You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
Guess what Will? What's that Mango?
So I was listening to an old Ezra client podcast this week and it was about burnout and how email and other constant work communications can lead to fatigue, which
is fascinating. But in this conversation he makes this aside to this professor he's talking to, and he mentions he's gotten really into weightlifting recently, and one of the things he says is that there are all these things you don't know as an amateur at the gym, and if you're a serious weightlifter, you should be eating gummy bears after a.
Workout, gummy bears, Like are there special gunning bears for training? Are we just talking regular gummy bears?
Regular gummy bears? And So I looked this up immediately after I heard it, and the funny thing is I had just come back from playing sports, and as soon as I heard that, I didn't need any convincing. I just like belged to the bodega around the corner from my house and bought gummy bears and shoved them into my face for my muscles.
Which by the way, is the right way to eat them? There are two ways to eat gummy bears. You either eat two at a time, both of the same color, one on each side of the mouth, or you just take a handful and you just push as many as you ca there. But anyway, is there any truth to that? Like, do gummy bears actually help with recovery? Yeah?
I hadn't realized this, but apparently it's pretty well known among athletes, and so I found this article in Swimmer's World which explains how, after working out with the fibers in your muscles, get these miniature tears, which is a good thing because that's how you grow stronger, and they refer to it as a microtrauma, which alerts your body that you need nutrients, particularly amino acids, to repair them.
But because repairing these muscles requires energy, gummy bears and other high glycemic carbohydrates with dextros or alt dextrin, they provide this quick hit of sugar to kickstart replenishing what's been lost, And because your body is still sort of using energy from the workout, the sugar gets put to use immediately and it doesn't get stored as fat.
I now know exactly why you chose to do this episode, like, this is total permission for you to eat gummy bears as long as you've done like a little bit of exercise. This is awesome. I know.
Now I'm gonna do like a single jumping jack and tell my family I've got to go to the store to get some gummy bears sot on. It did make me wonder what other surprises are gummy bears hiding, And that's what today's episode is all about.
Hey there, podcat listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh Hot Ticketter and sitting behind that great big booth and Mango. This one took me a minute. Dylan is going much deeper with his cuts right now. So he's got a rolling pin. He's got a pie sitting off to the side. It took me a second to see that. And he's wearing an apron. I was like, what is he doing? And then he put on the
bear ears. He's Grammy Gummy from one of the greatest cartoons of all time, The Adventures of Gum Years. Did you watch that show as a kid? Yeah, of course, so good. Anyway, well done, Dylan. That's our trusted producer, Dylan Fagan over there, all right, Mango. So I know for a fact that we've been friends for a very long time, and then almost every time you've had a big essay to write or a big assignment in college, you'd go to the convenience store right there on campus
and you'd get some gummy candy. Am I right?
Yeah, I know it's totally embarrassing, but I think it's because I don't like writing, or at least I don't like starting writing. So I love research, I love thinking about ideas, collecting facts talking about them, but writing a paper always feels so overwhelming to me, And somehow, having a treat while doing it feels like I'm rewarding myself for starting, which is ridiculous but also weirdly. Gummy candies
are something that remind me of my dad. Like before I would travel to various high school events, whether it was for like science Olympics or soccer tournaments or jazz band competitions or whatever, my dad would always sneak a little bag of Harrybo gummy bears in my backpack. Is a treat and somehow it was kind of like this, like good luck charm, and I think it's a mix of all of that that keeps me loving gummies.
Oh, I love that. It's such a great story. I actually don't think I knew that right. Well, it's interesting to look at candy and emotions, just sort of the connection there. Like, obviously there's no shortage of anecdotal evidence of people eating ice cream or chocolate as a treat just for a pick me up. But you know, one of the things I was fascinated by was Sweden's relationship to gummy candies. There's this New Yorker piece from twenty eighteen.
