Hershey Syrup With Calcium Provides 0% Calcium?
In case you were planning on getting your recommended daily allowance of calcium from Hershey's Syrup + Calcium, you may want to think twice. As reader Samuel has pointed out, the label on the fortified corn syrup says it contains "0%" of your suggested daily calcium. On the bright side, it probably doesn't taste like chalk.
A trip to Hershey's website reveals different nutritional information, so the label is likely a mistake. The website says that 2 tbsp. of the calcium fortified version of the syrup contains 10% of your suggested calcium. (The label does have tricalcium phosphate listed in the ingredients.) Either way, Nutrition Data says you'll get at least 29% of your intake if you add the stuff to one cup of milk — already a good source of calcium. Nom, nom, nom.
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Hershey's is corn syrup now? Is nothing sacred? It's not much better, but I miss the days of good old sugar based Hershey's...
Also - anyone remember when the bottle had that big text proclaiming: "As always, a fat free food!"
False advertisting?
oh man now i want chocolate milk.
sorry, i just checked mine in the fridge and it says 10% calcium, 0% iron. so there is some in there!
@pecan 3.14159265: My daycare used to have an old ( washed out ) Hershey's Chocolate Syrup bottle in their kitchen playset. It NEVER lost its wonderful chocolate smell. I used to love to squeeze the bottle so the chocolate air puffed out at me. Then again, I'm obsessed with food, so I do weird stuff like that all the time.
Calcium fortified non dairy products always taste off to me. I don't know if that would be noticeable in chocolate syrup or on top of a gigantic, chocolaty sundae.
But look, 10% DV zinc! More sundaes, please. I feel a cold coming on.
@pecan 3.14159265: to be fair, they are saying it is calcium enriched, not that it's a healthy snack or something totally outlandish. when i bought it i figured i was going to use it anyway (what can i say, i was craving chocolate milk!), might as well get the calcium enriched kind. i actually specifically checked the vitamin content and there was a difference between the regular and 'enriched'. i'm guessing the op's bottle is a misprint.
"Zero's a percent!"
@fjordtjie: I'm actually having a glass of (non-fortified) chocolate milk right now. Mmmmm...
Someone once told me something that the syrup inhibits the absorption of calcium, but I don't know if that's because they wanted me off of the 5 glasses a day habit or if it was a real issue.
If someone's using chocolate syrup to get their daily dose of calcium, they have bigger problems than the missing calcium, frankly.
Good Eats gave a recipe for chocolate syrup once. It's pretty good, although the sugar tends to recrystalize after a few weeks despite the corn syrup which is in there to prevent that. You can tinker with it by using brown sugar or adding raspberry syrup.
@pecan 3.14159265: It's too bad that it's not got enough of the right bits to be called chocolate anymore. It's now Hershey's Syrup with chocolate flavor.
Nesquik is Chocolate Syrup, however...
@kalaratri: and now i am too. all this talk of chocolate milk is just like free advertising--and it worked.
i doubt the syrup actually inhibits calcium absorption. but good thing you're not lactose intolerant!
Since it is Hershey's it also has 0% chocolate.
@kjherron: Homemade chocolate syrups also go bad after a short period of time, so unlike Hershey's you can't just let it sit in the fridge forever.
I used to love Hershey's Syrup, but I stopped buying the stuff since it's HFCS incarnate.
@DreamTheEndless: Hershey makes no qualms there are there for profits. They after all are one of the ones leading the fight to allow Cocoa butter to be removed from chocolate and replace it with something like veg oil and still call it chocolate...
@kjherron: You just made my day. I noticed Hersey's had corn syrup when I started to replace my last bottle and so didn't. I should have known Alton would have an alternative.
PicklePants - How long would it take for it to go bad? I have all of those ingredients in my cupboard and they take forever to go bad. Unless it's a combining the ingredients thing.
I would love the FDA to tell food makers that have 12 months to rid all products of HFCS and see the reaction!
@pecan 3.14159265: My childhood memory is having Hershey's chocolate syrup in the can - not the bottle (the bottle came out later). Mom had to punch the two little holes with the can opener thingy. I used to pour it into my mouth straight from the can (not in front of mom, of course).
