Lil Xan Was Not the First Person to Be Hospitalized by Flamin' Hot Cheetos

The year was 2012, the rapper now known as Lil Xan was a 16-year-old named Diego Leanos, and kids kept ending up in the ER because Flamin' Hot Cheetos were giving them blood-red poo. The red food dye isn't actually dangerous—and also isn't unique to the spicy sticks of unpronounceable ingredients—but the snack proved so addictive that unsuspecting teens were accidentally ingesting massive amounts of colorful flavor dust, resulting in alarming stool and expensive ambulance rides.

Unfortunately, the reaction to that round of Flamin' Hot Cheetos fearmongering seemed to be a nationwide belief that any troubling side effects should be ignored in favor of eating more Flamin' Hot Cheetos. By the following year, doctors were citing the snacks—when consumed in unrelenting abundance—as a source of significant stomach inflammation, and earlier this year, a woman blamed her daughter's emergency gallbladder surgery on her relentless Flamin' Hot Cheetos habit.

Well, apparently Lil Xan eats an awful lot of Flamin' Hot Cheetos, too. After the rapper posted an Instagram story from the back of an ambulance earlier this week, he explained in a subsequent video post that he had gone to the hospital for a Hot Cheetos injury.

In the video, he says, "I was in the hospital not due to any drugs, but I guess I ate too many Hot Cheetos, and it ripped something in my stomach open. So I puked a little blood."

Vomiting blood would be a new (and troubling) symptom of Flamin' Hot Cheeto overdose, so maybe we should take that with a grain of MSG—it seems more likely that the stool-dyeing effect works when ingested foods come out the other end, as well. But this does mean that Lil Xan has likely been eating several bags of Flamin' Hot Cheetos a week for an extended stretch—and that he should probably stop doing so ASAP. One of the ER doctors Fox spoke to in 2016 suggested string cheese as an alternative.