It's called how to Eat Candy Like a Swedish Person, and in it the writer talks about how people in Nordic countries are crazy for gummies. So, according to the article, the government ran this study and it showed that Swedes eat more candy per year per capita than the citizens of any other country. And it's not close. It's more than thirty pounds per person. So it's incredible how much candy that they eat. And part of it is because every Saturday people like to go out and they buy
this bag of sweet treats. Isn't that awesome? They do this every Saturday, I think so. Like according to the piece, people trudge out to the store every Saturday they get themselves something. I think it's pronounced lord AC's goddess and it means Saturday candy. And it's because in the nineteen forties the Swedish government performed all these tests on the hazards of consuming too many sweets, and so when they realized that eating this candy was adding the nation's teeth,
they actually urge citizens to limit their intake. But because they knew total abstinence would get them nowhere, they had this suggestion. They said, consume as much candy as you'd like, but only on one day a week. And that's how this Saturday tradition of going to the store and getting yourself a big bag of pick and mix. That that's
how this all began. And the article goes on to explain that the country almost treats it like self care because in Sweden it gets really dark in the winters, as we know, and people rely on things like sugar
to get through the season. And it's also why the country drinks so much coffee per capita Anyway, the thing I liked most in the article is this bit where a friend of the journalist relays that when you look at each person's candy bag, it almost reflects their state of mind and like what they need to get through the day or through that week.
Oh I love that that you can look, like at a bag of Swedish fish and various candies that someone's pulled, and I almost see it as like an individualized prescription for bringing them a little joy.
Yeah. Yeah, no, it's pretty cool. You would see all twenty seven varieties of reeses in the mix with my candy each week, and I don't know, I guess understand how I was feeling. But anyway, where do you want to begin with your first factor of the day here?
So I think we should talk about the history of gummy bears and gummy worms and things like that. But before we do, I want to talk about this one fact because it's really sweet. So you know, I'm obsessed with the Cornell Food Lab and the way they do all sorts of food innovations and food science studies.
Right, Yeah, I was actually thinking about this not too long ago. I was remembering back at Mental Floss. You always wanted to do this story about how they'd added caffeine to breakfast. Heereal, I guess for people who didn't like coffee, right.
Yeah, And it isn't just that, like, there are innovations in ice cream and snacks. Made me actually wonder whether I should go into food science at one point because it just felt so Willy Wonka ish. But they also
do a lot of psychology and marketing studies. Actually, my favorite study, and this is an aside, but it had to do with cereal boxes and they analyzed all these cereal blocks is the sugary ones for kids, and on the packaging they noticed that often the cartoon characters or mascots are drawn looking down to catch the eyes of children in the grocery aisle, which is crazy and so devious, but apparently it's a big marketing point.
Yeah, but back to my fact.
So, one of the things you think about when you think about COVID or the lockdown is how many experiences kids missed out on. You know, you think about like prom or playing in tournaments or getting to go to graduations or whatever. And one of the things Cornell's paper writes about is that the freshmen at Cornell, who were food science majors, got to knock out a lot of their chemistry lessons, but they didn't get the joy of experimenting in the lab. And that's because the kids got
sent home midway through their semester in March. And so this professor, Julie Goddard, who taught the intro class, made this promise to the students of that freshman class that she would figure out some way to make it up to them. And exactly one thousand days later, which I guess is the anniverse, when they got sent home as freshmen, she had a big makeup lab where all these seniors got to make gummy worms from scratch before they graduated. And I just love that making gummy worms is kind
of a prerequisite for graduating in this course. But also how this professor worked behind the scenes to make it happen.
Oh that's really cool, all right, So why don't we get into the history of gummy bears. So the story goes back to a gentleman named Hans Regal, and this comes from Bonapetite, who wrote a story sort of a brief history of gummy bears. So in nineteen twenty, Hans is a factory worker in this confection factory and he's sick of this dead end job, so he started experimenting at home with a gummy candy of sorts. Now, gummy
candies have been popular prior to this. You've got things like Turkish Delight, Japanese rice candies, and there are things like jelly babies and gum drops in England that pre date Regals candies. But you know, he's trying to come up with something new, and he comes up with this really satisfying mixture, and then he puts his candies in a delightful mold, these long, thin dancing bears that resemble
the circus bears that kids love. And in the beginning, he makes his candies at home and his wife delivers them around town by bicycle, and he calls the company Harribo, which is a combination of the first two letters from Hans Regal and Bond, the German town that he's from. And by the time World War two begins, he's grown the company pretty significantly. He's got like four hundred employees working for him, and he's producing ten tons of candy
every single day. So his dancing bears, as they're known are this massive success. Now, Gummy Bears do have a dark legacy, like Regal ends up fighting with the Nazis and dies in the war, and the company goes through some rough times. But after the war, his sons kind of rebuild the business from scratch and by nineteen sixty they're really back on their feet. They've also transformed the candies.
