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Scientists calculate just how much Halloween candy it takes to kill you – Metro US

Scientists calculate just how much Halloween candy it takes to kill you

Scientists calculate just how much Halloween candy it takes to kill you
Patti Neall/Flickr

It’s a familiar feeling around this time year – guilt.

Oversized bags of Halloween candy have haunted the shelves at local drugstores and supermarkets for several weeks already and if you’re like most of us, you’ve already indulged — or overindulged—in a bag or two.

Back home on the couch, fingers scraping the bottom of the empty candy bag, living room littered with empty wrappers, the guilt settles in. Amid empty promises to go to the gym tomorrow, or to limit the sugar intake, we’ve all wondered: Just how much Halloween candy would it take to kill me?

Yes, yes, we all know sugar is slowly killing us all, but the folks a the nonprofit American Chemical Society ran the numbers and figured out how much Halloween candy you’d have to eat in one sitting to hit a lethal dose of sugar.

“As the old saying goes, the dose makes the poison. At high enough doses, sugar can be toxic,” narrator Kirk Zamieroski says in the three-minute 30-second video the ACS published Tuesday.

Spoiler alert – it’s more than that bag you just ate on the couch, but not necessarily as much as you’d think.

For the average American weighing in at 180 pounds, it would take 262 pieces of mini candy bars – about 20,000 calories or 1,627 pieces of candy corn to turn a candy binge lethal.

Anyone can easily calculate exactly how much candy it would take to kill them using a simple equation.

Calculate the lethal dose of fun-sized candy pieces by multiplying your weight by 13.5, then divide that number by 9.3.

For the fatal amount of candy corn, multiply your weight by 13.5 and divide that number by 1.5.