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Comment by goodmachine | Hacker News Reader

Kraft are a notably shitty company, as is Mondelez, the subsidiary owner here.

2010: One week after they acquire Cadbury the new owners sack 400 workers, despite pledging otherwise in order to get the deal waved through.

2016: They further renege on promises to use Fairtrade cocoa beans... but keep the logo on products to fool consumers.

2017: Mondelez pay £0 tax on profits of £185m in the UK.

I wouldn't give my dog their chocolate, but the larger point is that this is not the kind of company we or the orangutans need around.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249728/Cadbury-sac...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/cadbury-cho...

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> I wouldn't give my dog their chocolate

You really shouldn’t give your dog any chocolate.

It is considered poisonous to most dogs

Indeed, an old dog I had managed to eat a stash of easter eggs and she was very ill, on a drip. There is dog-safe chocolate available from pet shops

Why bother, though? A dog will be just as happy eating its own vomit.

No, it wouldn't.

If there is vomit nearby my parents dog will choose it over it's own food

Because carrying around dog-vomit as a dog treat isn't really socially acceptable?

Mostly.

It’s theobromine in chocolate. Present in most chocolate, but concentrated in baking or dark. It’s barely present at all in most medicore milk chocolates like the ones kraft makes large scale.

A average chocolate bar and and average dog won’t get poison effects from theobromine, but could have a really bad reaction to that make calories and sugars. An average dog would need multiple average chocolate bars.

Very much true for baking or dark chocolate though. A dark bar and a small dog can be a bad combination. Some dogs show a fair resistance to it but could still see liver damage.

My jack Russell got into a pound of tootsie rolls. Found her twitching on the ground outside. Took her to the vet and she was put on an IV and she lived to 16.

Scary! I wonder if it was theobromine poisoning or too much sugar? I guess tootsie rolls could be related to dark chocolate.

I once had a huge black Labrador Retriever (45 kg, and tall, not fat) that got up onto the kitchen countertop and ate almost an entire 32oz box of chocolate-almond bark. The only ill effect he apparently suffered from it was getting yelled at. Some of the other grossly inappropriate things he had ever eaten include a 60W incandescent light bulb, two toilet cleaner tank pucks, and the blue dog vomit caused by eating toilet cleaner pucks.

This was not an animal with discerning tastes. Nevertheless, sweet milk chocolate doesn't have a lot of theobromine in it, and he was rather large for a lab. Didn't live to 16, but larger breeds usually don't.

I grew up with a Golden Lab, your story doesn't surprise me :)

I have heard that for an N-pound dog, it would take approximately N ounces of dark chocolate to be fatal.

That's encouraging, because such a scenario seems very unlikely, even by accident, but I do not intentionally give my dog any chocolate at all.

Caffeine is also present in many chocolates and chocolate products, and is also more toxic to dogs than it is to humans.

According to my renown biochemistry professor it is poisonous to many humans too, they just don't know it. If you have any health problems try avoiding chocolate for a month; doing this experiment certainly won't harm you.

What was his or her stated mechanistic reason for believing this? I ask as a regular consumer of dark chocolate.

Theobromine, a chemical in coffee, affects the heart by imitating the neurotransmitter adenosine and also inhibits some subtypes of phosphodiesterase. Dogs can’t metabolize it; humans can, but there may be some effects. FWIW I’m skeptical of the prof’s claim.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theobromine

Thanks! Apologies for taking this so far down the rabbit hole, but if dogs are unable to metabolize theobromine, then how does it leave their system?

"Can't" isn't quite accurate - what it really means is that the rate of metabolism is significantly slower. Dogs can (and will) eventually metabolize and eliminate theobromine, but the rate is slow enough that the compound can build to toxic levels quickly following ingestion.

In general, mammals are capable of metabolizing and/or eliminating nearly any foreign organic compound over a long enough timespan, thanks to the mechanisms of xenobiotic metabolism. The liver contains a large number of enzymes of the Cytochrome P450 (CYP) family, which are able to catalyze reactions with a wide variety of compounds as the first (and most critical) step of metabolism. These reactions typically make the compounds hydrophilic, making it possible for the kidneys to pick them up and eliminate them. However, different animals express the various CYP enzymes at different levels; some are much more effective at metabolizing certain compounds (e.g. theobromine) than others. So, if an animal lacks a certain CYP enzyme (or it is expressed at a very low level), they will also metabolize certain compounds much slower (other enzymes, which are less efficient, will have to do the job).

So, basically: dogs lack certain enzymes in their liver which means that they metabolize theobromine much slower than humans - but that doesn't mean they don't metabolize it at all.

Just to tack on to this, this is the cause of almost all drug-drug interactions and many adverse drug reactions. CYP450 is an incredible family of enzymes.

> if dogs are unable to metabolize theobromine

They can, just not very well.

We can too, but not perfectly. To get a lethal dose of theobromine a healthy human adult would need to eat about 10Kg of milk chocolate in a very short space of time (less for dark chocolates).

For most small dogs a normal ~40g bar is enough to cause concern, if an even smaller dog (i.e. breads that are sometimes called "toy" dogs) consumes a standard bar you should take it to the vet immediately as that could likely be quickly fatal.

My ~25lb dog once consumed half a bar of 80% dark. I gave her ~4 Tbs of hydrogen peroxide per the internet's suggestion and she basically drank it like water, without issue >.>

I like to believe her excessive food consumption throughout her life was training for this moment where she would need to metabolize poison.

Irene Rosenfeld also refused to attend a parliamentary hearing on Kraft's behaviour.[1]

Personally I think that should be treated in the same way as contempt of court and an arrest warrant should have been issued against her.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/may/23/mps-condemn...

Yeah proper thing to have done would be cancel hearing and have her detained until the next hearing date.

Like in a few weeks or months, or maybe next parliamentary session. Who knows.

Mondelez also own Tolberone (who removed segments from their bars, and spaced the rest out to keep the bar size the same). And Chocolate Orange, which now has a scallop out of each segment. I don't buy anything modelez anymore, I don't want to finish eating a chocolate bar more annoyed than before I began.

I used to live near the Terry's factory in York. The smell of melting chocolate wafting over the river was divine. Sadly, that was shut down and sent overseas just like Cadbury, despite being a well loved company and great local employer.

Kraft/Mondelez might be good at cut-throat capitalism, but many people in the UK (including myself) despise this type of nasty and unethical behaviour. Buying a company only to trash it completely is just not on.

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