Food Theory: M&Ms Melt In Your Hand, LIE To Your Face!

hi i'd like to return some m m's i bought yesterday whoa you're the human torch yeah yeah anyway i was told they wouldn't melt in my hand but well i'm sure you can guess what happened oh i'm i'm sorry to hear that can i see your seat unfortunately that also burned up in my hand do you have the credit card that you used to make the purchase with also burned up in my hand okay well do you at least have the bag what's so hard to understand about this if i hold it it burns up okay okay geez here's your refund yeah i i don't know what i expected [Music] hello internet welcome to food theory the show that feeds you sweet drops of info in a crunchy theory shell now we've talked about food mascots food myths and food cliches but i don't think we've talked too much about food slogans yet there's just so much in a slogan a few short words can make or break an entire brand yokiro taco bell finger looking good i'm loving it have it your way they're great every single one of those conjures up a specific image and feeling in my brain and it makes me want fried chicken tacos sprinkled with fries and frosted flakes but arguably one of the most iconic and long-lived food slogans in history is the iconic m m's melts in your mouth not in your hand even though it clocks in at a whopping eight words for the better part of a century it's proved to be unforgettable not to mention verifiable i mean most of these slogans are pretty darn vague they're great entirely subjective there kellogg's eat fresh how fresh is fresh subway the worst though is probably i'm loving it from mcdonald's i mean what is it by eating mcdonald's am i pledging my allegiance to an alien space clown who feeds on fear the pronoun has no antecedent anyway mars is stepping up their game they're putting their money where their slogan is and i respect that eminem's presents a totally testable assertion right there m ms will melt in your mouth but not in your hands unfortunately for them though that also leaves the scientific door wide open for me to show you that the slogan is not only inaccurate it's also completely misleading m m's will totally melt in your hand and at the same time will not melt in your mouth let me show you how one of candy's most iconic slogans is a complete and total lie yeah i know i'm out on a thin candy ledge with this one but you clicked on this video so now you're invested and you're about to learn way more than you wanted to know about the chemistry and thermodynamics of m strap in friends this is gonna be a fun one to begin m m's have been coded in a hard shell of candy science since their inception in 1941 80 years ago this year their tidy little candy shell was originally patented as a less messy way to eat chocolate and this became especially useful during world war ii at the time mres and red cross packages to soldiers fighting overseas included everything that was considered essential some canned meat some dried fruit like raisins 80 cigarettes obviously and you guessed it some chocolate the problem was that while everything else arrived intact chocolate was a melty hazardous mess it wasn't able to survive the airplane trips and transport trucks in the literal heat of battle so when the u.s entered the war m ms entered an exclusive military contract with the us government to ensure that chocolate would arrive to troops intact in other words what am i doing here if it's good enough for the greatest generation shouldn't it be good enough for the youtube generation is an 80 year old track record not enough matpat well today i think it's time that i stop ruining only the childhoods of gen z and millennials and give boomers an up a chance i am an equal opportunity childhood ruiner what can i say so while m ms were vital to the war effort by promoting a mess-free chocolate experience that slogan is still far from accurate first let's look at the main claim of the slogan m ms do not melt in your hand at first blush this seems like it should be easy to prove m m's shells are made from a blend of sugar and corn syrup the melting point for corn syrup is 146.1 degrees celsius that is 295 degrees fahrenheit our hands are not coming anywhere close to those temperatures normal human skin temperature is 91 degrees fahrenheit with some areas being warmer like under your armpit where you sometimes see kids getting their temperatures taken and also you tend to be colder at your extremities in truth your hand surface temperature is going to vary based on your bmi your blood pressure air temperature but stays roughly between 85 and 95 degrees fahrenheit or 29 to 35 c even in the hottest reliably measured temperatures on earth 130 degrees fahrenheit it would seem like the corn syrup portion of the candy shell isn't in danger of melting in your hand and if it does somehow melt well you've got some bigger fires to put out as for the sucrose sugar portion of the candy shell that one is definitely not