By David Zinczenko, with Matt Goulding
Recently, while poring over some research, I got a breathless call from my co-author buddy, Matt. “You won’t believe what I just found! Check this out.”
He sent me a link to a Baskin Robbins page, and what came up on my screen (gory details below - straight from their website) was a tower of nutritional insanity unmatched by any other beverage we’ve come across in our years of research.
“Instead of giving Socrates hemlock, they should have just forced him to drink one of these,” he said. “Could this 2,300-calorie liquid monstrosity be the worst drink on the planet?” We've seen a few 1000-calorie shakes, but this is twice as bad as anything we've ever seen.
The menu description may sound simple enough: “A blend of HEATH Bar Crunch and Jamoca® ice creams, chopped HEATH Bar pieces and caramel, topped with whipped cream and chopped HEATH Bar pieces.” But the ingredient list reveals a much more complicated story. Methyl paraben, propylene glycol, polysorbate 80: You’d need a degree in chemical engineering just to have a shot at cracking this brain-freezing code. All told, the list of ingredients runs seven inches and 73 ingredients long. Whatever happened to the days when a milkshake was just ice cream and milk?
As unsavory as this list of indecipherable emulsifiers, preservatives, and artificial flavorings may be, the most concerning part comes when you consider the sheer nutritional impact of this weapon of mass construction.
To give you some perspective, slurping up one 32-ounce Heath Shake is the caloric equivalent of eating 12 Krispy Kreme doughnuts, the saturated fat equivalent of scarfing 60 slices of bacon, and will give you the same sugar rush as working your way through 13 Haagen Dazs Vanilla and Almond ice cream bars.
The drink is part of Baskin Robbins “candy-bar madness” promotion — a deal struck with Hershey’s to any dairy derivative they can get their hands on with bite-size chunks of popular candies.
We put in a call to the company to check in on the product. They called us back to say they were discontinuing it at the end of May. For some tasty swaps for high-fat and high-calories drinks, click here.
And if you have your own list of food bombs, please add them in the comments section. Believe me, the food manufacturers are listening — and your opinion does matter.