Eat Chocolate, Be Smart

Image credit: http://now.msn.com/men-who-eat-chocolate-reduce-stroke-risk 

I came across this news article about a tongue-in-cheek paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine that claimed a close relationship between chocolate consumption and the number of Nobel prize laureates per capita. 

A researcher called Franz Messerli of Columbia University in New York took the number of Nobel Prize winners in a country as an indicator of national intelligence and correlated it with that nation’s chocolate consumption. Switzerland came top, with the highest chocolate consumption per head and also the highest number of Nobel laureates per capita. At the other end of the scale was China, which scored low on both counts. 

Another study found that two cups of hot cocoa a day, for 30 days, gave older patients with impaired brain blood flow a 30% bump in memory and thinking abilities. The study, published this week in the journal Neurology, was authored by Dr. Farzaneh Sorond, a neurologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. It's an admittedly small study, involving just 60 people with an average age of 72. There was no control group. 

[But Dr. Sorond cautioned against self-medicating with chocolate, though. People with diabetes, high blood pressure and tendencies toward vascular dementia, "can't really afford to take in more sugar, fat and calories”].

To me, the message is clear – chocolate is really good for us! Don’t you love it when you come across scientific studies that tell you what you wish to hear?