melting in your hand the actual melting point is 366 degrees fahrenheit or 185 degrees celsius but long before the sugar is melting it's actually reacting sugar molecules are highly reactive especially with all the things in your body or more specifically the things on your hand aka sweat the two main components of sweat on your palm are water and salt and they surround and interact with the sucrose molecules of the candy which we usually just call dissolving you know how m ms sometimes leave a ring of candy dye on your hand if they're left there for too long that's not melting which is strictly dependent on temperature it's the candy actually reacting with your sweat by dissolving in it yeah it is super gross and the hotter your hand the more soluble the salty water on your sticky little palms become which means the more candy shell that you can dissolve in there so just know that when the m m finally hits your mouth you're eating some delicious chocolate wrapped in a thin coating of candy and sweat mmm tasty and when you pop into your mouth the exact same thing happens where the sugar isn't melting again based on temperature the m m is sitting in your mouth and dissolving in your saliva so technically we've already disproven some of the slogan the candy shell can't melt in your mouth or your hand because the melting point for the candy shell is just way too high it's actually dissolving so i think it's time we adopt a more truthful slogan here mars pitch number one dissolves in your mouth less so in your hand uh if you don't like that one here's pitch number two doesn't melt in your mouth but you are eating a little of your own sweat every time then again there's always pitch number three where we instead choose to focus on the candy's milk chocolate insides as opposed to the candy itself m ms the milk chocolate melts in your mouth not in your hand wait i i thought it was just melts in your mouth not your hand did he just say the milk chocolate melts in your mouth not in your hand hold on hold on was it always like this no oh it was haha yeah okay sure hey guys did you know that the m m slogan is and has always been about the milk chocolate yeah apparently they weren't talking about the candy shell at all the full slogan has and has always been the milk chocolate melts in your mouth not in your hand the milk chocolate melts in your mouth not in your hand while you don't tend to see the full slogan written in print in the commercials they do voice over the full wording with their announcer and they do save it for large scale advertisements like this print poster from 1985 and this one and these and all of these too so uh yeah it is definitely the chocolate and i definitely knew that this entire time am i the only person in the world who doesn't remember the milk chocolate bit a little google trend search results here precisely no one in the world is searching for this complete phrase and here's the best twist of all it doesn't even matter mars is still wrong i'm still gonna prove why their slogan is complete bunk eminem's milk chocolate does in fact melt in your hand that's right mars you haven't stopped me yet i'm still coming for you we start off with some pretty damning evidence against their claim eminem's chocolate does have a melting point that's lower than body temperature between 86 and 90 degrees fahrenheit which we've established is practically the exact temperature range of the average human hand so while yes the candy coating doesn't melt remember the slogan isn't about that it's about the chocolate and the science says that the chocolate inside would definitely melt if it were in direct contact with your hand so now the question is whether the candy shell is a good enough insulator to keep the chocolate inside from getting so hot that it melts which means it's time to bring home this episode with the thing you've all been waiting for some sweet sweet thermodynamics because the shell itself isn't melting we have no idea what's actually going on on the inside until we do some math if the sugar coating were a perfect insulator in other words if it didn't transfer any heat to the chocolate at all we would know a hundred percent that the inside isn't gonna melt if m ms were coated with something like say silicone or wool we'd be pretty sure that the milk chocolate interior isn't heating up since silicon and wool are great insulators but a thin shell of sugar i mean how much heat is that really going to stop well because the internet is the internet we can actually do the calculation based on the thermal conductivity of sugar and corn syrup which are both right around 0.15 watts per meter times k the difference in temperature between one side and the other yeah that is the unit of measure and they are just as insane as they sound suffice it to say a big number here means that the material is a great conductor of heat typically metals fall into this category about 100 watts per meters times k which is why all the