Chocolate Busters: The Easy Way to Kick It!

The fact that you are reading this book tells me you probably already know this and are fully aware that willpower alone isn’t going to cut the cocoa, and lectures on the evils on chocolate are about as helpful as devices such as chocolate patches. (Yes, you haven’t misread, there really are chocolate patches, just like nicotine patches, and I’ll be covering these beauties in depth later!) The idea behind the willpower method is to give yourself a good talking to about chocolate; make a mental list of all the reasons why you shouldn’t have eat it, then take a deep breath and hang on in there until the craving goes away. There is one slight flaw with this approach:

THE CRAVING GETS WORSE!

And this is why the last thing you need is a lecture on the evils of why you shouldn’t eat commercially made chocolate. YOU KNOW THAT! What you need is a full understanding of why you do eat it. You need a simple, yet highly effective approach which will not just allow you to see this stuff in its true light; you also need a unique way of thinking that will allow you to Kick The Chocolate … and behappy about it. After all, anyone can stop eating chocolate and be miserable about it – I pulled that off on many occasions and I’m sure you’ve been pretty good at this yourself in the past; all you need is willpower, determination, positive thinking – oh, and being blooming ratty and miserable to boot!

TAKE FLYTE

Let me give you a quick but simple analogy to explain why so many people struggle using this approach. Imagine a house fly trying to get out of a room through a closed window. What chance does it have? Ummm, not a jot. But what if the fly had just returned from a positive thinking fly seminar, would it have a better chance then? Of course not! Physics will tell you that no matter how positive, determined or strong-willed the fly is, it will never break the glass. Equally, I will tell you and your past experiences should tell you also, positive thinking, determination and a strong will is not enough to kick the chocolate – and behappy about it! It is, however, always enough to kick the chocolate – temporarily – and be blooming miserable about it!

What you need is not a pocket full of willpower, a dose of positive thinking or a lecture; all you need is a mind open enough to help remove the many, many layers of conditioning relating to what can only be described as the king of drug foods.

So, without further ado, let us begin our journey into the world of chocolate by stripping off the first layer. I have called chocolate the king of all drug foods, but king wasn’t the title it was first given, in fact the title ‘king’ would almost be an insult. The truth is that from the dawn of time and even today in many societies, chocolate is still widely regarded as …

2 The Food Of The G.O.D.S (#ulink_ac8ee62e-ad05-56ab-9ff8-46fe0ddcb31a)

GLOBAL ORGANIZATION OF DRUG-FOOD SUPPLIERS (G.O.D.S.)

Michael Jacobson was the first person to coin the phrase ‘junk food’ back in 1972. It rocked the ‘sweet’ world and, just like the tobacco industry, the chocolate industry hit back with claim after claim of why its product wasn’t ‘junk’, but indeed one of the best food sources on the planet (a point I will shatter in depth later). Well, I will agree with them in one respect, commercially made chocolate isn’t junk food at all – no, it’s ‘DRUG FOOD!’ If you think the term ‘junk food’ played havoc with the industry back in 1972, with sweet sales dropping a massive 25%, just imagine what my term of ‘Drug Food’ will do.

Let’s face facts, chocolate is a massive global business and there is just no way the chocolate industry will let this lie. Please don’t be surprised if you start to see scientific paper after scientific paper being produced ‘proving’ why their product is not addictive (in exactly the same way that tobacco companies did for years). After all, they have a lot which needs protecting. In the United Kingdom alone we spend a whopping £4 billion a year on chocolate. That’s £65 for every man, woman and child, or to put it another way, 312 oz a year or, to really bring it home, over 22 lb of chocolate per head per year! Now bear in mind this is the ‘average’. Many people are consuming far more than this and the figure doesn’t include what we buy from duty free airports and when we are away abroad. An article in the Daily Mail a few years ago ran the headline:

‘WHY I MUST EAT 200 CHOCOLATE BARS A WEEK’

