Even though I don’t get Trick or Treaters at my house, I still buy lots of Halloween candy. Reese's, Kit Kat and of course lots of the junky stuff like Skittles and Nerds, and I’ll admit sometimes I overdo it a little bit. I ate a bunch of Skittles yesterday and about 20 minutes later I had a stomach ache, but how much candy can you eat before it kills you? The experts have worked that out!
The fine folks at The American Chemical Society say you would have to eat a LOT of candy before it became lethal. They estimate one would have to ingest around262 pieces of that little fun-sized Halloween candy or about 1,627 pieces of candy corn for the sugar to kill you. I can’t eat more than two of those at a time so there’s no risk there for me.
These guys were pretty scientific about the whole thing, in fact I really don’t understand much of this, but they used the oral LD50 model. This is the amount of a particular substance that would be deadly to half of participants in a group of study participants, so the “median lethal dose” of sucrose, aka sugar, that you could ingest.13.5 grams per pound is the LD50 of sucrose. The average person weighing around 180 pounds, so with that in mind if that person were to eat 2,440 grams (or 5.4 pounds) of sugar, that could be deadly. They came up with a few other formulas, but I won’t bore you with the details. My guess is you would probably barf a lot of that candy up before you died anyway. Nature’s emergency exit!
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