How many sweets would you have to eat at Halloween for them to kill you?

Obesity, diabetes, tooth decay – now there's another risk of eating too much sugar to add to the list: death by overdose.

It's good to know your limits on the night of Halloween, and the American Chemical Society have helpfully worked out exactly how many trick-or-treat sweets you'd need to eat before suffering death by sugar.

Each of us has a different maximum sweet capacity. One of the main factors is body weight. You can calculate your own personal limit using the box below.

If you do decide to go overboard and pass your limit – or if you already have – then don't panic yet, for a few of reasons.

First, this calculation is based on the amount of sugar per kilogram of bodyweight that it takes to kill rats, not humans. That kind of trial, surprisingly, hasn't been carried out on people so far.

Second, the calculation only finds the dose that kills half of the rats in a test population. So lucky rats can still eat that much sugar and live to see another day.

Third, you have to eat the candy all at once for the calculation to be accurate.

It is pretty difficult to eat hundreds of sweets instantaneously, however big your mouth.

So how do your figures stack up? According to the American Chemical Society, the average number of sweets an American would have to eat to have a fifty-fifty chance of dying is 262.

That's 22,000 calories – more than ten days' recommended energy intake for a woman.