Eating This Much Halloween Candy Can Actually Kill You
With Halloween just around the corner, the time has finally come to stock up on candy. If you really want to make your local trick-or-treaters happy this year, knowing which kinds of treats truly stack up can make any kid's day. Thrillist ranks Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Twix, Snickers, and KitKats as the best Halloween candy ever that can make anyone happy. While these treats taste great, eating too many of them in a short amount of time can lead to a spike in blood sugar and cause some nasty side effects, per Healthline.
Some fans have experienced a sugar hangover after eating too much candy. This feeling comes with an upset stomach, headache, feelings of shakiness, and even mood swings. While you can usually combat these symptoms by drinking water, doing some low-impact exercise, or eating sugar-free whole foods, sometimes you might need to see a doctor if symptoms persist. Anyone who has overindulged in candy might also wonder if you could ever eat so much of the sweet stuff that it might kill you. According to HuffPost, this phenomenon could potentially happen — a representative from Safer Chemical Analytics said that the only way you might experience a fatal dose of candy is if you continuously eat a bunch of the treats at once.
Too much of a sweet thing
HuffPost reports that everything you consume has an LD50, or a lethal dose that would kill 50% of people who ingest said item. For sugar, the lethal dose equates to 13.5 grams of sucrose per pound. This means that a person who weighs 180 pounds has to eat 5.4 pounds of sugar to receive a fatal dose. Not all candy contains the same amount of sugar either. In a 2016 YouTube video, experts found that a 180 pound person's lethal dose consists of 262 pieces of fun-sized candy, or 1,627 pieces of candy corn. For many, this amount potentially exceeds the trick-or-treating candy haul in one night, so have no fear in overindulging a bit on candy.
While experts strongly encourage you to avoid eating a huge amount of sugar in one sitting, they also stressed that you would mostly likely vomit or experience hyperglycemia before succumbing to your candy haul (via HuffPost). Not everyone weighs 180 pounds either, so people at higher and lower weights could experience different LD50s. To calculate your own sugar threshold, multiply your weight in pounds by 13.5, then divide it by 9.3. For candy corn, divide everything by 1.5 instead of 9.3. When it comes to celebrating Halloween right, have no fear when it comes to digging into your candy stash, but make sure to keep this piece of trivia in mind next time a friend or family member tries to test your knowledge.