SWEET TOOTH

Massachusetts Man Dies From Eating Copious Amounts of Black Licorice: Doctors

The man, identified by doctors only as a construction worker with a “poor diet,” is said to have made a fateful switch to the candy just three weeks before his death.

A 54-year-old Massachusetts man died of heart failure after consuming a bag and a half of black licorice every day for several weeks, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. The man, identified by doctors only as a construction worker with a “poor diet,” is said to have made a fateful switch just three weeks before his death: He began eating black licorice containing glycyrrhizic acid instead of the fruit-flavored candy he’d preferred earlier. Doctors note that the glycyrrhizic acid contained in the candy, which turns into glycyrrhetinic acid, can wreak havoc on the body and lead to hypertension, extremely low potassium, metabolic alkalosis, fatal arrhythmias, and renal failure. The man suffered exactly such an array of “profound metabolic derangements” before suffering a “sudden cardiac arrest” in a fast-food restaurant and dying the next day, doctors said. “Even a small amount of licorice you eat can increase your blood pressure a little bit,” Neel Butala, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, told the Associated Press about the case.