30 Facts about Chocolate - mental_floss on YouTube - List Show (304)

Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss on YouTube

And did you know that the first ever chocolate bar was made by the company Fry & Son in 1847

That company eventually merged with Cadbury. That's the first of many facts about chocolate I'm going to share with you today in this video

brought to you by Geico in honor of Easter. And if you don't celebrate Easter, well, at least we can all agree that candy is delicious

We can thank the Industrial Revolution for access to chocolate. Like during the early 1700s, the chocolate making process became mechanized

But back then, people only drank their chocolate. They didn't start eating it until about a century later

According to USA Today, 100 pounds of chocolate are consumed in the United States each second

Which reminds me Mark, I haven't had a Hershey's Kiss in like 14 seconds. What do I pay you to do exactly

Oh, edit Mental Floss apparently. But the US doesn't actually lead the world in consumption of chocolate per capita

I'm glad there's one food that we don't eat the most of. It's actually the Swiss, Germans, Irish, and Brits

In those countries, the average person eats about 24 pounds of chocolate each year

Compare that with the average citizen of China, who will eat a mere 99 grams of chocolate in a year

Cacao trees don't even produce the cocoa beans found in chocolate until they're around 3 or 4 years old

But, cacao trees can live for a long time, sometimes even up to 200 years

A conch is the heated mixer that allows cocoa butter to be evenly incorporated into chocolate and creates the smooth texture

It was actually invented by Rodolph Lindt in 1879 and if that name sounds familiar it might be because he was also the founder of the Lindt Chocolate Factory Frank C Mars who founded Mars Incorporated learned how to make candy from his mom in the late 1800s He had polio so she taught him how to hand chocolate while homeschooling him

He went on to invent the Snickers bar, which he actually named after his favorite horse

Speaking of Snickers, up until 1990, it was called a marathon in the UK and Ireland

You know, because a single bar has enough calories to support you while you are running a marathon

The company Nestle came to be in 1905 when a European condensed milk company joined forces with Henri Nestle

a German pharmacist who'd been making milk-based baby food. During the week before Easter, Americans buy around 71 million pounds of chocolate candy

That's more than the week before Valentine's Day, around 48 million pounds

but less than the week before Halloween, about 90 million pounds. By the way, all these chocolate facts are making Domo hungry, but John's like

Domo, you look like chocolate and I'm hungry. Hershey's kisses were wrapped by hand between their invention in 1907 and 1921, when a machine

was created that could do that work. Because the film Psycho was filmed in black and white, the crew used Bosco chocolate syrup

in place of fake blood, so it would look more like blood on camera

For the classic I Love Lucy episode, Job Switching, in which Lucy gets a job at a candy factory

they cast an actual chocolatier. Desi Arnaz discovered her making chocolate at a farmer's market and cast her as the woman who teaches Lucy how to hand-dip chocolates

The Quaker Oats Company bought the rights to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and then financed the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in order to promote a new candy bar, which they named the Wonka Bar

It's one of those things where the marketing was significantly better than the product

Now, Harry Potter was not written to sell chocolate frogs, although that was a wonderful side benefit

But anyway in the Danish translation of Harry Potter the chocolate frogs are called plato and considering that plat is a slang word for stupid and oo means owls they basically called stupid owls In 1947 there was a chocolate bar strike in the town of Ladysmith Vancouver Island

in British Columbia. The children of the town were outraged when the price of candy bars at the local cafe

was raised from 5 cents to 8 cents. Children began to picket the store, and the protests got so much attention that they made

the newspaper. then spread to cities like Edmonton and Montreal and Quebec City

Eventually, they were branded communists and the movement fizzled out. Nowadays, five cents will buy you a chocolate chip, if you're lucky

A 2014 study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience found that healthy adults between 50 and 69 years of age

scored higher on a memory test after drinking a beverage with a lot of cocoflavanols for three months

when compared with adults who'd been drinking a low-flavanol mixture. This might mean that chocolate can improve memory

although we can't conflate correlation and causation, but I want chocolate to be good for me

The last great ruler of the Aztecs, Moctezuma II, allegedly drank 50 cups of chocolate every day

It's like how much Diet Dr. Pepper I drink. And the Maya baptized babies with a mixture of ground cacao beans, flowers, and water

In the 1940s, Hershey invented the Tropical Bar for the US military

They created it to withstand high heat, like it could maintain its shape after an hour in 120 degrees Fahrenheit

They produced over 380 million of these two ounce bars by the end of World War II

And speaking of durable chocolate deliciousness, M&Ms have been brought to space over 130 times since 1981

They're perfect because, you know, they can withstand any condition. There's the chocolate inside, but the hard candy shell on the outside

A 2004 study found that 70 of people would give away their computer password when bribed with a single chocolate bar How the Sony hack happen Some North Koreans flew to California and they were like hey we got some Snickers You want a Snickers What your password That was it That all it takes It the theobromine in chocolate that poisonous

to dogs. They shouldn't eat it because they metabolize it too slowly. So you cannot have

chocolate, mostly because you're made of porcelain, but partly because it would make you sick

Interestingly, theobromine is also a cough suppressant. In fact, a 2004 study showed

that it's about a third more effective than codeine. In 2006, the Halloran Chocolate Factory

in Germany teamed up with the Haar's Clock Factory to create the world's largest cuckoo

clock made out of chocolate. At over 9 feet tall, it weighed 250 pounds

In a 2008 study from the University of Copenhagen, men ate 15% less pizza after eating 100 milligrams

of dark chocolate as opposed to the same amount of milk chocolate. The researchers believe

that dark chocolate might help curb cravings for salty foods. But the lesson for me is that if you want to eat a lot of pizza, and I do, you should probably eat milk chocolate

At the Cadbury factory in Bourneville, they can produce around 1.5 million Cadbury cream eggs every day

And finally, I return to my salon to tell you that in the 17th century, a bishop in the Spanish town of Chiaparreal banned chocolate during mass

because women kept having their maids bring them hot chocolate during services

Suspiciously, soon afterwards, the bishop died, and many believed that he had been poisoned in the name of chocolate