I hate grocery shopping. Okay, that's not precisely true. I actually don't mind the shopping part, especially if it's a fun store like a Whole Foods, or a farmers market, but I always hate the checking out. As more and more grocery stores add Self Checkout lanes, it seems there are fewer and fewer lanes open where someone will actually help you deal with the PLU#'s on your produce and bag your groceries for you. Not that I don't like the Self Checkout, and I can bag my own groceries like a big girl, if that's the most expedient thing. Only, I buy lots of fruits and vegetables, and I don't have their code all memorized the way a trained professional would. So I don't know that it's any faster.

Anyway, the point of all this is, last week I was standing in the checkout line, waiting for my turn. It didn't take long to get tired of reading and rereading the headline at Hello! and In Touch and whatnot, all about how sweet Suri and shy Shiloh are turning two and about to become big sisters. So I turned my gaze to the candy (because I'm a masochist) and what did I see but a Snickers bar in white packaging. Quoi? I thought to myself. What's this, a Snickers with almonds or something? I looked more closely. (I'm a sucker for almonds.)
And what do you think? It's a Snickers bar called Snickers Charged! And it's fortified with caffeine, taurine, and b-vitamins.

Jeepers. Like Snickers could get any worse for you--now it's got caffeine in it? And what the hell is taurine? Further investigation (thank you, Wikipedia!) reveals that taurine is an "organic acid", and a "major constituent of bile". Yum! I can only assume the good folks at Snickers have included it in their limited-time-only version of a Power Bar because it's been shown in diabetic lab rats to decrease weight and sugar levels. Awesome! B-vitamins, though, that's something that's actually good for you, though, right? Except, since there are like, 22 different b-vitamins, it's kind of hard to know exactly which ones the Snickers people mean. So who knows what you're getting, there.

I almost picked it up, just to see if it would kill me if I ate it--or, conversely, make me super energized, or whatever, because presumably they fed it to lab monkeys and didn't kill any of them. But in the end, I chickened out. Which is another way of saying my common sense asserted itself and stayed my hand. There's a fine line between adventurous and stupid.

Posted by Louisa Edwards at 6:24 PM