Dwight Howard Used To Consume A Truly Shocking Amount Of Candy

There are plenty of amusing details in Baxter Holmes’s ESPN piece about the NBA’s love of PB&Js, but one anecdote about Dwight Howard’s health in 2013 overhauled my understanding of what the human body can do.

Howard’s legs tingled, he complained, but she noticed he was having trouble catching passes too, as if his hands were wrapped in oven mitts. Well, he quietly admitted, his fingers also tingled. [Lakers nutritionist Dr. Cate] Shanahan, with two decades of experience in the field, knew Howard possessed a legendary sweet tooth, and she suspected his consumption of sugar was causing a nerve dysfunction called dysesthesia, which she’d seen in patients with prediabetes.

What was the cause? Emphasis theirs:

To alter Howard’s diet, though, Shanahan first had to understand it. After calls with his bodyguard, chef and a personal assistant, she uncovered a startling fact: Howard had been scarfing down about two dozen chocolate bars’ worth of sugar every single day for years, possibly as long as a decade. “You name it, he ate it,” she says. Skittles, Starbursts, Rolos, Snickers, Mars bars, Twizzlers, Almond Joys, Kit Kats and oh, how he loved Reese’s Pieces.

Holy shit.

[ ESPN]