Man Dies From Eating Too Much Black Licorice, What Is Glycyrrhizic Acid?

[Judi Lynn]

Sep 24, 2020,12:36am EDT

Bruce Y. Lee
Senior Contributor

Black licorice is like Rebecca Black’s song "Friday" or Justin Bieber’s "Baby." You tend to either love it or hate it. There’s no middle ground.

But if you somehow think black licorice is to die for, be careful. That’s literally what could happen if you eat too much of this stuff. Case in point, the most recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine included a case study of a 54-year-old man who had a sudden cardiac arrest and died after eating one to two packages of black licorice a day.

The words “good diet” and “two large packages of black licorice” typically don’t go together unless there is the word “besides” in between. That’s probably true with most types of candy. As a team from the Massachusetts General Hospital (Elazer R. Edelman, M.D., Ph.D., Neel M. Butala, M.D., M.B.A., Laura L. Avery, M.D., Andrew L. Lundquist, M.D., Ph.D., and Anand S. Dighe, M.D., Ph.D) described in the case report, the man had regularly eaten up to a couple large packages of fruit-flavored soft candy daily before switching to black licorice. Now, this wasn’t red licorice but instead was the kind that has glycyrrhizic acid. Once black licorice gets into your body (usually by way of you mouth), your body can convert glycyrrhizic acid into the equally difficult to pronounce glycyrrhetinic acid.

Three weeks into his new licorice diet, the man was in a fast-food restaurant when he suddenly started shaking and lost consciousness. Emergency medical technicians (EMTs) arrived at the scene after about four minutes and found that man was suffering from ventricular fibrillation, an abnormal heart rhythm that leaves the heart quivering and unable to effectively pump blood. That obviously was an emergency and a life-threatening situation.

More:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/09/24/man-dies-from-eating-too-much-black-licorice-what-is-glycyrrhizic-acid/#e71e9f549b97