[valb]

Hi, a first time post here from a recent convert to the show - I love the podcasts and always like to plot how I can use your Kitchen Science in my classes.

I know there are no chocolate atoms strictly speaking, but it hints to my question.

A pupil of mine recently came back from America with a box of peanut brittle (yum  []) from a large sweet factory and he started telling me how it smelt strongly of chocolate in the area around the place. He then rambled on about how you could eat a chocolate bar by just taking a deep breath and that got me wondering: can you technically consume a chocolate bar if you breathed in enough of the chocolately aroma around a factory?

And - here's the important question - would you get the calories?

[neilep]

Hi Val,

WELCOME TO THE FORUM !

What a great question !

I wish I knew the answer. But if it is possible then we could all be feeding just by breathing.

I think there are organisms out there that do take sustenance akin to this way.

If one is absorbing the calories then it would have to be in the minutest form but that of course does not negate the nature of your question.

Lets hope a passing ' absorption of food via air' expert answers !

[lyner]

Sounds a bit like passive smoking.
Fancy a passive Mars Bar?

[Chemistry4me]

I can almost taste the KFC when I pass by it.
Doesn't what you breath in go to your lungs. but food is digested/absorbed in the stomach/duodenum so at a guess I would say that you can't get the chocolate calories

[valb]

Ok, so no calories if nothing else - I completely ignored the fact that it doesn't go into your digestive system (I was so excited at the concept of breathing chocolate!).

But in the same way that you can inhale coal dust near a mine or refinery, can't you inhale chocolate particles? In which case, what happens?

[Bored chemist]

Much of what gets inhaled ends up in the bloodstream just as if it were swallowed.
However the mass of stuff involved is tiny so the calorie count isn't significant.

[johnson039]

no i guess. as the chocolate 'atoms' float around the factory, they were actually 'sucked' into your nose and to your lungs. If those 'atoms' are small enough(which i m not so sure abt that), they diffuse in your bloodstream and being transport away. BUT NO DIGESTION OCCURS! unlike what we hv eaten in our stomach

[blakestyger]

When I worked in the sugar industry the men who were employed in the sugar bagging area were shown to have ingested sugar into their metabolism by breathing in sugar dust.

[Make it Lady]

Smell is such a big part of taste so going past a chocolate factory, the aroma of chocolate will make you think you can taste it. I used to live next to TOMs chocolate factory when I lived in Denmark. I would roll down the windows in my car and inhale peppermint creams. Peppermint has a more diffusive aroma. Bread factories are also very smelly.
I think the smell around a factory would not be the same as working in dust particles though.

[Bored chemist]

A lot of what gets into your lungd ends up in your stomach anyway. The lungs (try to) dispose of solid debris by sweeping it up the windpipe. After that it gets swallowed.

Digestion isn't what provides the body with energy.
Glucose, for example, is not really digested. It is just dissolved and crosses the gut wall into the blood.
The energy is released when it undergoes chemical reactions. Those might take place directly in the muscles (as with glucose) or indirectly. For example, alcohol is converted (by a rather complicacted path which I am simplifing here) to glucose.
The liver does a of of that clever chemistry and it can't tell if a molecule of alcohol was swalowed directuly, swalowed along with some mucous after being caught in the lungs , absorbed directly from the lungs into the blood or even absorbed throughthe skin.

[Chemistry4me]

I'm not sure that the 'chocolate' molecules will diffuse across into the capillaries around the lungs. If this was possible you could breath in anything and they'll move into the bloodstream. But if they do get into the bloodstream then the molecules will be distributed around the body to be used therefore you would get the calories.

[Bored chemist]

"If this was possible you could breath in anything and they'll move into the bloodstream."
You pretty nearly can. The exceptions are things that are very insoluble like asbestos fibres (which is why they cause so much harm).
The dominant smell of chocolate may well be vanilin, that's a small enough molecule to pass straight through the lungs.
Plenty of gases and vapours are toxic because they get into the blood from the lungs.

[chris]

Love this question!

Literally, "can the smell of chocolate make you fat?"

[RD]

Only if you're snorting it ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coco_Loko

[wolfekeeper]

I couldn't find the boiling point of chocolate, but I found the boiling point of some of the fats that make up cocoa butter; the ones I could find are around 200C or more.

So at normal room temperature, the saturated vapour pressure of the fats is going to be really tiny, so you're not going to get much cocoa butter at all with each breath- it will be down at the parts per million which will be negligible.

If you think about it, that makes sense. Chocolate just doesn't evaporate, except when chocoholics are around.

[chris]

at normal room temperature

Hmm - but if someone is cooking chocolate then the temperature is a bit higher and some molecules may be volatilised into the air...

[wolfekeeper]

The cocoa bean roasting process might well vaporise some of the fats, but all other chocolate processes typically occur at no more than about 45C, much higher than that and the chocolate flavour is damaged. The smell of chocolate is due to volatile chemicals which make up a tiny fraction of chocolate.

https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2011/august/whats-really-in-that-luscious-chocolate-aroma.html

whereas the calories are all in the non volatiles.