Sugar Toxicity

12 Feb 2020 at 20:40 // under

I looked up the physical properties of sugar to answer a question, and while I was reading, I noticed the LD50 value.

LD50 or Lethal Dose 50 is the dosage required to deliver a 50% chance of death. Obviously we have limited data on this for most substances, it is difficult to convince the ethics committee that we should try and kill about half the subjects.

In the case of sugar, the quoted LD50 value was measured in rats and had a value of 27,700mg/kg¹. That is 27.7 grams per kilogramme of the creature receiving it.

In my case, this works out at about 1.8kg of sugar.

I used to have a very sweet tooth, but even when at my worst, I think I would have struggled with that much in one go. Thinking about it, I am not sure I could consume 1.8 kg of anything in one go.

1. Wikipedia references toxnet which gives two other values. I have picked the middle one of the three. ↩

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