RICHARD ORD: When 'fun-size' Snickers just doesn't live up to its name

A Snickers bar a day? That's just nuts! And nougat. And chocolate...

The quizzical looks were followed by suggestions that I was scoffing my way to an early grave!

Hardly. One bar a day isn’t going to rush me to an early grave. Life is not a sprint after all, it’s a marathon. Bit like the Snickers bar used to be.

Maybe that’s why the marketing people changed its name. These new Snickers can be eaten in three seconds flat. Hardly a marathon is it?

And ‘fun-size’? Where’s the fun in a small bar of chocolate? Surely ‘fun-size’ is a five-foot Snickers bar. One you have to carry out of the sweet shop over your shoulder like a plank of wood. For added fun you can swing it round every time someone calls your name and clatter the person next to you on the head.

At its current length of about four inches (I’m guessing, because I ate my last one today so can’t measure it) the Snickers bar is pleasing nobody.

‘Grim-size’ would be a more appropriate name.

In the Seventies, it probably would have killed you to eat a Snickers bar every day. That’s because chocolate bars were bigger. That’s why they were called bars. They were approaching the size of gold bars.

Compared to the confectionery in those halcyon chocolate chomping days, the ‘fun-size’ bars of today are more like lozenges.

When your chocolate purchase barely exceeds the length of a Lego brick, it’s probably stretching matters to call it a bar.

Which is why my act of eating a Snickers bar every day is unlikely to kill me in the short or long term. Unless, of course, it gets caught in my windpipe.

That said, I thought I’d check with Dr Google to make sure I wasn’t killing myself. I typed in ‘Is eating a chocolate bar every day bad for you?’ I got as far as ‘every’ when it predicted the rest of my query. I’m clearly not the only person with a chronic Snickers habit.

Good news: Chocolate contains naturally occurring polyphenols which are good for you. Bad news: Snickers pile on enough calories to mean you have to walk for 40 mins to burn them off. Fortunately, that’s the amount of time it takes for me to walk to and from my local off licence to buy my daily bottle of vodka. So no healthy worries for me. I’m gonna live forever. Hic!