Poisonous like water, table salt and other substances that are lethal in excess and benign or even essential in moderation.
if you drink enough of it too quickly, it will overload your kidneys and kill you.
So no it's not poisonous in the same way.
People with healthy lifestyles will feel when they're having too much licorice for their own good. This was a person with a poor diet in general and possibly didn't notice the negative effects of his overconsumption because he was already used to high blood pressure, shitting salsa and having his heart play math rock.
> People with healthy lifestyles will feel when they're having too much licorice for their own good.
That's quite a claim, especially if we consider the possibility of low-sugar licorice. I think it requires some evidence.
He might notice some negative effects before dying but that doesn't mean he'd reasonably be able to tell what caused it, and it might already be too late.
What does it mean to "directly poison to death"? Licorice is harmful if ever by causing potassium deficiency which can lead to heart disease among a range of other easily noticeable symptoms. It doesn't "directly poison you to death" in any sense that consuming a lot of salt or water doesn't; you overconsume it and it causes a harmful chemical imbalance in the body.
> And for water you had to talk about exceptional circumstances
Let's talk about exceptional...this guy, according to the journal, "had a poor diet, consisting primarily of several packages of candy daily" and that "3 weeks earlier [to the cardiac arrest], he had switched the type of candy he was eating [to a licorice]". So basically no source of potassium in his diet to begin with, and then three weeks after switching to a different type of candy that may in itself cause hypokalemia he suffered a heart failure, somehow without noticing any of the rather obvious symptoms associated with hypokalemia. That is exceptional.
> That's quite a claim, especially if we consider the possibility of low-sugar licorice. I think it requires some evidence.
What does sugar have to do with anything? For evidence, look up any medical source on the symptoms of potassium deficiency. These are not symptoms that would pass an otherwise healthy person by.
> He might notice some negative effects before dying but that doesn't mean he'd reasonably be able to tell what caused it, and it might already be too late.
Reasonably, if I'm on a diet "consisting primarily of several packages of candy daily" and start experiencing any of the symptoms of potassium deficiency, I'm going to reconsider my diet. We can discard the notion that this might have been a person with a reasonable attitude towards his health in the first place.
Water does directly poison you, the way I meant it.
Let's put it this way: the harmful chemical imbalance is the cause of death. This happens with too much water, and happened from the licorice here.
Salt causing long-term damage is not the same thing. That's not overdosing on salt. So I'm considering that something different.
An actual salt overdose is something that won't taste good.
> somehow without noticing any of the rather obvious symptoms associated with hypokalemia
> These are not symptoms that would pass an otherwise healthy person by.
It's not just being able to notice symptoms, it's having licorice start tasting bad to you.
If you have a lot of salt in you, salt starts tasting bad. If you have a lot of water, you're not thirsty, under the vast majority of circumstances. You can tell that you should stop eating the thing.
It's very likely he noticed the symptoms and had no idea what was causing them.
> Reasonably, if I'm on a diet "consisting primarily of several packages of candy daily" and start experiencing any of the symptoms of potassium deficiency, I'm going to reconsider my diet.
> What does sugar have to do with anything?
What I'm saying is that you could get the same amount of licorice active ingredient without it being a huge portion of your diet. You could even have a healthy-seeming diet that happens to be low in potassium. And then what do you do, when you have mystery symptoms?
With that amount of sugar, someone with a healthy lifestyle could plausibly "feel when they're having too much candy for their own good". But if you get rid of that part, and focus on just the licorice, the claim that someone will "feel when they're having too much licorice for their own good" needs proof.
Yes it is. Overconsumption of salt eventually leads to health problems because of the chemical imbalance it causes.
This was not someone who ate a bunch of licorice at once and immediately died from it. He adopted a diet almost solely based on licorice candy for three weeks. It's very much a long term effect of eating too much of it.
> An actual salt overdose is something that won't taste good.
Based on personal experience, as a lover of licorice, neither will a licorice overdose. I can't imagine eating pretty much only licorice for weeks on end because eating too much gives me headaches and stomach pains.
> It's not just being able to notice symptoms, it's having licorice start tasting bad to you.
Again, salt doesn't start tasting bad. It just doesn't have a good taste in concentration. An undiluted teaspoon of salt won't kill you, but it'll taste like crap to most people. To others it will taste good, which is partly why salt poisoning still occurs.
> If you have a lot of salt in you, salt starts tasting bad. If you have a lot of water, you're not thirsty, under the vast majority of circumstances.
...and after a couple of weeks of living on licorice?
