Snickers Bar
Milk Chocolate, Peanuts, Caramel, Nougat

First, let's make sure you're in the right place.

"Radar, get me a Snickers."
"Yes, sir.  Nuts, or no nuts?"
"No nuts!"
"Yes, sir.  MilkyWay."

If you’re old enough - or love reruns - you may recognize this.  It’s from an old TV show called M*A*S*H -  a conversation between Colonel Potter and his camp clerk, Corporal "Radar" O'Reilly. 

So, if you are looking for candy with peanuts, you have come to the right place. 

But, if you are looking for the candy with no nuts, you may want to go to my MilkyWay page.

Snickers is made by Mars candy company.  It was introduced in 1930 for Five Cents.  Today about $2,000,000,000 ($2 billion) worth are sold yearly.  So they must be doing something right.

Let's see, if everyone paid the same price I did ($1.49), that would be about 1,342,000,000 bars.  Or a total of about 78,000 TONS of them!  Woof.

It does taste good, and it will give you that short-term energy boost.  If your search is strictly for something sweet and chocolatey with some peanuts, this could be it. 

The peanuts will give you some extra protein.  And make your blood-sugar spike slightly less intense.

The ingredients list, however, includes some items that many people are concerned about.

There are 19 items shown on the ingredients list.  But really there are only 13, because sugar, chocolate, skim milk, lactose, milkfat and artificial flavor are each shown twice. 

How's that? 

Because it's a two-level list.  The first ingredient is milk chocolate.  And those 6 items are in both the list of what makes up milk chocolate, and the list of what makes up the rest of a Snickers.

If you are like me and look closely at nutritional and ingredient labels, here are some things you may notice in this bar:

• Artificial flavor.                                               This obviously is a generic term that covers a lot of possibilities.  All we know for sure comes from the word artificial.  But do we really need to know anything more to consider this item a caution flag?
  
• Corn syrup.                                                     Corn syrup has gotten a lot of bad publicity.  Which by itself proves nothing, however many people still prefer to avoid it.
  
• Partially hydrogenated anything.  (In this case, soybean oil.)                                        Mayo Clinic says that eating hydrogenated oil will increase your "bad" (LDL) cholesterol.  And at the same time lower your "good" (HDL) cholesterol.  That about says it, I think.