I'm glad they're doing something to make this concoction of high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, water, sugar, potassium sorbate, salt, mono- and diglycerides, xanthan gum, polysorbate 60, vanillin, and artificial flavor healthy.
U-Bet>Hershey's Syrup.
If you want to make a real Brooklyn Egg Cream, you need U-Bet.
You can get U-Bet with no HFCS around passover. That's the time to stock up.
I think they were talking about the trace amounts of caffeine in chocolate.
Caffeine leaches calcium from the bones over long periods of time- but if you're drinking five glasses of milk a day, you're probably not the most vulnerable slice of the population.
Women, however, need to intake 1 1/2 to 2 times the amount of calcium a man needs, since higher testosterone levels allows for better calcium absorption. Women have less testosterone, hence they need to take in more calcium in their diet.
When is calcium needed the most in girls? 14-21, which is just about the time that most people's caffeine intake skyrockets...
There's your lesson about osteoporosis today.
enriched= increasing the amount of already existing vitamins and minerals that were lost due to processing (vitamins in processed enriched flour)
fortified= adding vitamins and minerals that were never there in the first place (i.e., calcium in fortified orange juice)
I've got a better idea than Hershey's syrup with calcium: Don't use Hershey's syrup at all! Too much sugar, bad sugar, everyone's fat enough as is. Eat some fruit or something!
@pecan 3.14159265: We had Bosco when I was a kid. Different syrup. Same chocolatey goodness. Is that a sign we couldn't afford Hershey's syrup? Or a sign that I'm in my upper 40's?
@Cogito Ergo Bibo: I only remember three brands from my childhood: Hershey's, Nesquik, generic store brand. Everything else was sludge.
@K-Bo: Have you tried any of the (admittedly kinda ridiculous) Philosophy brand food smelling shower gels? They have one that smells EXACTLY like chocolate cake. Seriously, it's amazing how close the scent is to the real thing. I think you might really like it. It's quite pricy for shower gel, but you can bathe yourself in chocolate whenever you get nostalgic for the choco-air sniffing!
Hey, 0% is still a percent.
uhh, even if there isn't any calcium in the chocolate, i am pretty sure you are still getting plenty of calcium from, you know, the milk.
@pecan 3.14159265: I remember Nesquick. It never dissolved correctly for me. I liked the syrup much more. And usually, there was a thin layer of 100% syrup at the bottom of the glass! Yummy! Or diabetes inducing. One of those.
Good golly. Bosco still exists! [www.boscoworld.com] Used to come in a glass bottle with a white label and blue and red lettering.
@pecan 3.14159265: Thanks, Pecan. I just remembered I had a bag of chocolate chips in the cupboard. Time to break out the strawberries and double-boiler!
Jello-o pudding does the same thing. It almost fooled me, too. I was there in the store and saw the one with the Calcium label and nearly chose it instead of the regular - then I looked at the ingredients and saw that they were exactly the same. And at the nutrition informaiton label, and saw that neither contained any calcium at all. I'm afraid I don't have a photo to share, though.
@Laura Northrup: I always get that too! You have to have the pulp, in my world orange juice should come served with a spoon! Haha!
@tomholiday: Hershey's is trying to encourage people to eat the syrup straight, thus increasing the volume of product sold 1000%.
@DreamTheEndless: Yep it's just corn syrup and chemicals. You'll notice that they don't call it "Chocolate Syrup" anymore. It's just "Syrup" now.
Same thing with most Dryer's Ice Cream. They secretly changed the ingredients around, now they can't even legally call it "Ice Cream"... it's a "Frozen Dairy Dessert" because it's made with whey instead of cream.
Hershey's chocolate syrup was a staple in my fridge when I was a kid. We always had it, and it was cheaper to buy a bottle and add it to milk to create chocolate milk than it was to buy two kinds of milk. And you could make it extra chocolatey. Ahh, nostalgia. And I was never under any pretense that it was actually good for you - it's chocolate syrup! It's ridiculous that Hershey's is marketing calcium in its syrup. I haven't seen Breyer's or Edy's market that its ice cream contains calcium because it contains cream and milk, so maybe there's hope after all.