Firlapalooza

I wouldn’t say that I have a very strong sweet tooth, but occasionally, I come across some candy which is especially tasty to me.  At a friend’s wedding recently, they had a candy table, where I rediscovered the gelatin-based and quite refreshing gummi colas.  They combine the texture of a gummi candy (gummi bears, of course, being their most infamous form since 1922), the flavour of a slightly flat cola drink (it’s hard to carbonate these, after all), and the appearance of a half-full bottle.  A well thought out presentation!

Then, my wife returned from Europe with a bagful of an even tastier incarnation from Haribo called “Happy Cola”, which cannot be found very easily on this side of the Atlantic (the bag featured six different translation of the ingredients, none of them English).

Well, that 200 gram bagful, pictured here, did not last, as I went through it quite quickly… I found out you can get ten times that amount in one package if one wishes to get a more ample quantity via the 5-pound bags available on Amazon.  But before I considered that step, I checked out the nutritional value, and wondered how it compared to an actual bottle of cola.   Approximately 770 calories in the bag, and 400 calories in a 1 litre bottle of Coca-Cola… nearly double.  As for sugar levels, my research indicated that there are 58.4 grams of sugar per 100 grams of the candy.  Therefore, a 200 gram bag of Happy Cola is has a little more in sugar quantity compared to a full 1-litre bottle of Coca-Cola with its 108 grams.  This is well-illustrated on a handy site I came across a while back, ‘SugarStacks‘, which uses piles of standard sugar cubes as a visual aid to indicate how much sugar is contained in common “food” products.  However, because Happy Cola contains neither caffeine nor phosphoric acid, it does not quite have the long list of negative effects which come upon your body within 60 minutes of drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola.  As well, Happy Colas have 7.7 grams of protein (per 100 grams), an important component for the body, which is decidedly absent in any cola drink.

It is thanks to the venerable cola drink that we have this quaint bottle-shaped candy, but there may be some minor advantages to consuming it in gummi form.  In the end, it’s probably better to have neither.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010, and is filed under Healthy Living. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. I reserve the right to delete inappropriate comments.