If You Only Ate Candy Corn, This Is What Would Happen

Right now, you might be asking yourself what on Earth would possess someone to eat nothing but candy corn. The most obvious answer would be a demon. But even evil has its limits, so it's still hard to imagine a supernatural creature cruel enough to do that to you. Granted, candy corn can now taste like a turkey dinner, complete with cranberry sauce, sweet potato pie, and stuffing flavors. However, in the event that you wanted to stuff your face with a candy-coated lie to avoid the toil of making Thanksgiving dinner and just got hooked on the convenience, your body would be way more thankful if you didn't go that route.

As the old adage goes, you are what you eat. And what is candy corn at its core besides a mistake your tongue immediately regrets every Halloween? Gizmodo notes that this guilty displeasure consists of corn syrup (duh), honey, sugar, gelatin, salt, and food coloring. While it will come as no shock to you that exclusively consuming these colorful nuggets of empty calories would be bad for you, an all-candy corn diet might cause even more damage than you imagine.

In the absence of vital vitamins and minerals, your body would start to starve after using up its existing stores of protein, according to Cornell University professor of nutritional sciences David Levitsky. Toxicologist Hans Plugge told Gizmodo that among other nutritional issues, "you'd probably develop scurvy." The result of vitamin C deficiency, scurvy was the scourge of pirates and ravaged armies during the Crusades, making men beg for death. Left untreated, it leads to anemia, bleeding under the skin, blurry vision, gingivitis, tooth decay, and bleeding in the whites of your eyes, among other bodily horrors (via Healthline). Your skeleton could become brittle and full of holes. You could become delirious or depressed. And since scurvy impairs wound healing, you might die of an infection or profuse blood loss.

While you're busy being a broken-boned blood geyser, your intestines could revolt – and not just because bloody eyeballs are revolting. Citing findings by the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, Science Daily wrote in 2012 that when your body is deprived of protein or amino acids, your digestive tract goes haywire. Your intestines become inflamed, diarrhea rear-ends you, and malnutrition eventually ends you altogether.

Assuming you consume 2,000 calories a day and subsist entirely on Brach's candy corn, according to Gizmodo's calculations, you'd need 271 pieces of candy corn to reach your caloric requirements. Unfortunately, the vast majority of that energy would come from the 400 grams of sugar you'd be eating. For context, the American Heart Association recommends that men cap their daily sugar intake at 36 grams and that women stop at 25 grams. So a man would be consuming roughly 11 times as much sugar as he should in a day, and a woman would be consuming 16 times the advised limit.

All that sugar may put a strain on your pancreas. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains that your pancreas pumps insulin to help keep your blood sugar in check. But if you inundate it with excessive amounts of sugar, your body may build a tolerance to insulin, leading to type 2 diabetes. If you persisted in eating sweets after that point, you could risk falling into a diabetic coma and dying.

The good news is that your body would probably refuse to let you eat that much candy corn. As professor Levitsky put it, "We have a very fundamental process that prevents us from eating the same food every day — it's called the monotony effect." After a solid 24 hours of eating solely candy corn, you wouldn't stomach the stuff.