The patient had also recently changed the type of sweets he was eating. A few weeks before his death, he switched from red fruit-flavoured twists to another type made with black liquorice. Another doctor, Dr Andrew L Lundquist, agreed in the report that the liquorice was to blame. He wrote: "Further investigation revealed a recent change to a liquorice-containing candy as the likely cause of his hypokalemia. The diets cutting one in five lives short. Are sugary drinks causing cancer?
Ultra-processed food linked to early death. If those drop too far, you might experience symptoms like increased blood pressure, swelling, lethargy, or even abnormal heart rhythms or congestive heart failure. Obviously, those are bad. But the good news is, it takes a fair amount of candy to cause a problem. For consumers who are over 40, the FDA says that eating 2 ounces of black licorice a day for at least two weeks could land you in the hospital with heart trouble.
If you have been eating large amounts of the candy, and you start to feel like your heart is beating weirdly or your muscles are going week, stop immediately and call your doctor. That goes double if you take any drugs or dietary supplements that might be affected by the extra glycyrrhizin.
Cortisol has many important functions, including being a critical regulator of ion, salt, and water balance. This in turn significantly affects blood volume, blood pressure, and overall functioning of the cardiovascular system.
This leads to higher levels of sodium, water retention, a plunge in potassium levels, and a subsequent cascade of life-threatening problems in the body, including kidney failure.
The increase in sodium and water retention leads to swelling and high blood pressure. The extreme drop in potassium levels hypokalemia throws off the ionic balance critical to the cardiac conduction system —which is a specialized group of heart muscle cells that use electrical signals to make the heart muscles contract and pump blood around.
As such, drops in potassium levels can lead to fatal irregular heart rhythms, such as ventricular fibrillation. To make matters worse, glycyrrhetinic acid also interferes with enzymes in the liver that influence aldosterone levels, another critical steroid hormone—which exacerbates all the other health effects of the toxin.
The liver also recirculates glycyrrhetinic acid, meaning high levels can accumulate after frequent licorice consumption and remain high for long periods. It can take weeks for symptoms of licorice poisoning to go away.
In fact, the US Food and Drug Administration typically likes to remind consumers of the life-threatening risk around Halloween each year although that is, sadly, unnecessary this year.
Still, because black licorice is not a terribly popular candy and few people indulge in sufficiently toxic amounts, the gummy sweets aren't a menace to public health. Reports of illnesses are rare, let alone deaths.
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