The bears have become squattier and smushier and even cutered in order to attract the kids, and they get renamed Little Gummy Bears, and the candy gets distributed across Europe.
And so up until this point, Gummy Bears haven't really hit the US market.
Is that right? Yeah, that's right. Gummy Bears actually only came to the US in nineteen eighty one. It makes me glad that we weren't borrown long before that, because it's just really, really sad. And that's because most of the early demand for Gummy Bears was created by kids who'd been exposed to the candies from either their German language teachers who had brought back packages from Europe or from soldiers who had been stationed abroad and then brought
some of these candies home. But once they enter the US market, gummies take off immediately, Jellybelly, the company that makes jellybean, starts making their own gummy candies, and then Trolley and other German companies enter the US market, and before long gummies are one of the most popular candies in the US. Of course, Harribo continue to maintain their defence and today they produce one hundred million gold bears
every single day. And while people like Warren Buffett have made offers to buy out the company, Harribo insists it wants to continue being family run.
That's pretty interesting. So one of the things I was curious about was how we moved from gummy bears to gummy worms. And most of this research comes from a wonderful newsletter that I like called Snackstack. It's run by this author we've actually had on the program, Doug Mack, and in it he explains that German manufacturers were making gummies of all sorts of zoo animal shapes starting in the nineteen sixties, but in nineteen eighty one, Trolley introduced
something called gummy squiggles. These are the original gummy worms, and unlike something like gummy bears, which were designed to evoke this sense of fun. These gummy candies were intended to create what the author refers to us quote delight by way of low risk disgust. So apparently Trolley did some market research and realize that American consumers are open to products that feel weird but aren't actually abnormal in terms of flavors, and I guess the theory proved correct.
In fact, Mack points to this article from the Wall Street Journal in nineteen eighty four where this Minnesota deli owner talks about how this new gross candy is selling like crazy. Apparently he was selling hundreds of pounds of gummy worms a week, and in the article he says, quote, I know one guy who uses them as a calling card. He's a medical equipment salesman. So I guess all sorts
of people were impressed by the novelty. Anyway, the worms become a gateway candy for Americans to even more disgusting candies. Gummy rats take off in Chicago in nineteen eighty six, apparently become the second best selling candies in that city for a period, and it launches a category of candies that the author refers to as quote creates that will alarm your parents, and not just because of their sugar content, which means everything from gummy bacon to roadkill gummy to.
Fake toxic waste candy to all.
The extreme candies that exist on the market today.
You know, I've always been into like different and weird candies, but there's something about gummies where like there's a certain number of acceptable animals and sizes that they can take the form of, like gummy bears, gummy worms, other small gummies. But for some reason, I don't know who's buying these,
like life size gummy rats and gummy pythons. I mean, I know I talked earlier about loving to take as many gummy bears and cramming them into my mouth as much as I can, But actually there's something off about it when it feels like they're actually the size of a snake you can wear around your neck. Like it's just so gross to me or is it just me? Or you like this too?
It is so gross? Like I love when gummy candy is bite sized, but not like like it has to be bite sized for a human, not an alligator.
Right, yeah, yeah, so I know I mentioned this at the top of the show. Of course, you remember the Saturday Morning cartoon Adventures of Gummy Bears.
I love that Dylan referenced them. But also that theme song, right, they're bouncing here and there and everywhere.
Yeah, he carefully can't go too far with it, fair usemego so, but yes, it is a fantastic song. But you know, a lot of our younger listeners have no idea what you're talking about was Starting in nineteen eighty five, Disney launched a Saturday morning cartoon called Adventures of the Gummy Bears. It was this super popular show with kids of our generation, and the plotline was basically like the Smurfs.
