2 Comments
User's avatar
Roger's avatar

Hey, can you gargle with this carrageenan stuff?

Asking for a random casual acquaintance. Since it's Generally Recognized As Safe, could you dump some amount in some water and gargle and it be effective against oral HPV/cancers?

Serious about the question. Just kidding on the random casual stuff. Congratulations on your long marriage.

Chris Buck's avatar

It can definitely be taken as a serious question - head and neck cancer is no joke:

https://cbuck.substack.com/p/everybody-should-be-allowed-to-choose

Carrageenan is the ingredient that helps prevent ice cream from forming too many large ice crystals. The original folder in my lab notebook was actually called "ice cream experiments" - I tested several brands in the lab and they all worked. The concentration of carrageenan is much higher in sex lube than in ice cream, but my IRB-unblessed bedroom experiments confirm the intuitive inference that eating a larger amount of ice cream is a lot nicer than eating a smaller amount of sex lube. Kinda too sticky for other places, obviously.