The ten-pound candy bar, and other glycemic disasters

This Toblerone bar weighs 9.9 pounds, or, for our metric friends, 4.5 kilos. It’s not that the chocolate is bad, and the manufacturer does their best to convince you to share it, but we all know the fate of these 4,500 grams of chocolate. They’re all going inside a single person. You, if you buy it.

Can you control your insatiable urge for sugar, salt, and fat? Is it your fault that you ate the whole thing? Technically, yes, but realistically, this behavioral pathway is encoded in your genes. Find sugar, eat sugar. It kept the prokaryotes alive, and if you’re reading this, it’s worked well enough that you’re still here too. At least it’s not the five-pound Hershey bar, whose makers process the chocolate in such a way that leaves it smelling faintly of vomit due to its butyric acid content. (It’s not noticeable if you grew up eating it, but if you’ve ever heard someone referring to Hershey as “pukey,” that’s why.)