Liquorice in allsorts of trouble
Did you know liquorice has long been used as a treatment for much of what ails you?
I didn't. But new research indicates the black sweet can interfere with other drugs and so keep you feeling icky.
Liquorice is often found in cough medicine as an agent to stop you feeling 'bunged up' and is a known cure for mouth and stomach ulcers. It has been used to ease arthritis and also acts as a laxative.
The Chinese swear by it, apparently.
And it is one of the ingredients of the hokey Hoxsey Therapy which claims to cure cancer. More of that for another day, methinks.
But if you do eat too much liquorice you can seriously pump up your blood pressure. So that's a warning you can tell your sweet-hungry kids.
Now scientists in Salt Lake City have tested the active ingredient - Glycyrrhizin - on rats to see how it reacts with more traditional medicines.
Not too well is the answer. It was found to interfere with immune suppressing drug that's given to chemotherapy patients and could block other drugs from being absorbed by the body.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
I never liked those candies anyways. And if you say that they block different types of drugs from being assimilated by our body I'm even more scared now.
People get hooked on all kinds of things, some innocuous, others more harmful, and the addictive mind is surprisingly inventive.And liquorice isn't an exception.I got to admit though I never heard of a drug treatment center to have patients for this addiction. It's for the best.Studies showed that an ingredient in Liquorice shows promise as an antidote for the toxic effects of cocaine abuse.