What a way to go

I like licorice as much as the next guy. When they're part of the mix, I like licorice jelly beans. It's not my favorite, but the licorice Chuckle isn't the one I eat first to get it over with. (That would be the mint green one.) I like Good 'n Plenty, and have since Choo-Choo Charlie was telling us kids how much he loved them. And licorice All Sorts? Yummers.

I also like Twizzler red licorice. And, yes, I do know that it's not really licorice. Which is a good thing.

And there's such a thing as too much of a good thing. As one fellow in Massachusetts found that out the hard way.

As was just reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, a 54-year-old Massachusetts construction worker collapsed (at a fast food joint, no less) after:

...eating one or two large bags a day for three weeks threw his nutrients out of whack and caused his heart to stop. (Source: Boston Globe) 

One or two large bags a day? I've been known to binge on Twizzlers. Or Oreos. Or a sleeve of Girl Scout cookies (chocolate mints, of course). These binges have resulted in mild gastro discomfort, and a deep feeling of shame, but I never felt I was in a near-death experience. That I did feel, years ago, when I guzzled down a few Diet Cokes in rapid order while in the office on a Saturday working on some do-or-die deliverable. My heart started to race, and that was it for my ever guzzling down multiple Diet Cokes in rapid order.

Anyway, the culprit in licorice is something called:

...glycyrrhizic acid, found in black licorice and in many other foods and dietary supplements containing licorice root extract. It can cause dangerously low potassium and imbalances in other minerals called electrolytes.

The family of the construction worker reported that, prior to switching over to licorice, he'd been eating multiple bags of soft, fruit-flavored candies every day. Bad move. In any case, I'm guessing that the poor bastard was just trying to stop smoking.

As it turns out:

The US Food and Drug Administration warned on its website in 2017, “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.”

The FDA advises that no matter what your age, you should not eat large quantities of black licorice; if you have muscle weakness or an irregular heartbeat, you should stop eating it and call your doctor; and you should consult with your doctor about interactions it may have with your other medications.

Consider yourselves warned.

And speaking of warned, how long do you think it'll be before bags of licorice, boxes of Good 'n Plenty, tins of All Sorts, start coming with some sort of Surgeon General's warning. I don't know about you, but seeing a skull and crossbones on a package of candy would give me pause. 

Still, considering all the god-awful ways to die there are out there, dropping dead from eating too much licorice doesn't seem like that bad a way to go.