oh you know what that means uh just a green m m yeah but you know what green m ms mean wink wink did you just say wink wink are you reading the stage directions or something look the green eminem's mean that what [Music] hello internet welcome to food theory the show that's a perfect 10 but actually thinks plain m ms are best m ms one year ago we took a look at the lore of m m's to prove that these cute crunchy spokes candies were actually cannibals but today we're doing something a little bit different we're looking at the eminem's themselves to confirm or deny a rumor that's been circling around them for decades do green m m's make you whole this is going to be tough to say without getting demonetized something tells me i'm not getting the markiplier treatment on this one friends do green m ms make you more likely to have some delicious uh sweet candies in your mouth uh let's go to the scientific route everything is less sexy when you describe it scientifically do green m m's actually put you into a state of heightened arousal where you'll be more likely to procreate with your fellow human beings yeah baby tldr looks like i'm gonna have to brush up on my youtube safe euphemisms for this episode friends yeah in case you haven't heard this one people have been convinced for years that green m m's actually make you feel uh let me pull out the thesaurus goat-ish goat-ish really merriam-webster uh yeah yeah apparently that is a real thing feel free to put that one on your next valentine's day card baby you make me feel goat-ish anyway as the urban legend goes green m m's put you in the mood for love as to where those rumors began no one really knows there are three theories three food theories as to why it happened one that it has to do with the color's relation to nature and fertility two that it has to do with the color's rarity since in the early days green m ms only tended to be ten percent of the candy in there but of course my personal favorite is theory number three that it all started with this commercial your batting average is totally awesome what's your sacred eminem i hit singles when i ate the brown ones doubles with yellows orange triples and with the green ones i take the balls you're up quick give me a green one only one homer left that's for me here's a triple a few things to unpack here first off that kid is a stone-cold liar in the close-up shot of his hand we actually see him pour out three green m m's and we never actually see him eat a single one so for him to suddenly say that he only has one left is a bald-faced lie and he is therefore hoarding all the homers to himself way to not be a team player there bud but more to the point in case you've never had the misfortune of being an american high schooler kids tend to relate physical milestones of a relationship to the bases in baseball kissing is usually first base and getting a home run is going all the way if you know what i mean in the commercial green m ms equal home runs so by the transitive property of equality you get the point also let me know down in the comments i'm just curious if you don't really have baseball in your local culture do you have something else like this like for all of europe you guys don't really play baseball is there a football equivalent to the bases metaphor or no are we in america just gross and weird anyway whatever the reason it was enough to go down in pop culture history as a thing people just say without really understanding green m m's nature's viagra the green ones make me horny and as word of the green m m's magical properties spread mars continued to stay quiet they did nothing to capitalize off the rumors that were circulating that was until chocolatier wendy jaffe decided to cash in by releasing a duplicate candy of just little green chocolates that she called the green ones and that is when mars decided to step in they weren't about to let anyone share their spotlight so they took legal action they won the suit and immediately started to lean in hard they released all green eminem packs for valentine's day you are the ultimate aphrodisiac if you don't know i suggest you run out and get yourself a pack of limited edition green m ms confidence is key no one works it like you they launched ad campaigns titled what is it about the green ones it's coming down i just don't like it he's a boy it's what boys do and of course most infamously they made the green spokes candy the sexy one she even got herself a sports illustrated photo shoot back in 2011. that was until the me too movement prompted mars to give her a more inclusive redesign and replace her signature gogo boots with a pair of sensible sneakers ugly sneakers too at least the goku boots were fun you could have at least given her a pair of yeezys anyway it's here that i step in sure the internet's fine tossing around the rumors and making jokes about the history of the urban legend but where has science stepped in where are my double-blind grant-supported studies looking at the really important issues like this nowhere until today that is that's right today i plan to look into the rumors and prove definitively once and for all whether the green m ms actually have some kind of seductive power does eating a bowl full of green m m's actually make you feel frisky or just fat or maybe just maybe there's another secret weapon that's hidden somewhere inside that bag let's begin before doing the actual experiment i first wanted to research whether the site of certain colors on m m's or otherwise could have weird physical effects on her body and the answer to that appears to be yes according to an article from the university of melbourne published in 2018 different temperatures of light target the autonomic nervous system which helps to regulate involuntary processes such as heart rate and blood pressure things that are going to play a role in your overall state of arousal in the test lights from higher color temperatures tend to result in higher levels of arousal also i've said the word a bunch of times so let me be perfectly clear here the scientific definition of arousal means physical and mental alertness and activation this test wasn't showing that you're gonna suddenly collapse into a fit of ecstasy every time you walk into a room with a fluorescent lamp but their test was only focused on colors of light what about just color colors another study exposed male students to the four primary colors red blue green and yellow the researchers then looked at electrical skin conductance and heart rate as a way of measuring the participants arousal and while none of the colors managed to raise the heart rate green actually made their skin clammier than both blue and yellow indicating higher levels of excitement so there certainly seems to be some evidence to suggest that green is arousing except you'll notice that there was one color that i left out red while green was slightly arousing red resulted in a significant elevation in arousal rates over all the others and this isn't just a one-off result either it's actually something that science has shown time and time again in a 2012 test specifically looking at red vs blue stimuli red was once again found to be the most exciting and in yet another survey of green vs red red once again came out on top overall there definitely appears to be a color hierarchy green is more exciting than blue but nothing compares to red and this makes sense psychologically right blue is the color of calm the ocean sleep blue is often used to represent intelligence and professionalism which is why it's the color that's favored by most banks green is a bit more active but it's calm think of peaceful grass and trees fields green is used to communicate freshness