A woman’s Ozempic use left a hardened mass of undigested food trapped in her stomach. The fix her doctors chose wasn’t surgery — it was Diet Coke
It sounds like a bad joke, but it worked. Faced with a stomach blockage that would normally mean a scope or an operation, a Massachusetts medical team reached for something you can buy at any corner store: 1.5 liters of soda
The patient was a 63-year-old woman with Type 2 diabetes, Stage 2 chronic kidney disease, and GERD. For about a month she had battled worsening nausea, vomiting, and a burning pain in her upper abdomen. When scans finally revealed the cause, it was startling: a large mass of clumped, undigested plant material sitting in her stomach
The culprit was traced to her medication. She’d been on semaglutide — the drug in Ozempic and Wegovy — for roughly a year and had shed about 40 pounds, close to 19% of her body weight. Those drugs slow how fast the stomach empties, which can let food fibers pile up into what doctors call a phytobezoar. CT and MRI showed a distended stomach with a semi-solid mass, and an endoscopy confirmed a large, greenish, mucus-covered clump
Here’s the part that surprises people: cola dissolution is a recognized first-line option for these blockages, tried before anyone considers endoscopic fragmentation or surgery. The usual approach runs up to 3 liters over about 12 hours. Because of her diabetes and her dislike of carbonation, her team stopped the semaglutide and went with 1.5 liters of Diet Coke. The working theory is that the acidity — a pH around 2.6 from phosphoric and carbonic acids, close to stomach acid itself — combined with the carbonation to loosen the mass.
The results came fast. The next day she felt a sudden tugging sensation, and her nausea and pain eased soon after. A repeat scope showed the bezoar had dissolved completely, and she went home on a regular diet without a single invasive procedure
The case was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in September 2025
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