Sugar Rush
For Christmas, my girlfriend and I received a lot of gifts, most of them containing chocolate. Enough to give a man diabeetus or make your dentist cry. But just how much chocolate was it?
The Haul
- 1 bag of Ghirardelli peppermint bark chocolates.
- 1 chocolate orange, cut into chocolate orange slices.
- 4 sticks of chocolate from Goumas, a candy store in Ohio.
- 1 box of buckeyes from an Amish grocery store in Ohio.
- 2 Dubai chocolates. Everyone loves 'em, chocolate and pistachios go well together!
- 21 triangular prisms of Toblerone. That's right, count 'em. 21.
- And a partridge in a pear tree?
Nutrition
| Type | Quantity | Chocolate [g] | Sugar [g] | Calories | g Sugar/g Choc | Cal/g Choc |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ghirardelli | 1 | 224 | 114 | 1200 | 51% | 5.4 |
| Orange | 1 | 157 | 95 | 750 | 61% | 4.8 |
| Goumas | 4 | 200 | *100 | *1000 | *50% | *5.0 |
| Buckeyes | 1 | 255 | *128 | *1275 | *50% | *5.0 |
| Dubai | 2 | 30 | 13 | 164 | 43% | 5.5 |
| Toblerone | 21 | 100 | 60 | 540 | 60% | 5.4 |
| Totals | 3600 | 2000 | 19000 |
Conclusion
Look at all that! In total, we had 3.6kg of chocolate, 2kg of pure sugar, all containing 19,000 Calories! It seems like the mass of sugar is around 40% to 60% of the total mass of the chocolate. Also, each piece of chocolate contained anywhere from 4.8 to 5.5 Calories per gram of chocolate.
Unfortunately, I didn't have nutrition facts for the Goumas chocolates nor the buckeyes, but I estimated that they contained 50% sugar and about 5 Calories per gram to stay about in line with the other chocolates.
Comparisons
3600 grams of chocolate is 3.6 kilograms, and 3.6 kilograms is nearly 8 pounds! That's about the weight of a domestic cat, or about 32 bananas. Assuming that one serving of chocolate is around 30 grams (close to 1 oz), we received 120 servings of chocolate! If you ate 3 servings per day, that would feed you for 40 days.
2000 grams of sugar is 2 kilograms, which is about 4.4 pounds! Thats about the weight of a full 2-liter bottle of water, or about 18 bananas. The daily value of sugar is about 50 grams per day. That chocolate contained enough sugar for 40 days, or if consumed in one day, the worst cavities in your life.
Based on a 2,000 Calorie diet, 19,000 Calories can sustain you for nearly 10 days. In another perspective, 19,000 Calories is about 80 megajoules, 22 kWh (kilowatt-hours), or 0.02 tons TNT. An average American single-family house consumes about 1.2 kW which means this could power your whole house for over 18 hours.
Published on 09 January 2026. Go back to all posts.