What Happens If You Swallow a Soda Can Tab?

Most swallowed soda can tabs pass through the digestive tract and come out the other end without causing any noticeable harm. A can tab is a small, relatively blunt piece of aluminum, and the human gut is surprisingly good at moving small objects along. That said, “most of the time it’s fine” is not the same as “always fine,” and the medical literature includes at least one striking case where a swallowed tab lodged in a person’s intestine for years and required surgery. The story of what happens after you swallow one depends on where the tab goes, how your body responds to it, and whether anyone can even find it on imaging if something goes wrong.

The Typical Outcome for a Swallowed Tab

A standard soda can tab is a thin piece of aluminum, roughly three centimeters long, with rounded edges and a central opening. It has no sharp points or barbs in the way that, say, a fish bone or an open safety pin does. In emergency medicine, small blunt foreign objects that make it past the esophagus and into the stomach generally continue through the intestines and are expelled naturally, usually within a few days. You would likely never know the tab was there. Many people who accidentally swallow a tab while drinking from a can experience no symptoms at all and never seek medical attention, which is part of why reliable numbers on how often this happens are hard to come by.

The esophagus is the first chokepoint, literally. If the tab clears the esophagus without getting stuck, odds improve considerably that it will make the full journey. Once in the stomach, the tab encounters a highly acidic environment, but aluminum resists stomach acid well enough that the tab won’t dissolve or break apart. It remains intact as it travels through roughly six meters of small intestine and then through the large intestine before being passed in a bowel movement. For most adults, and even many children, that journey is uneventful.

When a Tab Does Not Pass

The trouble starts when a tab gets hung up somewhere along the way. The esophagus is one place this can happen, particularly in children or in adults who have pre-existing narrowing from conditions like eosinophilic esophagitis or scarring from acid reflux. If a tab lodges in the esophagus, you will likely know quickly: difficulty swallowing, a sensation of something stuck in your throat, pain in the chest, and sometimes drooling or an inability to swallow your own saliva. That scenario usually leads to a prompt emergency room visit and removal via endoscopy, which is a camera-equipped tube passed down the throat.

A more insidious problem occurs when a tab passes through the esophagus and stomach but then gets caught in the small intestine. A published case report describes a soldier who developed chronic abdominal pain. Imaging eventually revealed a foreign body lodged in his ileum, the final section of the small intestine, along with an associated stricture, meaning the intestinal passage had narrowed around the object. Surgeons performed a mini-laparotomy (a small abdominal incision) and removed the object, which turned out to be an embedded pop tab. Examination of the tissue showed chronic inflammation and swelling in the intestinal wall, though no cancer or pre-cancerous changes were found.¹

What makes this case especially worth noting is the timeline. Based on the patient’s history, the tab had been lodged in his intestine for at least four years before it was identified. That is four years of vague abdominal pain, a problem that could easily be attributed to stress, dietary issues, or any number of benign explanations. The chronic inflammation and stricture that developed around the tab meant that simply pulling it out would not have been enough; the damaged section of intestine itself had to be surgically removed.¹

Why Aluminum Is So Hard to Find on Imaging

One of the most practically important things about a swallowed can tab is that it is difficult to see on a standard X-ray. If you swallowed a coin, a button battery, or a piece of iron hardware, a plain X-ray would usually light up the object clearly. Aluminum is different. It has a density very close to that of surrounding soft tissue, which means it does not stand out the way denser metals do.¹

A case report involving a suspected aspirated (inhaled) can tab demonstrated this problem vividly: neck and chest X-rays failed to show the aluminum foreign body at all. The authors concluded that X-rays have a poor ability to rule out an aluminum object and that CT scanning is far superior for this purpose. They recommended that doctors maintain a low threshold for ordering a CT scan when a patient reports swallowing or inhaling an aluminum object, rather than relying on a normal-looking X-ray to declare the situation safe.²

This matters because in an emergency department, a chest or abdominal X-ray is typically the first imaging study ordered for a swallowed foreign body. If the X-ray looks clean, a doctor unfamiliar with aluminum’s imaging quirks might reassure you and send you home. That is usually the right call for truly benign situations, but if you’re having symptoms, the takeaway from the literature is clear: a normal X-ray does not reliably rule out a swallowed can tab. Push for a CT scan if symptoms persist.

Swallowing Versus Inhaling a Tab

There is a crucial distinction between swallowing a can tab, where it enters the digestive tract, and aspirating one, where it enters the airway. Aspiration is the more immediately dangerous scenario. A tab that enters the trachea or a bronchus can obstruct airflow, trigger violent coughing or choking, and, if it stays lodged, lead to infection or tissue damage in the lungs.

Aspiration of can tabs is rare in the published literature but likely underreported. A 2017 review found only five previously documented cases of can tab aspiration and presented what appears to be the first case of a tab lodging specifically in the trachea. The authors noted that given how many billions of aluminum cans are consumed globally, the actual number of aspiration events almost certainly exceeds the handful of published reports.³

If you feel sudden coughing, wheezing, or a sensation that something went “down the wrong pipe” after a tab fell into your drink, aspiration is the concern, not a stuck esophageal object. This warrants immediate medical attention regardless of whether symptoms seem to improve on their own, because a foreign body in the airway can shift position and cause a delayed crisis.