But what's interesting about this knockoff is that Disney had said previously they weren't interested in televised animation, Like the company thought in themselves as purests, you know, they didn't
really want to mess with cheap TV. But the CEO at the time, Michael Eisner, decided that Disney really needed to experiment in the space, and he was super protective of Mickey Mouse and the original ip they had, so he wanted to pick a whole new set of characters to introduce to audiences, and he suggested Gummy Bears because he knew kids were obsessed with eating gummy bears, and also gummy bears were in the public domain, so we
didn't have to worry about licensing the characters from anyone else. So anyway, according to mental Loss, there are two fascinating things about this one. At the time, apparently, Saturday Morning cartoons were dominated by anthropomorphic bears, from the Berenstein Bears to the care Bears to the bear like animated Adventures of Ewoks, and so the gummy bears fit right in. They were an easy entry into the space. For whatever reason. I never thought about it, but we were so into
cartoon bears when we were kids. But the other thing that's interesting is that Disney wanted to do this on the cheap. They really saw this as an experiment and they didn't want to invest too much money. So it's one of the first animations where they outsourced the work to a studio in Japan, and they end up creating this really heavy dialogue driven plot so that there isn't that much animation to do, and it isn't long before
outsourcing becomes a trend in animation. Anyway, the gummy bear experiment was so successful that it actually kickstarted this renaissance and Disney animation on the small screen, So things like Doug tails Ooh and Tailspin Chip Anddale Rescue Rangers, Dark Wing Duck. I mean, I'm just kidding. I gotta watch all of these after this episode. They all exist because they were writing on the code tales of the Gummy Bears. I did not know that before this episode.
I love that they were trying to limit the action scenes and just focusing on dialogue so that they didn't have to animate that much. Like I feel like I have to go back and watch how talkie these shows are.
Yeah, yeah, like I really did so.
I know I just talked about gummy worms and gross scummy candies, but I can't get off the topic. I was also curious about sour candies and how we got into this world of extreme sour patch kids and things like that, and NPR has this interesting take on the genre. So apparently sour candies have a pretty long history, much longer than i'd realized. Back in the Victorian days, we had acid which were kind of a predecessor to lemonheads.
But NPR connects gross candies to Halloween, and according to food historian Samira Kahwah in her book Candy, A Century of Panic and Pleasure. Back in the nineteen thirties, Halloween treats tended to be homemade goods, right like you think about brownies or cookies or pieces of fruit that people used to hand out. But in the nineteen fifties, when all these urban legends started about people putting razors and apples and poisoning things, people moved to buying prepackaged goods
and it just felt safer to hand out candy. And manufacturers, of course, were very excited about this. They took advantage and they started connecting weird and scary candies to the holidays. In nineteen fifty four, the atomic Fireball, you know, those super hot cinnamon candies, they come out, which also happens to be the same year that the US detonates their first hydrogen bond. It's all over headlines and TV, but somehow it becomes this weird thing that's exciting for kids
to have in their mouth. And of course, lemonheads come out in nineteen sixty two. These start playing up the puckery taste of citric acid. But what's interesting is that the next entry to this sort of extra sour, extreme spicy candy is Warheads, and that doesn't happen until nineteen ninety three, but it's thanks to a guy named Peter Dijeger.
Yeager actually has a connection to gummy bears. He was an importer in the US and he had made a ton of money on importing gummy bears, and he was looking for the next big candy sensation in the nineteen nineties and he tries this sour candy from Japan. He tells Wired Magazine it was so sour that most people would take it out of their mouth, immediately throw it in the waste basket and be angry at you. You
thought you'd have an enemy for life. So anyway, Dieger travels across Asia looking for sour candies and he goes to various locales and he finds the sourrest of them all in Taiwan, and kind of playing off the atomic fireball, he calls it the warhead.
Now Wired Magazine.
