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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: it's Christian Sager. I got a question for you. Will

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Speaker 1: chocolate really kill your dog? It turns out the answer

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Speaker 1: is yes. But how does this make sense? I mean,

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Speaker 1: I'm not a dog physicist, but most human beings can

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Speaker 1: eat chocolate, right, so why can't our dogs? It's a

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Speaker 1: good question. And when we talk about death by chocolate

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Speaker 1: for canines, what we're really talking about is a chemical

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Speaker 1: inside of chocolate called THEO bromine. It's like caffeine. This

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Speaker 1: becomes toxic to dogs at about a hundred to a

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Speaker 1: hundred and fifty milligrams per kilogram of body weight. And

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Speaker 1: I know that's the formula if you're going to try

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Speaker 1: to poison a dog, but please do not poison a dog.

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Speaker 1: That's not all different types of chocolate have different amounts

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Speaker 1: of THEO bromine, and a lot of it depends on

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Speaker 1: the type of chocolate the dog is eating and the

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Speaker 1: size of the dog. For instance, twenty ounces of milk

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Speaker 1: chocolate could kill a twenty pound dog, and only two

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Speaker 1: ounces of Baker's chocolate or six ounces of semi sweet

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Speaker 1: chocolate could do the same thing. Unfortunately, it is pretty

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Speaker 1: easy for dogs to get into stuff that they're not

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Speaker 1: supposed to get into. Trust me, I know this. I

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Speaker 1: have two pit bulls at home. They could get into

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Speaker 1: bars of chocolate on the ground, bars of chocolate on

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Speaker 1: the counter if they're tall enough, maybe even marzipan. As

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Speaker 1: weird as it sounds, chocolate poisoning is not all that unusual.

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Speaker 1: Caffeine is toxic to human jokes after about a hundred

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Speaker 1: and fifty milligrams per kilogram of body weight. And here's

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Speaker 1: the thing. Let's be honest, we're usually heavier than dogs.

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Speaker 1: Us human beings. We have a little bit more mass

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Speaker 1: than the average dogs, so our threshold for that toxicity

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Speaker 1: is a little bit higher. Small children, however, can get

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Speaker 1: into some trouble with caffeine and with BLT if they

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Speaker 1: consume too much of it at once. Infants especially can

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Speaker 1: have trouble with caffeine because they don't eliminate it from

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Speaker 1: their bloodstream as quickly as adults do. And there's another

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Speaker 1: thing when we're talking about dogs. Dogs can wolf down

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Speaker 1: so much food, so much faster than a human and

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Speaker 1: you don't even know where it's going. Sometimes it's like

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Speaker 1: there's a singularity inside that animal, and this means that

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Speaker 1: they approach that threshold of toxicity much more quickly, and

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Speaker 1: for this reason, dogs can be more susceptible to poisoning

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Speaker 1: by this chemical theobromine. So, to bring it all back around,

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Speaker 1: look the point of this episode, do not feed your

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Speaker 1: dog chopping. Check out the brain stuff channel on YouTube,

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Speaker 1: and for more on this and thousands of other topics,

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Speaker 1: visit has stuff works dot com