Its present in a lot of chewing gums, sugar-free mints like 'smint' for example. And it only takes a very, very small quantity to kill a dog. It can be treated, at least the profound hypoglycaemic shock can be remedied via glucose infusion, liver damage is a bad sign, prognosis.
Also, if you didn't know, grapes are toxic to dogs also, at least, to most of them, including dried grape products, sultanas, raisins etc. The toxic principle is IIRC unknown at present, although theories include a mycotoxin (fungal toxin), also not all dogs seem to be affected. Its not breed specific, but individual-specific in terms of toxic response. MOST dogs however will be poisoned, but a few individuals seem to either be not susceptible or much, much less so to grape-poisoning.
Debating whether or not to buy either some strong formalin (formaldehyde solution), or some paraformaldehyde (a solid polymer of formaldehyde) that I could thermally depolymerize, or whether to use hexamine camping solid fuel tablets and hydrochloric acid, I need some formaldehyde but the yields reportedly aren't wonderful via the hexamine route, workable but not great. I do on the other hand have a kg or so bag of bottom of the barrel (in terms of camping fuel) hexamine that was going cheap because rather than being solid tablets, its been bashed about enough in storage that its now more or less powder with a fair lot of chunks in it. So crappy if you want solid fuel tablets to cook dinner with whilst camping, but for somebody who only gives a damn about it being hexamine and the potential for preparing some formaldehyde by dissolving it in acid, its actually more convenient since I have to bash it less to make it dissolve more rapidly. So I got a price knockoff for its being crap, whilst for my use its actually better, or at least, more convenient in the sense that it means less elbow-grease needed in grinding the stuff up and less mess.
And why low-cal sweetener-infested chocolate ren? chocolate is meant to be a treat, not a punishment. I'd rather go without than eat that brown material which undergoes little to no change
in the timeline from before being eaten to after coming out of the other end which is observable without the aid of chemical analysis and bacterial culture.
In fact, thats probably an insult to shit, comparing faecal matter to that stuff. Its the equivalent of a few centuries of festering ooze dredged from the mariana deep-oceanic abyssal trench, made up of hundreds of thousands of deceased, decaying fish, marine invertebrates, dead whales, and the stuff they crap out after eating whatever it is they eat only in an atmospheric pressure edition.
Bloody vile stuff. I wouldn't keep it in the same cabinet as I'd keep potassium cyanide, sodium azide, thallium salts or volatile arsenic compounds. The virulent poisons would probably take it out on me later because I'd so besmirched their good names. Hell, methylmercury would probably take exception to being kept in the same room as sweetener-befouled 'chocolate' (not that I'd keep organomercury compounds in my lab, or either make them, let them be used by anybody else in there mind you. I might work with toxic substances at times, but I'm not fucking stupid, or suicidal, and if I was either or both, organomercurials would still be the very last, digging-through-the-bottom-of-the-barrel ways to kill myself slowly and horribly. There is 'bad news' and 'wouldn't touch it with a twenty foot, shit covered stick held by a robotic manipulator arm within a hermetically sealed, negative-pressure chamber if you paid me my bodyweight in platinum' and then there are organomercury compounds.
And then there is sweetener-infected chocolate. Its up there with dimethylmercury-soaked kilo-bricks of solidified zaire-strain ebola virus given a dusting of smallpox spores on the surface like the icing of satan's own 666'th birthday cake. If hell would take it and not puke it back up again.
Not partial to dark chocolate, ren? because if you are, then you might try green&black's, they do a really good range of dark chocolate, ranging from 80% to >90% cocoa, from simple plain chocolate without additional flavours, to all kinds of pretty appetizing additives like salted chocolate, to lime-spiked stuff. Comes in sheets of squares that are a few mm thick, so should be pretty low-calorie. But unlike that unspeakable swamp-bilge with the sweeteners, it is real chocolate, of high quality and delicious.
If your dieting (not, IMO that you need to, you are lovely enough as you are
) then from everything I've read, the occasional treat actually helps, as opposed to a 'just torture yourself and try to suck it up' approach, as a reward for sticking to the diet plan (and of course, making sure the diet itself is something healthy and balanced, rather than some celebrity-espoused vacuous and potentially dangerous craze diet like juice-only diets or short sharp shocks of starvation, where perceived rapid weight loss is just the water you piss out (and in your case of course, sweat out, considering you are busily roasting in australia, which if it weren't for the huge amount of most interesting wildlife (or possibly because of it and/or in spite of it) could make a good case for consideration as hell's waiting room on earth, first populated in terms of non-indigenes, by criminals sentenced to deportation
(Hey Al, what is your distant family tree like
*jesting, of course and no insult meant*)
