogs become much narrower when sliced along their length, presenting less of a choking hazard because it will not "completely occlude" the airways if it gets into it, she explained in the video, 7 News reported.

Greater killer than Chinese lead-based paint

Parents thanked Jurcutz for her educational video. Some even shared their childhood experiences of choking on hotdogs.

Some, however, criticized her for sharing, saying that she should have informed parents how unhealthy hotdogs are and how they should not offer them to children in the first place.

According to New York State's Department of Health, choking is number four on the list of top causes of unintentional death of children below five years old, who are at the greatest risk for choking injury and death.

Moreover, food is the most repeated cause of "nonfatal choking" in young kids. It is alarming to know that at least one kid in the U.S. dies from choking on food every five days, and over 12,000 young ones are taken to the emergency room yearly because of food-choking injuries.

In these incidents, hotdogs take up the number one spot of food-choking hazards, especially when cut into coin shapes, confirming what Jurcutz told parents.

The American Academy of Pediatrics even stated that hotdogs are greater killers of children than Chinese-lead-based paint, killing 77 children each year because of their "vain, futile effort to consume" the food.

Gary Smith, author and director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, stressed that as a pediatric emergency doctor, he has witnessed how it is "almost impossible" to get hotdogs out in a kid's airway when they are wedged in.