Did I ever tell you about my LOVE FOR LICORICE?

My kind of sweets is not sweet at all. I have two favorites in the top, one totally healthy: olives and one not so healthy: salty licorice. The salter the better…

I remember once when I was only about 6 years old and going with my mother on a cruise. Of course, already at that age, my bad weather curse striked and we’re having a terrible cruise. The ship were having some kind of problem too, so it couldn’t go as fast as it should.

It was a night mare cruise. I was the first one to start vomiting, since I’ve only eaten licorice all the time and I guess the stomach had enough… After me, all the other persons on the ship started to be seasick - I guess the sound of me vomiting isn’t the easiest thing to hear when you’re feeling ill yourself.

I remember saying to my mother: I’ll never ever eat licorice again!

Usually it is like that, if you’re getting sick after eating something special you don’t want to see that again for ages. But what did I do? Incredible enough, I ate licorice again already on the return cruise! And I have been ever since.

I just LOVE genuine salt licorice, but it’s difficult to find the right licorice abroad actually.

Licorice is produced out of the roots of the bush Glycyrrhiza glabra. I have no photos of it, since I’ve never seen it in real life and this blog only shows our own photos or some gifs.

It could be fatal if you eat 100 gram of licorice per day for a long time, but as always these kind of amounts is individual. It depends on so many other facts too. The researchers advices is to not eat more than 50 g per day.

Some negative consequences of too much licorice:

- Headache
- High blood pressure
- Getting swollen
- Heart disorder
- Muscle weakness/ache
- Kidney influence

It’s the glycyrrhizin acid in the licorice that influence your salt balance, which influence a lot of things in your body. In controlled doses used (mostly in medicines) it can be healing too, for several diseases.

To be on the safe side I’m going to make the licorice habit more like a memory from now on and favorite the olives instead…

HerbMed about Licorice
Steven Foster about Licorice

NOTE: Sorry, we can’t visit your Monday Memories this Monday, but we’ll try to catch up when we comes back from our trip to Ireland