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Man dies from eating more than a bag of liquorice a day

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Man dies from eating more than a bag of liquorice a day

#251

Post by myself248 »

lostgame wrote: post #232
myself248 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aw jeez seriously? Caffeine pills are helping me kick my Dew habit. I suppose if the pills go behind the counter I can just get a kilo of the lab-grade powder and portion it out myself... that would actually make it easier than trying to break the pills in half to taper the dose.

>> Aw jeez seriously? Caffeine pills are helping me kick my Dew habit. Not experienced; but isn't that like taking amphetamines to kick a cocaine habit? :/

The pop is caffeine + sugar + flavor

So I'm replacing it with a caffeine pill and flavored water, to get the sugar calories out.

Then later I'll try to reduce the caffeine dose, and/or go to plain tap water.

Re: Man dies from eating more than a bag of liquorice a day

#252

Post by Dylan16807 »

starkred wrote: post #41

I was surprised to see how clearly the FDA recommends against black licorice consumption. https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/black-licoric... > If you’re 40 or older, eating 2 ounces of black licorice a day for at least two weeks could land you in the hospital with an irregular heart rhythm or arrhythmia. I love black licorice but as far as I'm concerned that's enough of a reason to do without. Just becau…

> Just because the damage is visible after two weeks doesn't mean that it doesn't occur in quantities below that amount.

It's not like each dose does a certain amount of damage. If you don't cause an imbalance then it's harmless (as far as this mechanism goes).

Re: Man dies from eating more than a bag of liquorice a day

#253

Post by deelowe »

nkozyra wrote: post #241
guenthert wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Not many people like salty licorice, given a choice.) That's about as sensible as saying "Not many people like salty popcorn".

Disclaimer: I've always loved salty licorice and I'm American Black licorice is already a contentious flavor here, throwing a big pile of salt on it (however delicious that happens to be) further reduces the audience)

It's not salt. It's ammonium chloride. It's really really good actually.

Re: Man dies from eating more than a bag of liquorice a day

#254

Post by pfundstein »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #150
djxfade wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so strange to me as a Scandinavian to read this. We love that stuff

Can't imagine why someone from the land of fermented shark flesh would like the flavor of ammonia.

TBF ammonium chloride tastes as much like ammonia as sodium chloride tastes like chlorine.

Re: Man dies from eating more than a bag of liquorice a day

#255

Post by OkGoDoIt »

guenthert wrote: post #181
WorldMaker wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The origin of salty licorice was as a throat lozenge (same reason a singer might gargle salt water ever so often to keep their throat healthy) in cold/freezing fishing waters. (The salt was the important bit, the licorice was just the flavor the fisherman really like to make it sweeter and easier to chew.) It wasn't invented to be an appetite suppressor, though for a lot of people it certainly is. (Not many people li…

> (Not many people like salty licorice, given a choice.) That's about as sensible as saying "Not many people like salty popcorn".

One of the weird things I’ve found traveling internationally is that salt & butter popcorn is apparently an American thing. In Asia and South America popcorn is almost always sweet. Salt & butter popcorn is one of those things you don’t realize how much you’ll miss it until you go to every market and movie theater in town and can’t find any popcorn that’s not sweet :-/

Re: Man dies from eating more than a bag of liquorice a day

#256

Post by hnick »

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #230
kbutler wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you detested it the first 49 times, why keep eating it?

familiarity breeds comfort. A common hack to get your kids to eat anything, is to force them to try it at least 10 different times. They always keep spitting it out or crying they don't like it. Eventually one time you feed it to them and they get used to it and like it, as if they never threw a fit with it before. Not everybody's parents did this. That's why there's grown adults that eat nothing but pizza or steak a…

Yeah it's odd. I didn't like coffee much until I got a job stacking shelves as a teenager. I'd walk past the instant coffee section a lot. One day a customer bumped the display and a large jar smashed open on the floor. Cleaning it up and smelling it, I suddenly realised I now liked it.

Re: Man dies from eating more than a bag of liquorice a day

#257

Post by eloisius »

sfjailbird wrote: post #101
Wistar wrote: post #70

Strong black licorice, "lakrids," abounds in Denmark. My brother visited me when I was living there and ate a pound or so of little, tobacco-pipe shaped licorice in an afternoon. He got profoundly ill with a racing heartbeat, lightheaded, dizzy and nauseous. I almost took him to the hospital but he refused. It took a couple of days before he felt good enough to get out of the apartment. Sometime after, I mentioned th…

I went to the doctor with acute high blood pressure that appeared out of nowhere. Symptoms were an untreatable headache and swelling in the facial region, lasting for a few days. In the end, I figured out that the cause was eating a big package of the same soft sweet black licorice. I even kept eating it during symptoms, making the condition worse. My main reaction, after learning that the licorice could cause this,…

That reminds me of the time I learned that dates are diuretic while in Morocco. They were so delicious I would eat a bag per day. Even while swearing I must have dysentery.

Re: Man dies from eating more than a bag of liquorice a day

#258

Post by Dylan16807 »

boomlinde wrote: post #9
tachyonbeam wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It tastes absolutely horrible to me. I guess somewhere deep down, I knew all along that it's actually poison.

Poisonous like water, table salt and other substances that are lethal in excess and benign or even essential in moderation.

Those don't continue tasting good when you already have dangerous levels of them in your system.

So no it's not poisonous in the same way.

Re: Man dies from eating more than a bag of liquorice a day

#259

Post by pfundstein »

anonuser123456 wrote: post #155
Smileyferret wrote: post #99

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_mineralocorticoid_exc... We actually learned about this in med school last week, but I never thought it actually happened to people... Licorice contains glycyrrhetinic acid which inhibits the conversion of cortisol to cortisone. If you have too much cortisol floating around because of this, that cortisol starts activating receptors in your kidneys that are normally activated by…

Can this imbalance occur transiently? One time, I was awake for ~3 days straight. I ended up in the hospital (visual hallucinations) and the only thing remarkable was low potassium and high BP. But I've had this long running hypothesis that body has trouble with cortisol regulation when I'm extremely fatigued. If I miss a night of sleep, the next night it is extremely hard for me to fall asleep (cortisol inhibits sle…

I would suggest that the hallucinations were simply a symptom of your sleep deprivation. I've experienced the same after a similar amount of time awake coding.

Re: Man dies from eating more than a bag of liquorice a day

#260

Post by Dylan16807 »

bjornedstrom wrote: post #45

I think this article is a good example of conflating cause and effect. But not in a fallacious way or value-negative way: it more highlights well, I think, that there is a difficult gray area where "cause" and "effect" both are related and separated from each other, but not in an obviously clear cut way. So he died from hypokalemia and other reasons, but the main (or only) reason for his hypokalemia was the licorice…

> So you could say that "man dies due from hypokalemia due to excessive licorice consumption not counterbalanced by having an otherwise healthy diet" which is possibly more nuanced, and possibly more (or less) helpful depending on what your purpose is to clarify or simplify things.

Could you?

Do you have anything to back up the idea that an otherwise healthy diet would counteract the very specific problem of hypokalemia?

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