Pink Dog

Good news about chocolate consumption. (Perhaps.)

Actually, the graph has been doing the rounds for a quite while now, but it features chocolate so I can’t resist…
Chocolate consumption and Nobel prize winners in various countries
As the BBC reported back in 2012:

Eating more chocolate improves a nation’s chances of producing Nobel Prize winners – or at least that’s what a recent study appears to suggest…

The study’s author, Franz Messerli of Columbia University, started wondering about the power of chocolate after reading that cocoa was good for you.

One paper suggested regular cocoa intake led to improved mental function in elderly patients with mild cognitive impairment, a condition which is often a precursor to dementia, he recalls.

But as the BBC rightly adds, dropping a justifiable damper on things,

This is a classic case where correlation, however strong, does not mean causation.

However, it’s always wise to be cautious about just dismissing something as correlation because quite often correlation does imply causation. The circumstances in which it does get talked about only rarely, which is why there’s a whole chapter on when correlationĀ does imply causation in my book, Bad News.

One response to “Good news about chocolate consumption. (Perhaps.)”

  1. Brits on the whole don’t like chocolate, they eat all kinds of diluted rubbish of which you can’t taste the chocolate for all the sugar and other additives.
    Here in Belgium I buy extremely tasty black chocolate which most people would refuse if offered to them.

    Chocolate is good for you, various ‘bars’ are bad for you !

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