what makes swallowing cinnamon so bad for you
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Your lungs are meant to inhale and exhale gases only, no liquids or solids. While you can swallow a reasonable amount of cinnamon in a reasonable way (such as when you put a teaspoon into a cup of coffee), it’s not bad.
The danger comes from trying to swallow a spoonful or more of cinnamon powder – you will most likely *inhale* a large amount of it. It can scrape up the lungs, cause inflammation and cause an infection.
First you need to understand how swallowing works – you get something on your mouth, then by action of gravity and muscles on your mouth, throat and esophagus it gets progressively pushed down until it reaches your stomach.
Because it’s a very dry and very fine powder, cinnamon will just glue itself your tongue, inner cheeks and throat, forming a coat all around. Since it’s so light, gravity can’t pull the rest down, and since it just slides against the coat of cinnamon in your inner walls, your organs cant force it down towards the stomach either, you can do “swallowing movements” all you want, but it won’t leave your mouth until you inevitable run out of air and need to breathe.
Since you have been holding your breath for so long you will breath in as hard as you can, and because cinnamon is such a dry and fine powder, everything you couldn’t swallow will now go down “the wrong pipe”, leaving a coat of cinnamon down the trachea all the way deep into your lungs. Your lungs are not prepared to handle large amounts of powder, hence why you cough very hard when things go down the “wrong pipe” – it’s your body trying to get rid of those things. But as we established before, cinnamon is very dry and very fine and will not unglue from inside your lungs so it will eventually get an infection and probably die.
Cinnamon is very dry and very fine (small), so when you put a big spoonful in your mouth, not only is it gonna taste really horrible, but any powder that is not immediately coating every surface of your mouth is going to go straight down your throat when you start gagging/trying to breathe, coat your lungs, and possibly kill you.
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