What, me worry?
There have been precious few things in my life that I’ve ever been addicted to (sorry, but Oprah falls into obsession not addiction- at least that’s how it was explained to me by the judge). Chocolate has been my most primeval addiction, and as such is the most consistent and irresistible pull that I feel. A yen is an urge is an itch is a lust is a yearning is a craving, but none of those truly capture the physical need that I seem to have for (obscenely high-priced) chocolate.
Today, after a bit of reflection on my current gustatory habits, I decided that I should do a bit napkin math and see just what risks I am taking by being a slave to the cacao gods:
- One ounce of milk chocolate has about 6mg of caffeine (i-before-e!) and about 44mg of theobromine. Baking chocolate has higher levels of both, running around 35mg of caffeine and 392mg of theobromine.
- The LD50 of theobromine in humans is approximately 1g per kilo of body weight, and caffeine is about 175mg per kilo.
- I personally weight about 68 kilograms, so my LD50 levels are about 68kg * 1g/kg = 68g of theobromine or about 68kg * 0.175g/kg = 12g of caffeine.
- Given that most of the chocolate I eat is up in the 70% chocolate solids content, and I want a little saftey margin, I’ll just go ahead and use the baking chocolate numbers to find out that I would need to consume to reach my LD50 level:
- theobromine: 68g * 1oz/.392g = 173.5oz = 10.8lb
- caffeine: 12g * 1oz/.035g = 342.9oz = 21.4lb
So, basically this says that the theobromine is by far more toxic that caffeine when it comes to chocolate consumption, and that I’d have to eat almost 11 pounds of baking chocolate in order to be in the realm of a 50% chance of lethality. Most of the bars I buy are 8oz, so that’s about 22 bars.
Phew. Close one today. Next time I’ll play it safe and keep the number down in the teens.
-c