They were referring to Maureen Young, a self-confessed ‘chocoholic’ who ate 200 chocolate bars every week for 6 years. If my calculations are correct that is a cost of over £20,000 in just six years! And that’s just one person. Maureen, although clearly more ‘addicted’ than most, isn’t the only one bringing in massive revenue for the chocolate industry. Even the average chocolate addict will get through a whopping £10,000 on chocolate in their lifetime. That figure shouldn’t really come as any surprise since in Britain at Easter alone we will get through 100 million eggs; that’s nearly two chocolate eggs for every person in Britain – ’Jesus!’ (well, quite). But, as you may have guessed, we don’t lead the world in chocolate consumption, that title is held by the Swiss, who manage just under 28 lbs a year! The US aren’t to be left out either – they spend a staggering $14 billion a year on the dark stuff. M&Ms now rank as the world’s most popular confection bringing in an amazing $2 billion a year. Let me emphasize that in case you just skipped over it, that is:

TWO BILLION DOLLARS EVERY YEAR JUST ON M&Ms!

M&Ms, although first made in 1940, were virtually unknown in Britain until a few years ago. When we wanted some round brightly-coloured sweets with chocolate centres it appeared that only ‘Smarties had the answer’ – which is quite funny as Smarties were first produced in 1937, three years before the now mighty M&Ms. M&Ms are owned by one of the biggest drug-food giants in the world – Mars Inc – a true superpower in the world of chocolate.

Mars Inc is a company that produces enough Fun Size Milky Way every year literally to reach the Milky Way. In fact, the huge amount of those little, sorry, I mean ‘fun-size’ choc bars, made every year are enough to circle the globe – TWICE! In the UK we buy 17 million Bounty Bars annually, once again a bestselling confectionery made by – yep, you guessed it – Mars Inc. It is no wonder then that the Mars Inc company are the largest sweet manufacturer in the world. What may come as a surprise though is that Mars, in financial terms, are now bigger than McDonald’s with an unbelievable $20 billion a year in sales from various interests.

Chocolate, like most products these days, has big guns globalizing the industry. In 1945 there were roughly 6,000 firms producing the stuff. It is estimated that by 2010 that the number will be as low as 150 worldwide. Mars Inc, in my opinion, are the McDonald’s and Marlboro of the chocolate world. And just like the fast-food and nicotine trades, the chocolate industry also has its Burger King, Silk Cut, Wendy’s, Benson and Hedges, and Wimpy in the forms of Cadbury, Nestlé, Rowntree, Green & Blacks, Lindt, Thorntons and, in the US, Hershey. In fact, in the US if you mentioned Cadbury they would wonder which planet you’re from, but say, Hershey and they immediately know what you mean. That’s because in the US Hershey are a very big player in the chocolate world – it even boasts its own town! The battle between Mars and Hershey has been going on for years and it echoes that of Pepsi and Coca-Cola, each company battling for number-one spot. At last count, Hershey was winning the US battle, but, by the time you read this, in the cut-throat, back-stabbing, idea-pinching world of chocolate, that could have easily changed. However, whatever the chocolate company, just like their nicotine, caffeine and fast-food cousins, each, on a financial front, are doing just fine and dandy thank you very much. And this is why chocolate is now one of the most traded commodities in the world, and to the villagers on small farms in places such as West Africa, and on plantations owned by wealthy land barons in other parts of the world, cocoa is as important to the economies of these countries as oil is to the Middle East.

Cadbury, Britain’s leader in the land of the chocolate, aren’t too far behind. Despite their ‘local brand’ impression – Cadbury are a major global player. Two billion bars of Cadbury’s chocolate are bought every year. If just the creme eggs it produces each year were stacked on top of each other they would be 900 times higher than Mount Everest, and if the Crunchies eaten in the same length of time were lined up they would stretch from Birmingham to Bangkok. On top of that, just like Hershey in the States, Cadbury even has its own town – Bournville, or as they like to describe it, Cadbury World.

Chocolate has also been written about in some of the most famous children’s stories ever told, from Charlie and theChocolate Factory to the modern day phenomenon which is Harry Potter. Major blockbuster films have not just featured it but have even been based on and named after it – Chocolat being the obvious example. There are few items in the world that do not have a chocolate version of them somewhere. You can get chocolate televisions, chocolate typewriters, chocolate hats, chocolate houses, chocolate cigarettes, chocolate body paint, chocolate love toys (I didn’t say all chocolate was bad!) and there is even a place that will make an exact replica of your good self carved entirely from chocolate!

