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The 51-year-old man showed up at the emergency ward in crisis.

He’d been suffering abdominal pain for three days, then appetite loss, vomiting and dry mouth. Tests showed he had both dangerously high blood pressure and hypokalemia — low potassium levels that can lead to lethal heart arrhythmia.

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tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or How jelly beans made a Canadian man deathly ill, and highlighted the dangers of licorice Back to video

And yet the reasons were a mystery — he had no history of hypertension or of conditions that commonly cause blood-pressure spikes.

Finally, doctors at a southwestern Ontario hospital hit on the unlikely culprit — jelly beans.

The man had developed a ferocious habit for licorice-flavoured versions of the candy, draining a 50-bean bag of them daily. Even in dire health, he couldn’t resist the sweets, “which he continued to eat in hospital,” says a case study just published by his physicians.

What he didn’t know and what the recently published study underscored is that licorice can cause high blood pressure and potassium imbalance in some people, the food’s active ingredient, glycyrrhetinic acid, triggering both conditions.