pots in your kitchen are made of metal they pass the heat straight from your stove directly to the food the lower the number the better insulator the material is like styrofoam at .003 sugar has a thermal conductivity of 0.15 which is shockingly low actually a whole lot lower than i expected thereby making sugar way better at insulating than you might think but is it enough to protect our chocolatey centers not quite you see while the candy coating is a pretty darn good insulator the shell itself is incredibly thin less than a millimeter thick after trying very unsuccessfully to measure it with a ruler i found this incredible recursive analysis of an m m done online by dan just just dan well dan calculates the candy shell to be 0.795 millimeters thick you know what i'm inclined to take his word for it because this was like theorist levels of unnecessarily rigorous so if we use all the information out there that the internet's gathered about eminem's like the weight of an m m at 1.3 grams the surface area of the shell at 3.55 square centimeters the conductivity of sugar and the specific heat of chocolate we can actually calculate how much energy we would need to heat the candy shell from room temperature of 72 degrees fahrenheit to the melting point of chocolate 86 degrees fahrenheit at minimum this is our equation and to save you the math the tldr here is that we don't need that much energy to do it less than the energy needed to heat up a cup of coffee just exposing the eminem to the heat of our hand in an indoor environment the chocolate inside the candy shell won't melt instantly but should melt after 251 seconds 4.1 minutes and uh yeah i get it you don't plan on holding an m m in your hand for that long especially after i told you it's reacting to your sweat the entire time but let's take the candy outdoors at an ambient temperature of 80 degrees fahrenheit we need less than half that time to start melting the chocolate 1.9 minutes if the ambient temperature is above the melting point of chocolate well now we're looking at less than one minute for a chocolate meltdown 34 seconds if the outside is 90 degrees and the thing is while it might seem unfair to test the candy outdoors in the summer heat that's actually at its most fair look at the way these things are marketed they're specifically shown as a candy on the go especially in outdoor environments look at this commercial from a beachside bar in the summer where by the way this guy's just squeezing the life out of these m m's for a long time here's some kids at the beach here's one at an outdoor concert here's one in terrible quality for the summer olympics back in 1984 which were held in los angeles where it hit 105 degrees fahrenheit or 41 degrees celsius heck remember that the whole point of these candies in the first place was that you could expose them to high heat and send them overseas to the military but in reality it's all false in fact there's only one last thing for me to do test em irl cue the footage of me holding m m's for an egregiously long amount of time starting the clock right here for four minutes and now we wait honestly the hardest part of this challenge is me not eating the eminence well i'm standing here looking like an idiot doing science by holding a bunch of m ms in my hand you can take the time to go down to the top line of the description and sign our petition to get me as the next host of jeopardy yep we are trying to convince the world that this man right here this man holding m m's in his hand for science deserves to be the next host of jeopardy so timer's all up now it's time for me to open up my hand and cut inside the m m's to show you that the chocolate inside should be melted and to show you the difference here this is a solid m m i'm pushing down on it really hard [Music] and it took a lot of effort and you can see chocolate inside is solid right now based on our calculations it should have been about four minutes candy shell should be intact but when i press down on it it should kind of ooze out or at least be a lot gooier right so here we go oh god i've got so many in my hand right now this is already not looking too good here we go push oh look at it oohs oohs oh yeah that is gooey and melted it's not quite like fully liquid it's not like it's not liquid but it certainly is melted so there you have it friends i don't know if this is surprising anyone at all since were people actually asking this question but to be fair makers of m m's the truth comes out the milk chocolate inside does in fact melt in your hand whether or not you realize it it's just melted on the inside of your candy coated shell so you know maybe a little bit more precision in advertising huh at the end of the day the m m's slogan is a hundred percent false every way you slice it the chocolate inside the shell isn't staying solid in fact it's melting most of the time it's melting in your mouth your hand your shirt pocket it is melting in the bag sitting