It has been linked to every emotion we possess and the Global Organization of Drug-food Suppliers (GODS) have managed, through clever advertising, to make us believe it can genuinely help our moods, act as a catalyst to the land of the bliss and, more recently, that it is actually good for us (this point will be covered in depth a little later). They have also managed to make it perfectly normal to start children on this stuff from an extremely early age. In fact, they have so brainwashed and conditioned us that if we don’t give children chocolate, especially if they have been ‘good’, we are the ones who are seen as the bad guys!

So how have we reached the stage where so many people believe that life wouldn’t be the same without a mass of drug-like substances entering their bloodstream on a regular basis? Why do we automatically think of chocolate when Valentine’s Day comes around, or Mother’s Day, or Christmas Day, or Easter Day, or a birthday – or, let’s face it, any day? Why do we continue to eat this stuff even though we nearly always feel sick and ‘Oh, I wish I hadn’t done that’ afterwards? Why is it so strongly linked to love, comfort, joy and, of course, PMS? Why does it seem to take such an emotional hold unlike any other ‘food’ on the planet?

THE ANSWER COULD LIE IN A BROWNIE

A Derren Brownie to be precise (well, Derren Brown actually). Anyway, I don’t know if you’ve seen this guy, but he is known as a ‘mind control expert’ and he is exceptionally brilliant at what he does. I watched a programme of his once where he took two advertising ‘geniuses’, people who prided themselves on being the best in the business; able to come up with unique ideas super-fast. Derren Brown arranged transport for these men to meet him in a hotel room. Once there he unveiled a large stuffed bear as their brief. Yes, they had to do an advertising campaign for a taxidermist and they had just half an hour to come up with it. Derren Brown placed a stuffed cat on top of a sealed envelope. He told them under no circumstances were they to touch the envelope. When he returned half an hour later the two quick-thinking advertising gurus had indeed managed to come up with a catchy advertisement. Now please bear in mind they had a blank page and could have put just about anything. As you may have guessed, when Derren asked them to open the envelope he had predicted the exact logo and, as near as damn it, advertising slogan as the two guys. At first they tried to dismiss it (I think their pride was a tad hurt) but in the end they had no explanation as to how on earth he could have predicted their choice of thoughts.

IT’S WHAT YOU’RE NOT CONSCIOUS OF THAT GRABS YOU

The reason why he was able to predict their thoughts was simply because he had already placed them there. What I’m saying is that the advertisement and slogan were never their idea at all – it had been cleverly planted in their subconscious mind on the cab journey over. How? Quite simply by placing both the ad and slogan many times at several stages along the route. For example, at one point the taxi stopped at a crossing and about 20 people, each with t-shirts printed both back and front with the ad and slogan, crossed the road. The ad and slogan were shown many times in this manner throughout their short journey. Derren even arranged that as they entered the hotel, a man holding a newspaper would be leaving. And what was the headline on the paper? Yep – the ad and slogan. So what the hell has that got to do with chocolate? Well, bucket loads actually.

IN THE HANDS OF THE GODS

Up till now, your buying and consumption of chocolate literally has been in the hands of the GODS. They are the ‘mind controllers’ of the chocolate world and it’s their job to make sure that you continue to buy, buy, buy. Like our two advertising people, what you believe to be your idea – to buy chocolate in this case – is often anything but. The hard reality is the GODS have been planting images and catchy slogans throughout your journey through life with the sole purpose of getting you conditioned to buy the stuff – most of the time without even knowing what made you do it. This is why a massive 90% of all chocolate sales arewhat is known as ‘point-of-sale’ or ‘impulse’ buys. Yes, surprising as it may sound, according to the chocolate companies themselves only 10% of chocolate sales are actually pre-planned (ie, gifts for Mother’s Day, saying, ‘I love you’ and so on); the rest are made on ‘the spur of the moment’ – or are they?

