This 5SOS Fan Keeps Eating Luke Hemmings Pics, But A Doctor Warns She Shouldn’t
"I’m consuming food a pic of Luke day-to-day up until he feeds one of me."
That's the rallying cry of Tilly, a
5 Seconds of Summer fan who vowed publicly at the starting of November to eat a photo of lead vocalist Luke Hemmings day-to-day of the month. For the past 25 days, Tilly has posted day-to-day videos of the stunt on Twitter, attracting polarized reactions from the world wide web when she waits for Hemmings' approval.
Tilly's first video of consuming food a Luke photo racked up over 165,000 views. The second day's grabbed nearly 50,000. And while views have tapered off because the month has gone on, each new video Tilly posts gets over 1,000 views within a day.
The videos are incredibly simple. Tilly holds up a photo of Luke, typically gives the camera a smirk, smile or duck face, and chews and swallows the photo in a matter of seconds. Often, she opens her mouth to create it clear there aren't any tricks involved.
"At first, the only people that had seen it were my mutuals and so they all thought it was hilarious," Tilly tells MTV News about her stunt. "At the time, I only had about 100 followers so I didn’t think several people would visualize it."
Tilly's idea to eat the Luke pictures came from
another 5SOS fan who did the same thing, nevertheless with photographs of
Colleen Kelly, a YouTuber and high-profile member of the fandom. Neither of those photo eaters are alone, though, evidenced by
a man who ate photos of Jason Segel day-to-day for 100 days.
Soon following the first fanfare from Tilly's fellow fandom members, attention began pouring in from all corners of Twitter, with a wide span of advice on her photo-eating thread.
"The hate got to me a little, however While I realized that it doesn’t matter what people on the world wide web — who I have never met in real life and probably never will — think about me, I just laughed it off," Tilly says. Right now I find it quite funny and often retweet the particularly bad and funny ones."
Some backlash to Tilly's videos addressed the possible health concerns involved with consuming food pictures every day. And while there's no telling exactly what will result from consistently consuming food paper and ink, it comes with some serious risks, according to
Will Bulsiewicz, MD MSCI, a board-certified gastroenterologist.
"There's very little scientific writing about paper ingestion," explains Dr. Bulsiewicz, who regularly shares health and nutrition facts with his 22,000 followers
on Instagram. "We do know that ingestion of paper has the potential to cause abdominal pain, bloating, and digestive distress."
There's huge quite a bit of ingredients in paper, including cellulose from trees, "fillers like clay, chalk, and calcium carbonate," and more chemicals that act as bleaching agents, strengthening agents and binders, according to Dr. Bulsiewicz. Some components can't be digested and can cause blockages or perforations in the intestines, while others may "cause harm to the gut microbiome."
In terms of the ink, Dr. Bulsiewicz compares its ingestion to the consumption of dish-washing soap. That doesn't seem also risky, he says, although some possible printer-ink chemicals, like diethylene glycol, are "known to cause kidney liver damage and may affect brain function."
"To be fair," Dr. Bulsiewicz says, "these risks are most likely with ingestion that far exceeds what occurs once you chew a boy-band picture and swallow. But the point that there really is no amount that is safe and even a little amount has the potential to harm."
Before starting to eat day-to-day pictures of Luke, Tilly says, she "did do a little bit of studying into it and the general consensus of it was that it’s not very good for you yet it isn’t going to harm me or make me sick."
Immediately after informing Tilly of Dr. Bulsiewicz's perspective, she admitted that she plans on stopping the stunt in the near future.
As for Tilly's hope that Luke will visualize her thread and actually eat a photo of her, both she and Dr. Bulsiewicz confess that chances aren't so high.
"I don’t think he would ever" eat a photo of her, Tilly says of her original objective. "At this point I just want him to acknowledge the tweet."
"Personally, I would encourage Tilly to put that paper to good use and pen a considerate letter to Luke Hemmings, letting him know the positive influence he’s had on her life and the ways he’s inspired her," Dr. Bulsiewicz adds. "There are better ways to capture someone's attention than to hurt yourself."
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