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It looks like an ordinary chocolate bar, tastes like an ordinary chocolate
bar, but the Canadian Cold Buster is far from an ordinary between-meals
snack. Lawrence Wang of the University of Alberta believes his new bar could
save lives.

The Canadian Cold Buster is designed to combat hypothermia, the sometimes
fatal depression of body temperature caused by prolonged exposure to cold.
To test the chocolate, researchers monitored the deep body temperatures
of student volunteers who spent three to six hours in a room at a temperature
of between -8 and -10 °C, dressed only in shorts and T-shirts.

‘The results were consistent and quite phenomenal,’ Wang reported. ‘After
one bar the subjects typically increased their cold tolerance by 50 per
cent.’ Students who did not eat Cold Busters cooled quickly. Within three
hours their core body temperature dropped by 1 °C. ‘If your core temperature
drops by 2 °C you are considered clinically hypothermic and you must
be taken to hospital,’ says Wang.

With the bar, body temperature dropped by less than 0.5 °C in the
three-hour test. This means that someone who ate a Can adian Cold Buster
after becoming lost or stranded in cold weather would have ‘at least twice
as much time to seek help or shelter before they reach the critical body
temperature at which they become incapacitated’, claims Wang.

Wang’s bar is made of natural food ingredients, including those found
in many other chocolate bars: milk protein, honey, cocoa powder, spices,
carbohydrates and vegetable oils. But, according to Wang, the chocolate
is formulated so that it helps the body to use fat more efficiently in the
cold. In freezing weather, it takes a lot of energy to maintain a normal
body temperature of 37 °C. To keep warm, we shiver, using energy from
stored fat. But, says Wang, the body has a physiological bottleneck: ‘When
we’re in the cold we generate a product called adenosine. Adenosine blocks
our ability to convert the body’s fat into a usable form of energy. The
Canadian Cold Buster bar contains natural substances that neutralise the
effect of adenosine and so increases our ability to convert fat into a form
that muscle can use to generate heat.’

The bar also provides a quick surge of energy. Unlike most chocolates,
which provide energy in the form of fat, much of the Cold Buster’s energy
comes from carbohydrates.

The Canadian Department of Defence, which provided much of the $750
000 that went into the 15-year research project, has applied for an international
patent on the bar.