Can you eat too much chocolate with dire consequences?

It would take 7,084 Hershey chocolate kisses, all at once, to get chocolate poisoning

The fact is, it’s almost impossible for the average human to die by chocolate consumption. There certainly is a toxic dose of chocolate, and it can be fatal,” says Reed Caldwell, an emergency medicine physician at New York University Medical Center. However, if attempted, you are far more likely to wind up in the emergency room sick with a severely upset stomach than with chocolate poisoning. But Is there something that makes chocolate toxic? The cocoa bean, from which chocolate is made, contains a substance called theobromine, which is a plant alkaloid with a slightly bitter taste. In the human body, theobromine is, at most, a mild stimulant, acting similar to caffeine. Theobromine is also a vasodilator, meaning it can open up your blood vessels and cause your blood pressure to drop. It’s also a diuretic, so you could feel the urge to visit the washroom. Additionally, theobromine also crosses the blood-brain barrier, suggesting that it might share caffeine’s beneficial effects on mood. For humans, theobromine is considered toxic at a dose of 1,000 milligrams of theobromine per kilogram of body weight. If an average human weighs 165 pounds, or 75 kilograms, to reach the level of toxicity for theobromine, you would need to eat 75,000 milligrams of theobromine. Milk chocolate contains about 2.4 milligrams and Dark chocolate contains about 5.5, baker’s chocolate 16 milligrams. You would have to eat 711 regular-sized Hershey’s milk chocolate bars OR 7,084 Hershey chocolate kisses OR 332 standard- sized Hershey’s dark chocolate bars at once for a toxic level. Even eating the large Swiss chocolate barsToblerone, you’ll be okay….Ed

Source: By Claire Maldarelli Popular Science/Photo: Wikipedia