The 90% of sales apparently made on impulse are at times such as when you are standing in a queue at a supermarket and just happen to see a glossy packet containing chocolate; or when you are waiting for a train and you hear the cry of glass-imprisoned chocolate bars screaming at you to set them free; or when you stop for petrol and grab a bar when paying – you know that sort of thing. However, the cocoa seeds of purchase must have already been sown some time prior to the moment of buying. Think about it, would a non-smoker ever buy cigarettes ‘on the spur of the moment’? Would they ever ask for some simply because they happen to have bought some petrol? Would they hear the loud cries from nicotine packets as they begged for freedom from their glass prisons on station platforms? No, of course not! If you don’t smoke you don’t buy them, no matter what impulsive mood you are in; smokers buy cigarettes because they are already conditioned to smoke – in exactly the same way that you are already mentally and physically conditioned to eat chocolate.

In truth the conditioning has been going on ever since you were old enough to say, ‘The Milky Bars Are On Me’ and has been going strong throughout your life. Product placement after product placement, billboard after billboard, TV campaign after TV campaign, sponsorship after sponsorship, even government literature cleverly designed to plant the idea that life is just simply more fun with a ‘boost’ or ‘treat’ of chocolate and all those who don’t indulge are clearly boring no-hope health freaks who are obviously a few cocoa beans short of a full pod!

There is no question that placing chocolate at the checkouts of supermarkets, newsagents and petrol stations plays a massive role in their sales. It is also true that many people wouldn’t buy half as much if they didn’t have it shoved in their face at every opportunity. However, the point is that you have already been conditioned to eat it for this kind of product placement to have the desired effect. Recently there have been calls for this kind of product placement to be banned, especially where it is aimed at children, but I think there is more chance getting run over by a giant Easter egg than this ever happening.

GREAT CHOCOLATE SMOKES ALIVE

The chocolate companies, just like the nicotine boys and girls, are true masters of the emotional hook, not just on a mental level but also at a physical one. Get the two right and BOOM – you’ve got one almighty addictive winner, a lifelong customer and, of course, several penthouses in Malibu! In fact, the similarities between the tobacco and chocolate industries are more than a little spooky and go way beyond the striking similarity between the Silk Cut colour and that of Cadbury Dairy Milk (have you noticed that?).

Both cigarettes and chocolate have colourful glossy packets, both have used words like ‘satisfying’, ‘lift’ and light’ in their advertising campaigns, both have role models such as the ‘Marlboro Man’ and the ‘Milky Bar Kid’, both have regal or ‘out of this world’ names, such as ‘Royal’ and ‘Super Kings’ in the cigarette world and ‘Mars’, ‘Milky Way’ and ‘Galaxy’ in the chocolate world. In fact, both even have names with Death in the title. There is a brand of cigarettes called ‘Death’ (how nice) and a (how can you describe it?) big blob of chocolate called ‘Death By Chocolate’. Both chocolate and cigarettes have been given to troops in World War II, both have gone to considerable lengths to prove their product is not just safe but has incredible health benefits, and both have one person in common – Philip Morris. Philip Morris not only owns the world’s leading cigarette company, Marlboro, but has recently started buying chocolate companies. They even beat the mighty American chocolate company Hershey to acquiring Freia Marabou, a Norwegian chocolate company with a strong presence in Scandinavia. On top of that, they also once owned and, I understand, still have plenty of shares in Kraft Jacobs Suchard: a company which produces Terry’s All Gold and perhaps the most instantly recognizable chocolate in the world – Toblerone. Toblerone’s slogan was always ‘Out On Its Own’, but next time you have a triangular-shaped choccie, spare a thought for the extra money you’re ploughing into Philip Morris’s pocket, helping to make sure that, on a financial front, they are truly ‘out on their own’. The coincidences don’t stop there either. Even Philip Morris’s ‘Marlboro Man’ was created by Leo Burnett, the same person who came up with the much-loved Uncle Ben character – owned by Master Foods, part of the Mars company.