and health which explains why it's plastered across most grocery brands meanwhile red is the color of love passion when you're angry you see red it's the color of extreme emotions heightened arousal in short science tends to suggest that colors with longer wavelengths tend to be more stimulating than those with shorter wavelengths so if red is so arousing and associated with love then why are green m m's the ones that are getting all the glory why aren't red eminem's getting their piece of the action well in 1976 that's exactly what happened a russian scientist claimed to have found proof that fdnc red dye number two could cause cancer as a result the fda scrambled to ban the dye's use in all food products which resulted in mars pulling red m ms from their lineup for over a decade ironically enough the red m ms didn't actually use that specific dye they were just worried about the public backlash against any sort of red food but regardless of the reason the move actually had two consequences first it gave rise to orange m ms which replaced red in the package and has ever since been depicted as though he's witnessing a murder but secondly it started yet another lesser-known rumor that the red m m's were disappearing because they were such powerful aphrodisiacs mars employees were taking them off production lines to save them for themselves unlike the rumors with green though mars has clearly not embraced this one considering that the red spokes candy's human form looks like danny devito on a bender look at me i'm human do you want to eat meat no do you want to eat me no thanks no would you like to eat meat nobody wants to eat me i'm the luckiest nothing says eat my candy quite like the lorax getting front-ended by a garbage truck but with that i think we have all our parameters set for testing first the question that we initially started with do green m m's actually affect your libido there's something in either the look or ingredients of the green coloring that are gonna make you feel more amorous question two are the green m m's actually stealing the spotlight from the real secret weapon in the bag red m m's or maybe there's always possibility number three maybe there's nothing special about either of them and the whole thing is just a bunch of wacky urban legends with zero scientific backing spoiler alert it's probably gonna be that one to test it all out i gathered up 40 people split them across four groups and had them play a rousing game of hot or not because here at food theory we only accept the most professional approaches to science participants in each group were brought into a room and shown a collection of 20 test photos they were then asked to rate the hotness of each one on a scale of 1 to 10. the photos were drawn from a stock image website meant to be a neutral sample of typical individuals type of photos that you'd see on a dating website or social media profile next to the computer was a bowl of candy and this is where our variables came in the four groups consisted of a green group where the bowl was full of green m m's a red group where the bowl was full of red m m's a mixed group where the bowl was just full of an unaltered mix of m m colors and a control group where there was just no bowl of candy at all for the test we didn't do anything fancy like measure skin conductance or heartbeat we just measured their overall rankings of the photos were people that were presented with the green or red chocolates more likely to rate the photos they were viewing as hot thereby implying that something about the candy was making them more lustful we were about to find out but first you see that red button down there does it make you feel some sort of emotion deep down inside it's red after all and hey if you click it to subscribe to the channel one day we might bring you into a room full of candy sit in front of a computer and ask you to rate the visual attractiveness of random strangers i mean if that's not a reason to subscribe it's probably a reason to call the cops luckily i'm a friendly youtuber and things like that are my job and not sketchy in the slightest click it for the science okay so after crunching the numbers from our test we learned one important lesson eye contact makes you hot yeah we'll we'll get to the eminem results here in a minute but first i want to call it this really interesting trend with overall hotness rankings of all the photos just by coincidence one didn't have the person looking at the camera and that one was by far ranked as the least hot so pay attention all your online daters be confident look at the camera make that parasocial relationship work for you take it from me a png tuber who uses a cutout image of myself from 10 years ago to do all the talking for me also in case you were wondering this was the overall hottest picture with an average ranking of 7.4 now let's talk about the m m shall we because believe it or not the candy did seem to make a difference but not in the way that you might expect first we were able to confirm something about our research on color theory that we talked about earlier red does appear to be more stimulating than green the average ratings for the green stimulus group was 6.24 compared to the average rating of 6.48 for the red eminem group but while red ranked higher than green both ranked lower than the no candy group at 6.84 was it a big difference no would it have been ideal to have had more participants absolutely but you know i can only cost so many strangers on the street with promises of chocolate and hot photos before they put me on yet another watch list in short our initial experiment here not only confirmed that green isn't your lucky color when it comes to getting lucky but it also disproved that red is gonna be doing you special favors however while red and green weren't able to get the job done alone the mixed eminem's gave us a completely different story when presented with a bowl of mixed m m's the overall hotness ratings were on average a full point higher it wasn't even close with people in that group dropping all sorts of nines and tens across the board so what's that tell us honestly i'm not really sure my hypothesis my food hypothesis would be that it's not the color of the candy that matters but rather the presence of the candy in the first place having chocolate around is just gonna boost your mood the sugar is gonna shoot dopamine through your brain which is gonna make you happier and more likely to think that the people around you are attractive but then if candy's making the difference here why would a bowl of all green or all red chocolates not have the same effect again my guess would be because it's distracting or unsatisfying it feels uncomfortable to get a bowl of m m's that are all just the same color i know i'd be suspicious of those candies in a way that i'm not of a mixed bowl of colorful m ms that said it's just me trying to explain the results that we got but it need more testing to prove one way or the other a test that i actually would like to run at some point i know that i just joked about this before but seriously if you'd like to participate in one of these wacky studies sometime in the future hit the subscribe button we're currently working to figure out ways to include you as part of the testing process for episodes like this because let's be honest well 40 participants is fine 40 000 participants is a data set that'll make science weep so if you want to be around for the next time i start sending random candies to people in the mail hit that subscribe button now if you'll excuse me i need to go eat some skittles here the purple ones make you smarter but hey that's just a theory a food theory bon appetit [Music] you