Trick or Treat? FDA Warns Against Too Much Black Licorice

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Just in time for Halloween, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is warning people away from eating too much black licorice.

For adults age 40 or older, the FDA says, eating 2 ounces of black licorice a day for at least two weeks may lead to arrhythmia, or irregular heart rhythm, which could land you in the emergency room.

The culprit is glycyrrhizin, a sweetening compound derived from licorice root. In large amounts, glycyrrhizin can cause the body's potassium levels to drop, which in turn, may lead to abnormal heartbeat and high blood pressure. It can also cause water retention and swelling, which is a particular risk for people with congestive heart failure.

MORE: Enjoy! Chocolate Is Good For Your Heart

This isn't exactly a widespread risk — the FDA says that the agency received one report of a black licorice-related problem last year — but studies in several medical journals have linked the candy to health problems in people over 40 (some with a history of heart disease or high blood pressure).

The good news is that your potassium levels go right back to normal once you stop eating black licorice, with no permanent health effects. And if you like the taste, you'll be glad to know that many licorice-flavored products don't actually contain any real licorice; they're usually flavored with anise oil instead.

Also, although licorice root has long been used as a folk remedy in many cultures — it's purported to treat heartburn, stomach ulcers, sore throat, cough and even some viral infections — there's no evidence that it has any such health benefits, the FDA reports.

Black licorice can interfere with some medications, however, such as heart drugs and birth control pills, as well as some herbs and dietary supplements, so the FDA advises consumers to check with their doctor, if they have concerns.

MORE: The Chocolate Milk Wars: A Mom's Perspective

"No matter what your age, don't eat large amounts of black licorice at one time," the FDA says. If you have been eating a lot of it and have an irregular heart rhythm or muscle weakness, stop eating it immediately and call your doctor.

Sora Song is the health editor at TIME. Find her on Twitter @sora_song. You can also continue the discussion on TIME's Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.

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Black Death genetic code 'built'

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12 October 2011 Last updated at 17:02 GMT By Matt McGrath Science reporter, BBC World Service The ancient burial site is under what is now the Royal Mint The genetic code of the germ that caused the Black Death has been reconstructed by scientists for the first time.

The researchers extracted DNA fragments of the ancient bacterium from the teeth of medieval corpses found in London.

They say the pathogen is the ancestor of all modern plagues.

The research, published in the journal Nature, suggests the 14th Century outbreak was also the first plague pandemic in history.

Humans have rarely encountered an enemy as devastating as the bacterium, Yersinia pestis. Between 1347 and 1351 it sparked the Black Death, an infection carried by fleas that spread rapidly across Europe killing around 50 million people.

Now scientists have uncovered some of the genetic secrets of the plague, thanks to DNA fragments drilled from the teeth of victims buried in a graveyard in London's East Smithfield.

Professor Johannes Krause from the University of Tubingen, Germany, was a member of the research team. He said all current strains circulating in the world are directly related to the medieval bacterium.

Continue reading the main story The plague is one of the oldest identifiable diseases known to manPlague is spread from one rodent to another by fleas, and to humans either by the bite of infected fleas or when handling infected hostsRecent outbreaks have shown that plague may reappear in areas that have long been free of the diseasePlague can be treated with antibiotics such as streptomycin and tetracyclineSource: World Health Organization"It turns out that this ancient Yersinia pestis strain is very close to the common ancestor of all modern strains that can infect humans," he said.

"It's the grandmother of all plague that's around today."

Previously researchers had assumed the Black Death was another in a long line of plague outbreaks dating back to ancient Greece and Rome.

The Justinian Plague that broke out in the 6th Century was estimated to have killed 100 million people. But the new research indicates that plagues like the Justinian weren't caused by the same agent as the medieval epidemic.

"It suggests they were either caused by a Yersinia pestis strain that is completely extinct and it didn't leave any descendants which are still around today or it was caused by a different pathogen that we have no information about yet," said Professor Krause.

Tooth power

Globally the infection still kills 2,000 people a year. But it presents much less of a threat now than in the 14th Century.

DNA fragments were extracted from teeth

According to another member of the research team, Dr Hendrik Poinar, a combination of factors enhanced the virulence of the medieval outbreak.

"We are looking at many different factors that affected this pandemic, the virulence of the pathogen, co-circulating pathogens, and the climate which we know was beginning to dip - it got very cold very wet very quickly - this constellation resulted in the ultimate Black Death."

