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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/TheNormalPerson201 on 2026-07-20 12:40:07+00:00.

I was with my friends (which we will call Big S and Big T), we wanted to travel toghether and go to Budapest.

We got there and began to explore the city, the first day everything went  smooth. The second day we had the visit to the parliament, the afternoon free and a boat tour in the evening.

Everything was going according to plan, until it came time to have dinner, we didn’t have much time so we had to do something fast, first thing that popped up in our minds (since we are italian) is to make some pasta, so we went to the store tu buy the ingredients to make it.

We managed to find basically everything except salt, so while Big T went to another store to look for it me and Big S remained to pay.

We met up later at home, since we are in hungary and none of us can neither read or speak hungarian, we couldn’t understand a single thing that was written on the packaging, we just knew that “salt” is “sò” so we didn’t think it could have been anything else. The cooking started.

The salt was very fine and we needed like big salt for the water so logically we put a lot of it, fast forward a couple of minutes, we are ready to eat, everything is set but when we begun eating something felt off, the pasta tasted sour, so Big S took a pinch of salt and immediatly told us to stop eating (but we didn’t); that was not cooking salt. Our first thought was maybe it was something cleaning related, so we started searching online for answers.

We slowly pieced toghether what that was, and immediatly panicked, turns out its a powerfull laxative and if eaten too much of can have serious health consequences, but its effects can be limited by drinking a lot of water, so we did exactly that; now not only we were scared to having to go to the hospital (litterally the second day) but we were also scared to shit all over the boat during the tour.

We decided to risk it and we went out to go to the boat.

In the end we were all fine, turns out we didn’t eat enough to have any effect on us, other than scaring us a lot.

In conclusion, epsom salt is not used for cooking, if you take more than 30g in one day you could feel sick, it can be a laxative and lastly you can use it for baths and foot soakings (which we later did).

TL;DR We used epsom salt, which is a laxative and can be poisonous to cook some pasta while we were in hungary.