Kindly consider “manliest” in this circumstance to mean “Likeliest to kill you with their sugary assault on your pancreas,” and you’ll have a fine time reading my latest Maxim post. If you survive, congratulations, you’re a man. A man with diabetes, but a man.
Did you remember to wish your sweetheart a happy World Diabetes Day this morning? No? What about your swollen pancreas? According to legend, you have to leave a 5-lb bag of refined white sugar on your doorstep or else the Diabetes Goblin will turn your Type 2 diabetes into Type 1 as he passes by. As you polish off all the leftover Halloween candy, keep your eye out for these five unrepentantly insulin-busting confections announced this year. If you can survive these, you can survive anything.
Peeps Chocolate-Covered Mint-Flavored Trees — Man, you used to get Peeps once a year in a single shape: Easter chicks. Then came bunnies, then the secret erotic shapes for Valentine’s Day. (Baby chickens are secretly erotic, right?) Now it’s just a year-round parade of sugar-coated, specialty flavor marshmallows dipped in chocolate. The good news is one serving only contains 7% of your daily recommended carbohydrates. The bad news is the recommended serving is just one tree. The great news is these aren’t officially CHRISTMAS trees, so you can give marshmallowy tannenbaums to your pagan friends! (Sorry, Jews, but you’re still stuck with menorah-shaped Circus Peanuts.)
Calories: 110, but what do you care? Countin’ calories is a dame’s activity!
Willy Wonka Triple Dazzle Caramel Bar — There’s this misconception going around that Willy Wonka is a friend to children. This could not be more false; Wonka plainly attempts to murder every child who wanders into his factory, perhaps in service to their parents, who would surely be offed for the insurance money once the little bastards get strong enough to hold a pillow. Regardless, the only one who survives is strong enough to become heir to Wonka’s empire of child-mutilation, and oh, what a busy boy has our Charlie been. That splendid blond beast concocted the Triple Dazzle Caramel, one serving of which gives you 35% of your daily saturated fat and 7% of the recommended carbs. By the way, one serving is only 2/5 of the candy bar. So this is the rocket fuel you would bring to travel light as you ford the Arctic snowdrifts.
Calories: 500 per bar, a quarter of the recommended daily intake. Man up and guzzle its caramelic goodness.
Jelly Belly Dips — Chocolate is to candy what deep-fried is to everything: an easy way to make it taste good. In fact, if you take a Whitman’s Chocolate Sampler and dip it in chocolate, it actually becomes edible. (The box, that is. Not the candy, which is a lost cause.) But Jelly Belly doesn’t need chocolate, they’re the superior name in jelly beans since the bloody Brachs War of 1997. Granted, they picked their flavors wisely: Very Cherry, Raspberry, Strawberry, Coconut, Orange, and Wolfsbane. (okay, that last one’s lie, but oh! Just imagine a world–!) Still, it just seems like a concession to the masses. If jelly beans are what you do better than anyone, you don’t make your product more like every other confectioner’s. Show some confidence, JB! Be yourself, and one day the right girl will come along.
Calories: 180 for every 40, which is reasonable, but…holy cow, that’s 4.5 per jellybean. Considering you have fingernails larger than these things, that makes them like those magic dinner pills promised to us by endless movies about a sterile utopian future. And speaking of that, Jelly Belly, where are our turkey & gravy jelly beans?
Snickers Peanut Butter Squared — Nobody ever ate Snickers for their figure. This is the marathon runner’s preferred candy bar, but with peanut butter added between the nougat and caramel to pin down that elusive “Oh, HELL yes!” flavor. Legally, it has to come in two pieces so you can stop midway through the eating experience and come to your sugar-addled senses to think about what you’ve done. It’s a test of character, and the righteous man will withdraw to atone for his choco-carnage, while others judge themselves damned and messily devour all that remains. Or…sorry, that actually might have been the plot of Paradise Lost.
Calories: 130 per bar, so 260 in a packet. I’m sorry, did you come to Snickers looking for a healthy relationship, or did you come here for satisfaction? This is the hit-and-quit-it of candy bars, now with 10% more wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. It’s a strong piece of work, but not enough to make us forgive that awful Snacklish campaign you unleashed on an innocent public a couple of years ago. Well here’s a taste of your own medicine (now with peanut butter!): Snack you, Snickers, just…just snack you.
A Kit Kat Kattozunda — Japan is a mirror universe where everything you know and recognize becomes an insane genius form of itself. Vending machines sell used panties, trains go 225mph but are packed too tightly for anyone to survive, and Kit Kats come in a dazzling variety of flavors. We could have shown you new flavors Gateau du Mont Blanc or Pumpkin Cheesecake, but those would have been too conceivable. No, no such mercy for you! Gaze upon the horror that is Kattozunda! What is kattozunda, you ask? So do we! Scientists’ best guess is some sort of “edamame mash.”
Calories: Dude, it doesn’t matter. Whatever unhealthiness lurks in the candy coating is more than offset by the fact that you’re eating soybean paste. We get it — soy is in everything, but generally it’s like a coke dealer at the party: everyone finds it creepy, but it doesn’t get kicked out after it sneaks in because it fulfills a necessary function. Here, it seizes control of the candy and roars in a blaze of glory: “Say hello to my li’l friend!”