Such is the power of Philip Morris that they have managed with Toblerone to do what the makers of ‘Sunny Delight’ did with their product. One minute it wasn’t there, the next every shelf was packed with the stuff. Some of the biggest sales for Philip Morris come from duty-free shops in the airports of the world. You can’t but fail to notice the large, gold-wrapped, glossy boxes of … chocolate! Yes, haven’t you noticed that now Toblerone not only has the same colour wrappings as Benson and Hedges cigarettes, but it has also grown just a bit in size? Have you also noticed the shelf space these massive bars of Toblerone have been found? Have a look next time you’re in a duty free – at first glance you would think there is no other chocolate on the planet except Toblerone. And be aware that getting this kind of shelf space is no easy feat – you need more contacts than Specsavers to pull it off … oh, and flipping great wedges of cash too! This is because of the 90% ‘point of sale’ factor – it’s all about being seen.

I always suspected there must be some link between the two ever since I used to buy chocolate cigarettes – when I was just seven years old! If they can make chocolate cigarettes legal for children, I really wouldn’t put anything past them. Forrest Mars was even once a travelling salesman … for Camel cigarettes! It was also partly due to cigarettes that the Mars company grew the way it did. According to Forrest Mars, it all started with a simple suggestion to his father Frank, ‘Why don’t you manufacture something like Camel cigarettes?’ And the rest is history.

There is one other similarity between the two which I forgot to mention – both cigarettes and chocolate can be highly addictive. The chocolate companies, however, like their cigarette industry cousins, will naturally deny this until we are blue in the face, but somehow I don’t think it’s disputable.

WHAT IS ADDICTION ANYWAY?

Put simply, addiction is a mental and/or physical hook, hence the expression ‘hooked’. Addiction is an emotion and the emotion is fear. Any substance which creates the fear that life wouldn’t be the same without it, that you wouldn’t be able to cope with and/or enjoy your life the same way without it, is an addictive drug. So does mass-market chocolate fall into this category? You’d better bet your chocolate bottom it does.

Now clearly addiction has its levels and I realize that not everyone who eats chocolate is like Maureen Young (the woman who used to get through 200 bars of chocolate a week), but the fact that so many people are buying this book because they want to stop eating it is surely proof of its addictive nature. I mean, even if you loved them, you wouldn’t need to buy a book entitled The Simple Way to Stop Eating Sardines if you wanted to stop eating sardines, would you? There aren’t any ‘sardine patches’ or organizations such as Sardine-olic Anonymous are there? Yet there are ‘chocolate patches’, there are people who run their lives with a Chocoholics Anonymous way of thinking, and there are thousands of people spending God knows how much on therapies such as acupuncture and hypnotherapy in an attempt to free themselves of their craving for chocolate. If it were their genuine choice to eat chocolate, then surely they could simply make a genuine choice not to eat it – couldn’t they? So is it possible that some Derren Brown-like activities have been at work to make people believe it is their choice when really they have been mentally hooked?

With that in mind, I think the addiction part is pretty clear. Fortunately, 99% of the hook is mental, created by years and years of clever marketing; the actual physical withdrawal (if you can even call it that) you will simply not notice. However, like most addictions, let’s not underestimate the power of the emotional hook because it is this which drives the fear.

FALSE EMOTION THAT APPEARS REAL

The fact is the GODS, through clever emotional advertising, emotional conditioning and mood-altering chemicals (yes, there is a physical part), have managed to create a powerful and emotionally driven food. As such, people become mentally and physically ‘attached’ and in many cases getting rid of chocolate proves as difficult as ending a relationship; they literally feel fear at letting go and so are ‘hooked’. Luckily, the emotions created by the marketing and the chemicals are all false, they just appearreal. After all, what on earth can possibly happen to you if you do stop eating chocolate? Your heads are hardly going to explode and you are certainly not going to starve. So any fears you may have about getting rid of chocolate from your life are completely false. That said, when something appears real it then is real to that person.

The only way to kick the chocolate – and be happy about it – is fully to shatter those fears and see this stuff and its pushers for what they really are. With that in mind, let’s really start to unwrap the industry by taking a long hard look behind the advertising and conditioning before we unwrap the many layers of the product itself.

