Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Reducing salt intake is often a solid way to improve your overall health. However, swapping out classic sodium chloride for sodium bromide is a solid way to give yourself acne, involuntary muscle spasms, and paranoid psychosis. Knowing this, it's probably best to avoid that chemical compound entirely--even if ChatGPT tells you otherwise. In the recent case, one patient that was allegedly following the generative AI's nutritional suggestion was placed in hospital's involuntary psychiatric hold for three weeks.

ChatGPT's dangerous dietary recommendation led to a man replacing table salt with toxic sodium bromide for three months, causing severe poisoning and hospitalization.

A US medical journal has warned against using ChatGPT for health information after a man developed a rare condition following an interaction with the chatbot about removing table salt from his diet. An article in the Annals of Internal Medicine reported a case in which a 60-year-old man developed bromism, also known as bromide toxicity, after consulting ChatGPT. The article described bromism as a "well-recognised" syndrome in the early 20th century that was thought to have contributed to almost one in 10 psychiatric admissions at the time. The patient told doctors that after reading about the negative effects of sodium chloride, or table salt, he consulted ChatGPT about eliminating chloride from his diet and started taking sodium bromide over a three-month period. This was despite reading that "chloride can be swapped with bromide, though likely for other purposes, such as cleaning".