Rebuilding the genetic code of the bacterium from DNA fragments was not easy, say the scientists.

They removed teeth from skeletons found in an ancient graveyard in London located under what is now the Royal Mint.

Dr Kirsten Bos from McMaster University explained how the process worked.

"If you actually crack open an ancient tooth you see this dark black powdery material and that's very likely to be dried up blood and other biological tissues.

"So what I did was I opened the tooth and opened the pulp chamber and with a drill bit made one pass through and I took out only about 30 milligrams of material, a very very small amount and that's the material I used to do the DNA work."

From the dental pulp the researchers were able to purify and enrich the pathogen's DNA, and exclude material from human and fungal sources.

The researchers believe the techniques they have developed in this work can be used to study the genomes of many other ancient pathogens.

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Decoded DNA Reveals Details Of Black Death Germ

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Victims of the plague are consigned to a communal burial during the Plague of London in 1665.

Scientists have used DNA lurking inside the teeth of medieval Black Death victims to figure out the entire genetic code of the deadly bacterium that swept across Europe more than 600 years ago, killing an estimated half of the population.

The researchers didn't find any genetic feature that could explain why the plague was so virulent, according to a report just published in the journal Nature.

"There is no smoking gun, so to speak, to say, 'Aha, we've found the one mutation which caused this tremendous virulence and now we know why it killed 50 million people.' We don't see that," says biological anthropologist Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, who was on the research team.

 

He says the most likely explanation for the plague's devastation is that this rodent-infecting bacterium changed and struck humans for the first time right when the population of Europe was dealing with a cooling climate, poor crop production and filthy, crowded conditions.

Plus, people back then had no access to modern antibiotics and were likely weakened by other infections as well.

Poinar says the ancient Black Death DNA looks so similar to Yersinia pestis that still infects people today that researchers believe the medieval strain must be the ancestor of all modern strains.

That suggests this particular disease probably wasn't around centuries earlier and couldn't have caused the Plague of Justinian, another famous epidemic that devastated the Eastern Roman Empire in 541-542.

"More likely is that it was caused by another pathogen altogether that we haven't really considered yet," says Poinar.

In the past, other research groups have produced conflicting results when they've tried to detect Black Death bacteria in skeletal remains using less sensitive genetic tools. Some experts have argued that the famous plague might have been caused by a different disease, such as an Ebola-like virus.

This study used a newer, more robust genetic technique to fish out small bits of the ancient DNA from the dried powdery pulp hidden inside teeth taken from a Black Death cemetery in London.

"This is really the first ancient complete genome from skeletonized remains," says Poinar, who notes that scientists have sequenced the genes of the deadly 1918 flu virus, but that was from preserved tissue samples.

The Natural History Museum of Denmark's Thomas Gilbert is one of the scientists who tried to find plague DNA in Black Death victims in the past without success. He says the new technique used in this study is exciting and the analysis is compelling. "It's a great result. It looks very, very convincing," Gilbert says. "There's no reason why the data shouldn't be real."

But even if this has firmly established that plague bacteria caused the Black Death, Gilbert thinks the calculations that rule out its presence during the Justinian plague are open to question.

"I'm not completely convinced by that," says Gilbert. "The only way to find out what caused the Justinian plague is to do the same analysis on the Justinian samples, and I guess that's going to be the next attempt."

He says other groups have been working to use this same technique to probe for other diseases of historical interest. "What was unique about this paper is that they basically finished first and they did it on plague," says Gilbert. "But I know for example, people are doing it on tuberculosis, and people are doing it on all sorts of other things."

He says the insights that come from these studies will be of interest not only from a historical perspective, but also to help scientists understand how deadly epidemics have emerged in the past so that they can get ready for what might come in the future.

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What makes a twin white or black?

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4 October 2011 Last updated at 08:10 GMT By Lucy Wallis BBC News Gene variants helped to determine Leo and Hope's different skin colour Genetically a mixed race and European couple, who are expecting twins, have about a one in 500 chance that the babies will have different skin colours. Fifty years ago these twin births were almost unheard of, but with the number of interracial relationships increasing, so too are the number of cases.

Around 12,000 sets of twins are born each year in Britain, but only a few are born with a very different skin colour to each other.

"When I think of the reality, I'm like 'that's my daughter there and she's got a totally different skin tone,' and it's just really bizarre that I created her," says Shirley Wales, who gave birth to non-identical twins.

Her son Leo has black skin and her daughter Hope, has white skin.