on your car seat every day from april to october these things are melting everywhere the chocolate just winds up sloshing around inside the candy shell and when it's not melting well the candy shell is just dissolving in your sweat and your saliva so mars i'm just gonna fix the slogan once and for all you don't have to pay me for this one you ready m ms melts inside the candy shell which is separated from you and all the other stuff that you don't want covered in chocolate by less than a millimeter of sugar okay i admit it doesn't really roll off the tongue but i believe in truth and advertising here people 2021 the year of transparency for m ms and now if you'll excuse me i actually really love eminem's despite me spending the last 16 minutes dunking on them and all this science has actually given me a hankering for those ones with the rice krispies inside oh they're so good and then there's the ones with the peanut butter inside ah anyway i'm gonna go get those remember it's all just a theory a food theory bon appetit you know who has a slogan that isn't full of lies our sponsor for today's episode noom steph and i have been on noom's program since april and so far so great never never in my life have i stuck to a health program for this long and i have noom's unique approach to thank for that their program has really helped us look at our health through the lens of psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy our program doesn't so much stress calories and carbs which honestly is great news for us considering steph and i occasionally have to eat our body weight and junk food for these food theory experiments but instead the program focuses on addressing our habits and routines on a daily basis the first thing that really clicked with me was my water intake i've been a thirsty boy for a long long time a lot of that is due to my unhealthy soda habits but thanks to noob i'm actually much much better about keeping track of how much water i'm consuming day after day which means i am significantly less dehydrated than i used to be and thanks to their simple actionable recommendations like making sure that i have one green item on my plate for dinner i've been able to lose weight while feeling healthier in the process and the thing is at no point has it ever felt like a strain it's an incredibly effective strategy that uses psychological principles to ensure that you're enacting a healthier lifestyle for yourself in as easy and painless of a way as possible i've lost a lot of the weight that i've been looking to shave off i've also felt healthier on a day-to-day basis and none of it has felt like a hassle or imposition on my day-to-day life i'm telling you if i can stick to a health program for over four months with the crazy unpredictable schedule that we have on a day-to-day basis then i guarantee that you can too go to noom.com food theory to take your free 30-second quiz or you know what just use my link in the description below and get started today the new program has steph and i feeling fantastic not just because we're eating better but also because there's a huge sense of accomplishment that comes with staying on track for this long i feel like i'm making healthier decisions for myself i cannot recommend it enough again all it takes to get started with noob is a free 30-second quiz at noom.com food theory just give that link in the description a click and as always remember it's just a theory all food theory bon appetit let me know down in the comments below what your favorite flavor of m ms are there's like 300 of them at this point in uh i'll see all next week oh they're so good where's that bag of crispies they discontinued them oh mars you just brought upon yourself a world of hurt

Channel: The Food Theorists

Views: 2,998,129

Keywords: M&M, M & m, m&ms, m & ms, candy, chocolate, M&M commercial, M&Ms commercial, M&M lore, M&M mascot, M&M melts in your mouth.melts in your mouth not your hands.M&M slogan, M&Ms slogan, Food theory M&M, food theory M&Ms, M&Ms food theory, M&M food theory, food mascot, food mascots, food, recipe, food theorists, food theory, game theory, film theory, eat the menu, binging with babish, food tik tok, tik tok food

Id: aUWduIWPvzU

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 04 2021

Reddit Comments

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[u/Andro451]

Matpat squishing the m&ms is satisfying for some reason.

[u/ouch_that_hurts_]

Actually Mars is technically correct it doesn't melt in your hand because it melts in the shell. It does melt in your mouth because you expose the chocolate by biting down.

[u/Lena_Chestnut]

Huh, the slogan they use in Russian ads says nothing about chocolate melting. It's a rhyme that roughly translates to "Wherever you are, it's more fun together". Guess they went the vague slogan route

[u/EKidman]

I see the tf2 reference. I see that matpat thinks that the tf2 community forgot about the overwatch vs tf2 video.