Complex Numbers

Pure Imagination

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/10/18/15995478/chocolate-health-bene...

Dark chocolate is now a health food. Here’s how that happened.

Let me guess - Willy Wonka paid for "scientific" studies.

The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of scientific studies to show cocoa is good for you.

See? Cynics are usually right. Shunned and ignored, but right.

A year after James Cadbury, the 30-something great-great-great-grandson of the British chocolatier John Cadbury, launched his luxury cocoa startup in 2016, he introduced an avocado chocolate bar.

Way to destroy both avocado and chocolate, Jim.

The company promised to deliver the nutrition of avocados — in a chocolate bar. Journalists were dazzled.

Journalists shouldn't be dazzled. Journalists should be even more cynical - and skeptical - than I am. But we live in the 21st Century and, clearly, in Bizarro World.

Big Chocolate’s investment in health science was a marketing masterstroke, catapulting dark chocolate into the superfood realm along with red wine, blueberries, and avocados — and helping to sell more candy.

I'm a big fan of science. I'm also a big fan of chocolate. But science mixed with chocolate is like... M&Ms mixed with Skittles. I had a chaotic evil Dungeon Master who did that once. Once.

Point is, science, especially when it comes to food and nutrition, is largely statistical. And you know what Twain said about statistics.

Actually, Twain said (or, more accurately, wrote), "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics," but he didn't come up with it. So that's a lie too. It's lies all the way down!

Which brings me back to healthy chocolate.

Such overwhelmingly positive findings suggest this area of industry-funded nutrition science may be biased.

YA THINK?!

Fawning cocoa coverage is so pervasive, one journalist even created a bad chocolate study, suggesting the candy promotes weight loss. His goal was to fool the media into picking it up and make a point about how easy it is to do so. (It worked.)

I find that hilarious. And sad. Sadlarious.

“I don’t want to be cynical — a lot of their science is good; it’s put in peer-reviewed journals,” Coe added. “But just keep in mind that too much of anything is not really good. If you’re hooked on chocolate, you’re hooked on sugar.”

Funny you should mention sugar. Turns out a whole bunch of studies have been done on sugar as well, and it appears that added sugars are Really Fucking Bad For You. There might well be bias in that science as well, but you don't hear as much about it. Now, me, I prefer chocolate that's as bitter as my ex-wife and as dark as her lawyer's heart, but the vast majority of people? "Oh, I hear chocolate is good for you so I'mma eat this whole bag of M&Ms." Like one guy I knew who heard that red wine was good for you so he chugged a gallon of it every day. Pretty sure he's dead now. Liver and pancreas got into a fight and he exploded.

Still, most nutritional studies that you hear about are touting the health benefits of foods that taste like ass. Kale, for example. I was shocked to learn recently, by the way, that there was supposedly a time when no one had heard of kale. Shocked, because my family grew that by the bushel in the garden and sold it at farmers' markets when I was a kid. Always hated that stuff. It's only recently that I figured out how to make it palatable.

And that's one problem with "health" foods - the Puritan undertones of American society steer us away from believing that anything can be good for you if it's not like doing penance. Which is probably why so many people are eager to believe the chocolate stories - they reverse the narrative.

My personal opinion? Eat chocolate. Don't make it a "guilty pleasure." Don't pretend it's a health food. Just enjoy it for what it is - limit yourself if you have to (I certainly do), but god DAMN I'm tired of all the anxiety and neuroses surrounding food and drink these days.