Shirley, who lives in West Yorkshire, is mixed race and the father of her twins is white. She describes her daughter as the "double" of her father, but is adamant that she should not forget her mixed race heritage.

"Her skin tone is white," she says, "but she is mixed race, and if I were to ever fill out a form, as much as she is white, it's 'no my daughter is mixed race,' because I want her to be proud."

Gene variants

In order to discover how this genetic phenomenon occurred, Shirley took a DNA test to find out more about her own genetic profile.

She was adopted when she was four years old, and her birth mother is Afro-Caribbean and her British birth father was white. Her DNA tests revealed that, genetically, she was exactly 50% African and 50% European.

This is very unusual, and the results suggested that Shirley's mother had pure African roots, and that her ancestors must have moved from Africa to the Caribbean quite recently.

On average Afro-Caribbean people are around one fifth European in their DNA, due to the history of mixed race births dating from the 17th Century and British colonialism in the Caribbean.

Shirley Wales took a DNA test to discover more about her own genetic profile

Dr Jim Wilson, a population geneticist at the University of Edinburgh, who analysed Shirley's test results, claims the difference in the skin colour of Shirley's twins can be attributed to her ancestry and the chance inheritance of different gene variants that Shirley carries.

"Our skin colour is determined by a number of gene variants - at least 20 variants, I would say, probably quite a few more than that," says Dr Wilson.

"Some of these we know, and some of them we don't yet know, and at each of these genes, that are influencing the colour of our skin, there tends to be two or more variants. One of which is producing a darker skin tone, and one of which is producing a lighter skin tone."

These gene variants control the amount of melanin or pigment produced in the skin. However the particular genes that a child inherits from their parents and ancestors is actually a chance process.

"I think of it as a deck of cards," says Dr Wilson. "Imagine you are at the casino and you have been dealt a hand of cards, some will be black, and some red. [Shirley] happened, by chance, to have passed more of the European skin colour variants, almost all of them, on to Hope, whereas more of the African ones, just by chance, on to Leo."

According to Dr Wilson, genetically a mixed race and European couple, who are expecting twins, have about a one in 500 chance that they are of different skin colours. This chance only applies to non-identical twins, because they are conceived from two eggs fertilised by two sperm.

As in a painter's palette, in the skin the presence of pigment dominates the absence of pigment, so the fact that Hope is white is very unusual.

Shirley's DNA test results also showed that she carries the gene for red hair, so there is the chance that Hope could be a red-head when she grows up.

'Vulnerability'

As well as the genetic differences, there are emotional and psychological factors to also consider.

Ebony and Moesha have very different personalities

Twelve-year-old Moesha from Glasgow struggles to fit in. She is white and her twin sister, Ebony and mother Stacey are black.

"I wish I was more like my mum," she says, "because she's a nice colour and I want to be the same colour as her."

Stacey feels that her daughter's difference in skin colour has had an affect on her self-esteem and body image.

"Moesha's got no confidence whatsoever, it's definitely all front," she says. "Ebony is very, very self-assured. What you see is what you get. Moesha puts on this act for everybody. Moesha is just that bit more vulnerable. She tries to fit in but I don't think she knows where she fits in."

Moesha was bullied at primary school for not being the same colour as her mother, which led to her feeling a sense of distinction from her family.

"She's said it before, 'I'm not part of this family, I'm not the same colour,'" says Stacey, "and I just tell her, 'you take your colouring from your dad.'"

'We're just brothers'

One in every 10 children in Britain is mixed race and this number is increasing all the time. The likelihood is that black and white twins could become more commonplace in society and not such a rarity.

"Social attitudes will evolve as this phenomenon increases," says Dr Wilson.

Wesley and Thomas have always stuck up for each other in life

Twin brothers, Thomas and Wesley Charnock, 29, from Manchester have been subjected to racism in their life because of their different skin tones.

Thomas, a naval airman, says his brother Wesley, who is white, has found it harder to deal with racist remarks, because people do not physically notice his mixed race parentage:

"It's like a hidden thing for him," says Thomas. "If someone was to look at him walking down the street, they wouldn't realise his mum was black and he has this African heritage. That's in my opinion why he gets more het up about it."

Wesley, an HGV driver, says that such racist comments are just "small mindedness".

"We're just brothers at the end of the day," he says, "and we don't think of ourselves as any different to anyone else."

Find out more in Twincredibles, which will be broadcast on Monday 10 October at 21:00 BST on BBC Two, as part of the Mixed Race Season.

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