Can you literally accomplish “death by chocolate?” The answer is yes, but with great difficulty. Your dog definitely can, so no chocolate for Fido. And you… could, but with the amount it would take, it would be much easier if you dropped the chocolate directly on your head. So why can chocolate be deadly for some species and- arguably- necessary for sanity for us?
For today’s Moment of Science, I present the Paracelsus Principle, with guest stars chocolate and klonopin.
Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus because fucking yikes, is remembered as the father of modern toxicology. I personally would like people to remember me as Queen of the Seychelles, but my lawsuit against the state of Montana is still pending.
Paracelsus was a forward thinking man for the 1500s, which meant that instead of believing the poppycock that humans had four humours in balance, we obviously only had three. You’ve probably heard his core principle of toxicology: “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”
Simplified, “the dose makes the poison.” Given that this was four centuries before the lobotomy was the hottest new trend, I cannot hammer into your brainbox the fucking elegance of this.
Paracelsus’ Principle comes with a few caveats. Toxicity and dosing can depend on a number of factors, including age, weight, and of course, species. It’s one reason why drug trials can fail when they move from animals to human trials (but we’ll talk about the case of the spectacularly failed drug trial of TGN1412 another day). In modern toxicology, we have a few terms by which we define toxins. Some of the most common ones include ED50, the effective dose for 50% of the population, TD50 is the toxic dose, and LD50 is the lethal dose. Again, these vary by species.
Which is why when my twelve pound dog-shaped bag of nerves and felonious odors named Buddy and I are on a flight, the vet prescribes him a dose of klonopin that’s identical to mine. The ED50 for a dog is about ten times higher than a human dose, so he’s not wandering through the aisle looking for strange new butts to sniff. He’s… moderately less terrified.
So Fido can get hopped up on benzos, but why not chocolate?
A component of chocolate called theobromine is metabolized just fine in the human liver, but dogs? They metabolize significantly less of it, and at a slower rate than we do. They can also experience toxic effects with chronic consumption. It could take as little as twelve ounces of dark chocolate to kill my tiny dog, even less to experience some toxic side effects.
On the other hand, with an LD50 of 1000mg/kg in humans, an average adult human weighing 150lbs, or 68kg, would need to ingest 68,000mg for a lethal dose. Given that there are about 60mg of theobromine in every ounce of milk chocolate, you would need about 70lbs of chocolate to commit death by chocolate.
But hey, we said there’s a toxic dose. Paracelsus would approve.
This has been your Saturday Moment of Science. Don’t take it as a challenge.
Yeah, the TGN1412 debacle would definitely need its own lengthy article.
Likely, with an article on why one doesn’t want to test a novel drug out on all subjects simultaneously… All, to avoid a few potenially lethal reactions into a mass casualty incident.
It certainly did inform every subsequent human test of a novel drug!
the spectacular drug trial fail please