Actually does an analysis warheads to figure out how they are so tar, and it comes down to something called malic acid, which in smaller doses you can find in Granny Smith apples. But there's this researcher named Paul Rosen, who NPR talked to. He's a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and he calls this phenomena of challenging candy quote benign masochism, which he defines as seemingly unpleasant things we love to do, including watching horror movies or crying
at sad songs. They also talked to another psychologist, Rachel Hurst of Brown University, who explained that part of the pleasure of gross candy is that it gives kids the opportunity to probe the boundaries of what adults find repulsive
while also mildly scandalizing their parents. And she kind of likens the phenomena to pop rocks, which is that you know they're all right eating by yourself, but the joy is really in getting other people to try it and watching their reactions, because gross candy is both meant to be dis gusted and shared.
Well, that's a great way to look at it. And I love that term benign masochism, which I guess tells us why gummy candies got paired with extreme sour flavors. Yeah, but it isn't.
Just sour flavors. Apparently, there's also an extremely spicy gummy bear on the market. It's called Little Nitro. I was repulsed until you said the name of it, and now I want.
To try it.
It's just one tiny red gummy bear who I think has a flamethrower on his chest, and he's in this package. It's just the one bear featured surrounded by flames and a flammable sign. But apparently the gummy bear is nine hundred times hotter than a jalapeno pepper, which I think moves it from benign masochism to like just playing massacreism. Yeah, anyway, Yeah.
I don't quite get that. Although I don't know if you remember this, I do love an atomic fireball. I always have to have one sort of candy addiction at a time. And there was a time when my family intervened because I was ordering, you know, atomic fireballs by the bucket. I mean it was just it was too much. But they are delicious.
I mean, I love atomic fireballs, and I also love that. There was like a nuclear science magazine, right the Atomic Bulletin, and their candy was the fireball, and they would anytime someone wrote for the magazine, they'd send them a fireball in the middle.
I love that. And actually you may know the of course, the the co host of two of our most popular shows, Stuff they don't want you to know and ridiculous history. Mister Ben Bolan himself knows. I'm a big fan. And back when we were all in the Atlanta office together, every once in a while, I'd show up and there'd be a couple of fireballs on my desk, and I always knew they were left by by then. So yeah, all right, Well, I know we've got a couple more
facts to share about gummy bears. Why don't we take a quick break.
First, welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking all things gummy bears. So will I know it's time for your last fact. But there's also something I wanted to mention about sour candies that I didn't get to and I think it's pretty interesting.
All right, go for it.
That author Doug Mack, the one who created the Snackstack newsletter, has a bit about warheads as well, and he makes a point in his article that there are a lot of ways to be disgusted, but the way the reaction manifests in our bodies, like the physiological response and the facial expression is really consistent and shared across all cultures,
which is something I'd never thought about. Apparently, the ways we cringe as we're eating while sucking on a warhead is the same the world over, And he cites this book by this author, Rachel Hurtz where she talks about how even people who've been blind since birth actually make the same face of disgust as cited people like, We're not mimicking someone else's response, it's just how our face cringes in reaction to super sour things. And also the delight of it.
That's really interesting, Like I'd never thought about that before, the fact that somebody that wasn't able to see somebody else's reactions would actually be making the same facial expressions. That's super interesting.
So what do you want to talk about for your last fact?
All right? Well, last year there was this huge surge on Reddit of people who were stunned to realize that the green gummy bears and the packet of Haribo are actually strawberry flavored, which is just so weird. So I guess for years people have just been eating these gummies and just assume they were lime flavored, even though it's written on the packet, and so I was wondering how it is that so many people couldn't discern the taste. So I decided to look into this. Now I know.
We did an episode of Part Time Genus on flavor a long long time ago, and it was really fun to do that, and in it we discussed so much of how your sense of taste comes from your sense of smell well, and even how things like sound can affect your sense of taste, like listening to chickens cluck when you're eating ice cream makes you taste the eggs in the dessert. But one thing that's funny is that our eyes also play a role in the flavor as well.
The site Candy Bouquet talks about an experiment where people were handed clear gummies and even though the gummies had various fruit flavors, people perceive the clear gummies as flavorless when they ate them.
That's really wild, like people couldn't taste the flavor.