How Tabs End Up Being Swallowed

It might seem bizarre that anyone would swallow a soda can tab, but it happens in a few predictable ways. The most common scenario involves a tab that detaches from the can and falls into the liquid inside. Older can designs were more prone to this, but even modern stay-on tabs can occasionally break free if bent back and forth repeatedly. A person drinking directly from the can may not notice a small piece of metal at the bottom of a dark-colored beverage until it is already on its way down.

Another scenario involves intentional play. Some people, especially teenagers, fidget with the tab and pop it off to toss into the can, not realizing they might accidentally drink it later. In some social settings, people drop their tab into the can as a kind of casual habit or as part of a drinking game. Kids are at particular risk because they tend to be less aware of foreign objects in food and drink and have smaller airways and esophageal passages, making obstruction more likely even from a small object.

Alcohol is a risk multiplier. Reduced coordination, dulled sensation in the throat, and inattention all make it more likely that someone will not notice a tab dropping into a beer can and will not feel it going down. Several of the case reports in the medical literature involve adults who had been drinking alcohol at the time of the incident.

When You Should Go to the Emergency Room

If you know or suspect you swallowed a can tab and feel completely fine, the odds are in your favor. Most of the time, the tab will pass without incident. But certain symptoms should send you to an emergency department promptly:

• Difficulty swallowing or drooling: This suggests the tab may be lodged in the esophagus.
• Sharp or persistent chest pain: Could indicate the tab is pressing against or has scratched the esophageal lining.
• Abdominal pain that worsens over hours: May signal that the tab has caused a perforation or is stuck in the intestine.
• Coughing, wheezing, or difficulty breathing: Suggests aspiration into the airway rather than swallowing into the stomach.
• Vomiting blood or black stools: A sign of internal bleeding from a cut or perforation.

For children, the threshold for seeking care should be even lower. A child who might have swallowed a can tab should be evaluated even in the absence of obvious symptoms, because kids are less able to describe discomfort and are more vulnerable to complications from objects that adults might pass without trouble.

If you do go to the hospital, it helps to tell the medical team explicitly that the object was aluminum. As covered earlier, aluminum doesn’t show up well on standard X-rays, and knowing the material upfront can steer a doctor toward ordering a CT scan instead of stopping at a plain film that might look falsely normal.²

Is the Aluminum Itself Toxic?

A separate worry people often have is whether the aluminum in a swallowed tab could poison them. The short answer is no, not from a single tab. Aluminum is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust, and small amounts are present in food, drinking water, cookware, and antacids. The amount of aluminum in one soda can tab is trivially small relative to what your body can handle, and aluminum that passes through the gut intact is mostly not absorbed into the bloodstream anyway. The concern with aluminum toxicity arises from chronic, high-level exposure, particularly in people with impaired kidney function who cannot excrete it efficiently. A one-time accidental swallow of a can tab is not a meaningful toxicological event.

What matters about the tab is not its chemistry but its physical presence. The mechanical risk, the possibility of the object catching on tissue, causing a stricture, or creating an obstruction, is what the medical literature consistently highlights as the real danger.

How Treatment Works If the Tab Gets Stuck

When a can tab does cause problems, doctors have several options depending on where it is and how long it has been there. If the tab is stuck in the esophagus, endoscopic removal is straightforward and is the standard approach. A flexible scope is passed through the mouth, the tab is grasped with forceps, and it is pulled out. Recovery from an uncomplicated esophageal retrieval is quick.

If the tab has moved further into the gut and is causing symptoms, the decision gets more complex. In the case of the soldier described earlier, the clinical team considered three approaches: open surgical resection, laparoscopic (minimally invasive) resection, and endoscopic retrieval. They opted for open resection because the tab had been lodged for years and had become embedded in the intestinal wall. The chronic stricture meant that simply pulling the tab free would still leave behind a narrowed, damaged section of bowel that could continue causing pain and potentially obstruct the intestine in the future. Removing the affected segment of intestine was the only way to fully resolve the problem.¹

That case represents a worst-case outcome, and the lengthy delay before diagnosis was a major factor in how complicated the treatment became. Earlier detection almost certainly would have meant a simpler procedure and less tissue damage. The lesson is less about how dangerous can tabs are in general and more about how important it is to mention the possibility of a swallowed object to your doctor if you develop unexplained abdominal symptoms weeks or months later, even if the initial swallowing event seemed minor.

Simple Prevention

The easiest way to avoid this situation is to not drop the tab into your can. If you pop the tab off out of habit, set it aside rather than tossing it into the beverage. If you notice the tab is loose or partially broken on a can you are about to drink, pour the contents into a glass. This eliminates the risk entirely and also lets you see if any debris has fallen in. For anyone giving canned drinks to young children, pouring into a cup is worth doing as a matter of routine, not because the risk is high, but because the consequences in a small airway or narrow esophagus are disproportionately serious compared to the negligible effort of using a cup.