How Much Licorice Is Actually Safe? Fat Loss Hints vs Heart Risks

The video opens with a simple frame: stress fattens us through cortisol, and there are three ways to fight back. Fix the source of the stress, eat in a way that lowers cortisol output, or block what cortisol does once it reaches fat cells. The episode bets on the third path and traces it to an unlikely candidate from the candy shelf.

The candidate is glycyrrhizin, the sweet compound in real licorice root, which gut bacteria convert into glycyrrhetinic acid in the bloodstream. That acid blocks the enzyme that switches cortisol on inside body fat. Fat samples taken during abdominal surgery grow faster when cortisol is dripped on them, and the licorice compound interrupts that exact step in the dish.

The most visual evidence comes from skin, not diet. Italian researchers rubbed the licorice compound onto the thighs of women for a month to test it against cellulite, with a placebo cream and an untreated leg as controls. Ultrasound showed the surface fat layer thinned significantly on the treated thigh only. The change was a few millimeters, yet the authors floated it as a gentler alternative to cosmetic surgery.

Eating the candy is a weaker story. Dozens of trials of licorice preparations for weight loss average out to roughly an extra pound lost over a month or two versus placebo. Part of the reason is a paradox the video highlights: people lose fat but hold water. In one two-month trial women kept the same scale weight while shedding nearly three percent of fat mass and gaining about as much water, then lost the water and regained the fat after stopping.

The kidney is where the same trick turns hostile. In fat, licorice blocks the enzyme that activates cortisol, but in the kidney it blocks a different enzyme that deactivates it, so the body holds sodium and water and dumps potassium. Low potassium brings weakness and irregular heartbeat, which is the basis of the FDA advisory: adults forty and older eating two ounces of black licorice daily for two weeks risk ending up in hospital, and large single sittings are unsafe at any age.

Blood pressure cases make the warning concrete. Even modest daily amounts can raise pressure, a few ounces a day have put people in hospital in a coma with readings near 200 over 140, and an estimated three percent of hypertension admissions trace back to licorice. People with high blood pressure should likely skip it entirely, as should pregnant women, given links to preterm delivery and effects on infant cognition. A twist for American shoppers: much US candy contains no real licorice at all, so the natural-store black bar is ironically the riskier item.

So what counts as safe. The European scientific food panel caps regular intake at six grams of genuine licorice candy a day, and a Hershey-funded assay of hard-coated candies implies roughly one box a day at that limit. Tea varies wildly: across 33 brands the safe daily amount spans a tenth of a cup to twenty cups, with half a cup of an average brand a reasonable line, as shown by the woman who developed a life-threatening rhythm at fifteen bags a day. Men face one more trade-off, with about nine ounces of black licorice a day cutting testosterone by 44 percent in four days, fully reversible within four days of quitting, which is why the video concludes the root never earned a place in a diet book.