One of the most famous lines with the word Mars in the title has got to be that from a very insightful John Gray – Men arefrom Mars, Women are from Venus – but it’s still not a patch on the most successful one ever used. I don’t think there’s a single person, in the UK at least, who doesn’t know …

3 A Mars A Day Helps You Work, Rest And Play (#ulink_676cbc0a-7ee9-59fb-82eb-cecdc71c2e44)

One thing is undisputed – advertising works, especially when you are dealing in an addictive substance. And the chocolate big boys and girls spend an absolute fortune making sure their particular message stays in the forefront (and the depths) of our easily manipulated minds. Over and over and over again they beam the same messages into our computer-like brains, making certain that we download the information into our hard drives. Mars alone spends $400 million a year advertising in the US, Cadbury spends a whopping £250 million just in the UK. Each chocolate company does their utmost to make sure we never forget that ‘Nothing Satisfies Like A Snickers’, that when you have a break you should most certainly ‘Have A Kit Kat’ or if things get on top of you, you should ‘Take It Easy With Cadbury’s Caramel’. Each company cleverly links our emotions, sporting abilities and even good health with their product. And each company makes sure that we believe the hype.

MARS SPONSORS MARATHON

Mars paid $2 million for the worldwide rights to the Rolling Stones song ‘Satisfaction’ to help promote the company’s leading product – Snickers. But that is small change compared with the $5 billion they forked out to be the official sponsor of the 1984 Olympics. They also are a major sponsor in the football World Cup and, seemingly, will not miss any opportunity to link their product to something exciting and, ironically, sporty. This point was hammered home to me when I saw a friend of mine running on a treadmill in my local gym dressed as a Mars Bar. It turned out that Mars was sponsoring him to run the London marathon, a point which would have been made a lot funnier if the chocolate bar Marathon wasn’t now called Snickers! It took him over 5 hours to complete the race with buckled knees in what amounted to a Mars boiler suit. He explained how all the way around the streets of London on one of the hottest marathon days in history, he heard rendition after rendition of ‘A Mars A Day Helps You Work, Rest And Play’ – how’s that for illustrating the power of advertising! I think Mars got their money’s worth – not only was their big bar in full view of the millions of spectators, but it was also featured on BBC TV, a broadcasting company which prides itself on the fact that they don’t advertise! And what sort of pay did he get for nearly knackering his knees for life and giving the GODS massive exposure? Forty-eight Mars Bars! Unlike my friend, Mars are in my opinion just pretending it’s all for charity, pretending it’s all for the greater good, but in truth it’s probably all bullshit. After all, the advertising opportunities at these sort of events must be the primary motivation for sponsoring them anyway. I’m not just picking on Mars here; most of the big chocolate companies are up to this sort of thing, especially the UK’s biggest brand of chocolate – Cadbury. In Spring 2003, ‘The Nations Favourite’ (their words not mine) launched a £9m campaign to persuade children to buy 160m of their chocolate bars in exchange for sports equipment for their schools – yes, SPORTS EQUIPMENT! They called the scheme – ’Cadbury Get Active’ and said their initiative would ‘help to tackle obesity’. They managed to do this through the Youth Sport Trust and it was endorsed by the Labour minister of sport Richard Caborn. Imagine if Benson & Hedges decided to encourage children to smoke in return for donating some money towards cancer research; would the health minister allow that as it will ‘help a good cause’? Cadbury even managed to get Paula Radcliffe to back the ‘Get Active’ marketing scheme. Paula is not just an athlete, but a super athlete. At the time of writing this book, she reigns supreme in the long-distance running world, almost breaking a new record every time she sets foot on a track. The link here is clear, eat this stuff and it will help you be a supreme athlete; it will give you energy; it will keep you going; it may even make you a star! Mind you, at least finding out that chocolate companies sponsor sports stars has exposed what Linford Christie might have had in his lunch box – two creme eggs and a king-size Mars bar!

Cadbury not only recruit lean athletic stars to link the image of sport and health with a product full of fat and sugar, but they also sponsor one of the most watched television shows in the UK – Coronation Street. Their aim here is to make sure that the relaxed, end-of-the-day, put-your-feet-up feeling gets associated with their product. Does it work? I should coco! The people who make the decisions to spend millions advertising and sponsoring sports events or TV shows aren’t stupid – they more than know what they are doing. They know that if they can link a positive emotion or ‘feel good’ factor to their product they’re onto a winner – and, boy oh boy, are they good at it?

‘The Sweetest Things On Earth Come From Mars’