I mean, I guess the participants recognized that the gummy bears were sweet, but beyond that, they couldn't figure out what fruit the gummies resembled. But I think it might also be because the gummy flavors are notoriously tricky. So in twenty eighteen, the journal Perception printed a study that found it took healthy adults eight seconds of chewing. This is on average for a person to decipher of flavor, and even then, twenty three percent of the participants guessed wrong.
So in summary, we like gummies even though we have no clue what flavor was chewing on.
That's really funny. I feel like kids are always like fighting over red gummy bears and green gummy bears. But if that studies accurate, they can't tell the difference.
Yeah, you know, like you said, unless they're super tasters or something like that. It makes me question my own practice of having to eat the two colors at the same time. And so I don't know. I don't know why it is that we're like that, but it's interesting anyway. What fact do you want to close with?
So one thing I didn't realize is that different countries
have different interests in how chewy their gummies are. Like, it didn't even occur to me, but there's a piece in the Atlantic called quote Americans don't really like to chew, which is all about how the US market is more interested in softer gummy candies, but Asian markets like cheurier textures, and the article cites how culturally, like East Asian cuisine has been more interested in different textures that are chewy, like things like the tapioca and bubble tea, or fish eggs,
or like grass jelly and even things like mochi. Right like, they have this chewy texture and it's been popular for a long time abroad, and it's only really now slowly working its way into the US market. But it isn't just that Asians who've noticed this. Apparently for years European gummy makers have manufactured softer gummies for the US market. Well, the ones distributed in Europe are cheerier. But back to Japan.
One of the things the Atlantic article points out is that gummies are very popular with adults now, and the hottest trend in Japan is ultra chewy gummies where packages say things like high elasticity or hard or crunchy as
part of the sales pitch. In fact, one Tokyo based company start creating gummies that are extra chewy because they believe that when people are frustrated, hard gummies help people deal with the stress of modern life, and they're especially marketed to men in this hyper masculine packaging as stress relief, which is, you know, it's really funny, just this idea of making gummies seem ultra men.
It's true, but I guess it gets back to your weightlifting comment from the very beginning.
Yeah, I guess so. But the other thing I learned while looking into this is that Japan is very invested in their gummy candy culture. So in this article I read in the Spokesman Review, this Japanese dentist and professor talked about how gummies are good at improving saliva secretion and muscle strength in the mouth. So there's actually going to be a push for gummies marketed at the elderly,
which is pretty interesting. Also, there's apparently a japan Gummy association and they have been recommending different ways for adults to enjoy gummies, and one of the things they are heavily recommending is almost treating gummy candies like fruit. So they've promoted this recipe for making a lemon flavored spritzer by microwaving your lemon flavored gummies, chopping them up, and mixing them with ice.
And soda water.
They also talk about skewering ham with citrus based gummies and cheese and treating it almost like caupraisee style, which yeah, I'm not convinced, but I don't know, I try it once. And also I love that this Japan Gummy Association is like trying to get the word out about getting people to eat more gummies.
Yeah, that is that is pretty fantastic. All right, Well, it's your turn to choose. Who do you think deserves this week's trophy? Mango.
I mean, I think most of the facts I was kind of expecting, like being around the gummy topic, but the fact that you brought Disney's Gummy Bears into this, and the fact that those cartoons were like the catalyst for all these other cartoons that I watched in middle school, Like, it's just so insane to me. I think you've got to get this week's trophy.
Such a good cartoon. All right, Well, thank you so much. My mom is going to be so proud, and it really sort of defends all the cartoon watching I did at that stage in life. But that's it for this week's part Time Genius will be back next week with a whole new episode. Now. Remember we're always scouting for great facts and ideas. You know, the topics you want to hear about on the show, So be sure to hit us up. Ptgenius Moms at gmail dot com. That
goes straight to our moms. They get every single message. Sometimes they lecture us, sometimes they give us a little bit of advice, but they really enjoy hearing from you guys, and they always pass them along. That's it for this week's episode from Dylan, Mary Mango and Me. Thank you so much for listening.
Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and Me Mongastikler and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay Trustee Dara Potts and buy
Me Shory. For more podcast from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.