It’s a question some may have asked over the holidays, or are preparing for come Valentine’s Day: How much chocolate would you have to eat for it to actually kill you?
Setting aside the long-term ways in which too much chocolate could affect your health—diabetes, tooth decay, etc.—Dr. Naveed Saleh decided to focus on how much chocolate it would take to kill you in just one sitting.
In a blog post for Psychology Today, Dr. Saleh first explained exactly what in chocolate could potentially kill you. Cocoa beans contain the mild stimulant theobromine, which can be poisonous in large amounts.
“Theobromine interferes with the nervous system, respiratory system, and cardiovascular system (e.g., vasodilation), as well as results in excess urination,” he wrote.
“In very high amounts, it can cause increased heart rate, sweating, trembling, loss of appetite, severe headache, and drops in blood pressure,” Saleh added.
Theobromine is also the reason that chocolate is toxic to most household pets like dogs, cats, and birds. Animals are unable to metabolize the stimulant as quickly as humans, which can lead to their death.
As for how much chocolate it would take to take down a human, Popular Science reports that 1,000 milligrams of theobromine per kilogram of body weight is considered a toxic dose. So, a person who weighs 150 pounds (about 68 kg) would have to eat around 68,000 mg of theobromine to be poisoned.
How Much Chocolate Would Actually Kill You?
The amount of theobromine in chocolate depends on the type — generally, the darker the chocolate, the more stimulant it contains. White chocolate has hardly any, milk chocolate has around 2.4 mg per gram, dark chocolate contains around 5.5 mg per gram and baker’s chocolate can contain up to 16 mg per gram.
By the numbers, Popular Science determined that a 165-pound person could theoretically fatally overdose from eating 711 regular-sized Hershey’s milk chocolate bars, 7,084 Hershey chocolate kisses, or 332 standard-sized Hershey’s dark chocolate bars.
However, it’s unlikely that consuming that much would even be physically possible.
“Certainly, it can be fatal, but one thing that is helpful, and I don’t know if helpful is the right word, but some of the initial symptoms are nausea and vomiting,” explained Reed Caldwell, an emergency medicine physician at New York University Langone Medical Center. “So the initial toxicity symptoms may help prevent people from consuming a lethal amount.”
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