> What I'm saying is that you could get the same amount of licorice active ingredient without it being a huge portion of your diet. You could even have a healthy-seeming diet that happens to be low in potassium. And then what do you do, when you have mystery symptoms?
Go to a doctor? What would you do if you started experiencing frequent palpitations and constant headaches with no clue as to what caused it? The idea that death from licorice will somehow creep up on you unnoticed although you have a "healthy-seeming" diet is entirely speculative. This case is extremely rare, even compared to water and salt poisoning, and the circumstances around it—that someone pretty much sustained themselves on mostly licorice—are absurd and grotesque.
But yes, by the weasely nature of the term "healthy-seeming" I guess it's true in the sense that it could happen to anyone to whom eating primarily licorice for weeks on end seems healthy.
> With that amount of sugar, someone with a healthy lifestyle could plausibly "feel when they're having too much candy for their own good". But if you get rid of that part, and focus on just the licorice, the claim that someone will "feel when they're having too much licorice for their own good" needs proof.
You mean that "Oh I'm having constant headaches and my heart is playing King Crimson songs but it's probably just sugar so I don't have to do anything about it" is a reasonable attitude, or do you mean for me to prove to you that hypokalemia has symptoms?
"This imbalance caused heart disease" is very different from "this imbalance caused me to die".
> Again, salt doesn't start tasting bad. It just doesn't have a good taste in concentration. An undiluted teaspoon of salt won't kill you, but it'll taste like crap to most people. To others it will taste good, which is partly why salt poisoning still occurs.
I've had some extremely salty things and they tasted great until some of that salt got absorbed, then they stopped tasting great. There's taste-based regulation of salt. Do you want scientific references? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_appetite here's some links.
> ...and after a couple of weeks of living on licorice?
You just claimed the body doesn't do that with salt. Are you really trying to simultaneously argue that the body does do so with licorice?
I'm skeptical that there are inbuilt licorice systems. I think the burden of proof is on you there.
> Go to a doctor? What would you do if you started experiencing frequent palpitations and constant headaches with no clue as to what caused it?
Going to a doctor is a good idea! But I thought your claim was that they would "feel" licorice was the problem, not that a doctor could tell them.
> the circumstances around it—that someone pretty much sustained themselves on mostly licorice—are absurd and grotesque
Right, but I'm saying that someone who wasn't sustaining themselves on licorice candy could still be getting the same amount of actual licorice. For example, only getting 100 calories from sugar-free licorice candy, and 95% of their calories from normal food.
> You mean that "Oh I'm having constant headaches and my heart is playing King Crimson songs but it's probably just sugar so I don't have to do anything about it" is a reasonable attitude, or do you mean for me to prove to you that hypokalemia has symptoms?
I mean that they won't know it's from the licorice. They will feel "something is wrong" not "I am having too much licorice for my own good".
Well, the mechanism through which licorice might cause you to die is hypokalemia, which causes heart disease, which causes you to die. They only look dissimilar because you ignore this.
> There's taste-based regulation of salt. Do you want scientific references? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_appetite here's some links.
Taste is not the same thing as appetite.
> You just claimed the body doesn't do that with salt.
My mistake. I also explained why exactly I don't think I would be able to live on a licorice-based diet, an explanation which doesn't pertain to taste.
> I'm skeptical that there are inbuilt licorice systems. I think the burden of proof is on you there.
I don't care that you are skeptical of "inbuilt licorice systems", and there is no burden of proof there because no one has mentioned it until now.
> Going to a doctor is a good idea! But I thought your claim was that they would "feel" licorice was the problem, not that a doctor could tell them.
Yes, as you would feel a knee pain even if you didn't know you'd hurt it in your sleep.
> Right, but I'm saying that someone who wasn't sustaining themselves on licorice candy could still be getting the same amount of actual licorice.
Again, entirely speculative that this would cause an issue if you have an otherwise healthy diet.
> I mean that they won't know it's from the licorice. They will feel "something is wrong" not "I am having too much licorice for my own good".
They will feel that they've had too much licorice for their own good. I never intended to claim that they would magically know the cause. Maybe the sentence is ambiguous, but for you to assume the interpretation you have, you must think quite poorly of me.
No, hypokalemia causes your heart to stop beating. If it just caused heart disease he wouldn't be dead after a month.
> Taste is not the same thing as appetite.
Are you arguing someone will have an appetite for licorice and keep eating a lot even if it doesn't taste good? Or the opposite? I'm not following the scenario.
