NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Of
all the chocolate research out
there, the most unabashed
tribute to the "dark gold" has
to be a study just published in
one of the world's most prestigious medical journals. Drum roll, please: The higher a
country's chocolate
consumption, the more Nobel
laureates it spawns per capita,
according to findings released
today in the New England Journal of Medicine. And guess who leads the pack?
The Swiss, of course, closely
followed by the Swedes and the
Danes. The U.S. is somewhere
in the middle of chocolate
consumption and Nobel Prize winners per capita. To produce
just one more laureate, the
nation would have to up its
cocoa intake by a whopping
275 million pounds a year,
according to Dr. Franz Messerli, who did the analysis. "The amount it takes, it's
actually quite stunning, you
know," Messerli chuckled. "The
Swiss eat 120 bars - that is, 3-
ounce bars - per year, for every
man, woman and child, that's the average." The Nobel Foundation in
Stockholm is in the midst of
announcing this year's winners.
It's unclear whether the awards
reflect chocolate intake, but
previous laureates greeted the new research enthusiastically. "I attribute essentially all my
success to the very large
amount of chocolate that I
consume," said Eric Cornell, an
American physicist who shared
the Nobel Prize in 2001. "Personally I feel that milk
chocolate makes you stupid,"
he added. "Now dark chocolate
is the way to go. It's one thing
if you want like a medicine or
chemistry Nobel Prize, OK, but if you want a physics Nobel
Prize it pretty much has got to
be dark chocolate." Admittedly, both researchers
are jesting. Messerli said the
whole idea is absurd, although
the data are legitimate and
contain a few lessons about the
fallibility of science. FREAK CORRELATIONS Messerli, who runs the
hypertension program at St.
Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in
New York, came up with the
idea for the study after seeing
a study that linked flavonoids, a type of antioxidants present in
cocoa and wine, to better
scores on cognitive tests. He began with industry data on
chocolate intake in 23
countries and a list from
Wikipedia ranking countries
according to the number of
Nobel laureates per capita. "I started plotting this in a
hotel room in Kathmandu,
because I had nothing else to
do, and I could not believe my
eyes," he told Reuters Health.
All the countries lined up neatly on a graph, with higher
chocolate intake tied to more
laureates. The link was so strong it made
a joke out of a statistic that
virtually all studies in medical
journals hinge on - the so-
called p-value. Technically, this
is the probability that a given result would be at least as
"extreme" as the observation
assuming, in this case, that
there is no correlation. The p-value Messerli calculated
was 0.0001. "This means that the odds of
this being due to chance are
less than one in 10,000," he
said. "As physician scientists
we live and die by p-values, and
here we have a p-value of a magnitude that is incredible,
and unless you teach me
otherwise it's a complete
nonsense correlation." "So," he added, "how good are
p-values at giving us certainty?
That is really some of the
concern here." It's not the first time scientists
have found correlations that
seem to defy all logic - and
indeed may. The number of
storks across Europe has been
linked to birth rates, for instance, and sunspots have
been tied to suicides in men. By chance alone, these freak
results are destined to find
their way into mainstream
medical journals as well. "Scientists look at hundreds
and hundreds of different
things, and every once in a
while they will find two things
that are surprisingly correlated
with each other, and then they will say, 'Look at those very
strong correlations and how
important that is,'" Cornell told
Reuters Health, this time
speaking seriously. "But what
they don't do is tell you about all the different things that
aren't correlated." As a result, Cornell said, "you
are going to very much
underestimate the randomness
of what you got." The other possibility is that the
link is real, but meaningless. "National chocolate
consumption is correlated with
a country's wealth and high-
quality research is correlated
with a country's wealth," said
Cornell. "So therefore chocolate is going to be correlated with
high-quality research, but there
is no causal connection there." NO SHORTCUTS When it comes to chocolate,
several researchers have
suggested dark varieties might
benefit the brain, the heart and
even help cut excess pounds. In the conflict of interest
section of his article, Messerli,
who is of Swiss origin, "admits
to daily chocolate
consumption." Despite the
tongue-in-cheek tone, he said, he does believe chocolate has
real health effects, although he
warns people to stay away from
the sweeter kinds. Many researchers, however, say
the evidence is far from
impressive at this point. "Certainly I have never seen
anything that has made me
start adding (chocolate) to my
diet," said Dr. Yoni Freedhoff,
an assistant professor of family
medicine at the University of Ottawa in Canada. While he appreciates the
jocular nature of the new
report, he said both the media
and journals are guilty of being
too gullible when it comes to
cocoa. "It's a little bit disappointing to
see such a regular occurrence
of publishing data that really
are not strong enough to be
conclusive, but will be reported
on effusively," Freedhoff, an obesity expert, told Reuters
Health. "Our never-ending quest for
super foods and the perfect
diet is what's messing us up
from a nutrition perspective,"
he said, adding that exercise
and balanced meals cooked at home are keys to healthy living. "We are looking for shortcuts
to health, but healthy living
does require effort. There really
aren't any remarkable
shortcuts," Freedhoff added.
"When it comes to indulgences, we should indulge in them
because we enjoy them and
without expectations of health
benefits." Or of Nobel Prizes, one might
add.