> They will feel that they've had too much licorice for their own good. I never intended to claim that they would magically know the cause. Maybe the sentence is ambiguous, but for you to assume the interpretation you have, you must think quite poorly of me.
I guess I misunderstood you, but if your actual argument is just that they will know something is wrong then your argument is significantly weaker than I thought. Because noticing a single symptom, with no idea of the cause, doesn't stop you from dying. Even if you make a doctor appointment it could be too late.
And I misunderstood for a good reason, because this conversation started with someone joking that they "knew" licorice was poisonous because it tasted bad. And I was talking about how that actually happens with overdoses of salt and water, but doesn't happen with licorice. So I interpreted the "feels" sentence in the way that had A) relevance to taste and B) actually disagreed with what I was saying, since you started your reply with "Bollocks".
The way you're now telling me to interpret that sentence means that your second paragraph in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24602628 has no actual connection to anything I said in the comment you were replying to. I hadn't said anything about feeling symptoms. I had just said licorice would taste good unlike salt. So I don't know why you even had a paragraph saying "symptoms would exist".
No, it causes arrhythmia and high blood pressure, heart disease which may have consequences like sudden cardiac death.
> Are you arguing someone will have an appetite for licorice and keep eating a lot even if it doesn't taste good? Or the opposite? I'm not following the scenario.
I agree that you are not following. I am saying that appetite is not the same as taste.
> Because noticing a single symptom, with no idea of the cause, doesn't stop you from dying. Even if you make a doctor appointment it could be too late.
Hypokalemia is rarely fatal because the symptoms are obviously alarming
> And I misunderstood for a good reason, because this conversation started with someone joking that they "knew" licorice was poisonous because it tasted bad.
Yes, which I responded to by saying that many benign and essential substances are poisonous in the right volume.
> And I was talking about how that actually happens with overdoses of salt and water, but doesn't happen with licorice.
Which you've failed to substantiate.
> So I interpreted the "feels" sentence in the way that had A) relevance to taste and B) actually disagreed with what I was saying, since you started your reply with "Bollocks".
So you misunderstood my argument.
> The way you're now telling me to interpret that sentence means that your second paragraph in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24602628 has no actual connection to anything I said in the comment you were replying to. I hadn't said anything about feeling symptoms.
Exactly, which is why I brought it up, because it's another regulator of consumption that healthy people won't ignore. You can't in good faith argue that it is only now that you understand that, because you've accepted that as the premise of my argument throughout our discussion, however confusing it with the notion that people have "inbuilt licorice systems".
Don't call me a liar, thanks.
I really thought your premise was that "too much licorice" would be what the person felt.
Because noticing "a weird symptom" won't save your life unless you can figure out the puzzle fast enough.
> Which you've failed to substantiate.
Did you not look at the article I linked? "Very few specific appetites for particular nutrients have been identified in humans. The most robustly identified are salt appetite/sodium appetite."
Also here's why it's not entirely ridiculous to think something like that about licorice: People will figure out associations over time, so you can in fact have a learned ability to detect too much licorice. That's what I thought you were arguing. So I was trying to argue that this particular situation wasn't enough to learn such an association. I didn't think you were saying something so ridiculous that I must "think quite poorly" of you.
I'm not calling you a liar.
> I really thought your premise was that "too much licorice" would be what the person felt.
You just said that you thought my premise "had A) relevance to taste", and that's what I don't think you could argue in good faith.
> Because noticing "a weird symptom" won't save your life unless you can figure out the puzzle fast enough.
Yes, there's always someone oblivious enough to die for the most ridiculous reasons. Hence people die from water poisoning for chugging down amounts of water that defy common sense, people that die because they don't have the mental capacity to realize that eating spoonfuls of salt is harmful, and apparently people that die because there is no question in their minds whether a licorice based diet might be harmful.
> Did you not look at the article I linked? "Very few specific appetites for particular nutrients have been identified in humans. The most robustly identified are salt appetite/sodium appetite."
That doesn't substantiate the idea that the perceived taste of salt changes as you eat more of it.
> Also here's why it's not entirely ridiculous to think something like that about licorice: People will figure out associations over time, so you can in fact have a learned ability to detect too much licorice. That's what I thought you were arguing.
Forgive me for not understanding your point, but if on one hand you assume that I'm arguing for the existence of "inbuilt licorice systems" (a really dumb point that a dumb person would make) and on the other hand that I'm arguing for the existence of a learned association (an interesting point that's at least worthy of examination, though ultimately not my point), you aren't making things easy for me.
And a bag and a half of licorice a day for any length of time would wreak havoc on your digestion.