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Beware Headlines Saying Chocolate Is Good For You
BarbaraHudson writes: Many news organizations ran stories last fall extolling certain health benefits of chocolate. But it turns out the studies that the articles were based on didn't go quite so far. The CBC is running a pair of stories debunking chocolate's benefits to the average consumer: "Scientists have zeroed in on a family of fragile molecules known as cocoa flavanols. Research suggests they can relax blood vessels, improve blood flow and, as Small found in his study, even increase activity in a part of the brain involved with age related memory loss. But those flavanols largely disappear once the cocoa bean is heated, fermented and processed into chocolate. In other words, making chocolate destroys the very ingredient that is supposed to make it healthy.
That’s why Small’s memory study used a highly concentrated powder prepared exclusively for research by Mars Inc., the chocolate company, which also partially funded the study. ... There are lots of foods that contain potentially healthy flavanols, along with other bioactive compounds in complex combinations. So the question is: Would academic scientists in publicly funded institutions be so interested in the cocoa bean if the chocolate industry wasn't supporting so much of the research?"
That’s why Small’s memory study used a highly concentrated powder prepared exclusively for research by Mars Inc., the chocolate company, which also partially funded the study. ... There are lots of foods that contain potentially healthy flavanols, along with other bioactive compounds in complex combinations. So the question is: Would academic scientists in publicly funded institutions be so interested in the cocoa bean if the chocolate industry wasn't supporting so much of the research?"
Industries supporting research that supports their products! SAY IT AIN'T SO CRUSTY
If cocoa flavanols prove medically beneficial, we can figure out how to synthetically produce them in a dosed format. You might not be able to get health benefits by eating a chocolate bar, but perhaps one day your doctor will prescribe two flavanol pills every morning to treat your condition. This is how much of medicine functions. First, we notice something (in nature or lab produced) that has a beneficial effect. Next, we refine that substance and figure out a dosing system for it to maximize the effect and minimize any side effects.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Researchers do sketchy science to shill for corporations?
That unpossible.
And that, kids, is precisely why there is not, and never will be, a free market.
Because buying your own science is so much more lucrative, and the populace is so damned gullible.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Just putting that out there.
"The question" is whether or not there is any evidence to support their claim. I do not care where the money came from if evidence is produces and can be reproduced by others in controlled conditions. That is science.
Did they even manager to get the huge lead content under control?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If this sketchy science and reporting is pro Dove dark chocolate I'm all in.
What the media regurgitated as findings made by scientific studies were in fact PR releases by chocolate companies filled with half truths and misleading information. Of course the worst part is how people have been convinced that a Snickers and other junk food bars are actually chocolate.
I work in an academic lab doing research. If some company wants me to work on chocolate and is willing to supply it, lots of it, hell, I'll find any damn result they want.
The marketing bots are out of control and use science in ways it wasn't meant to be. All a marketing bot needs to do is look at one scientific fact anywhere that says something remotely positive about their product and voila, advertising angle. I seriously saw Lucky Charms marketed as a health food once because the oat pieces are made of oats which are known to be good for the heart. Science is supposed to be unbiased, but the results are being used in wrong ways. You can say something good about anything. "Why not try toxic waste for a facial cream? It will give your skin a healthy glow."
God spoke to me
"In other words, making chocolate destroys the very ingredient that is supposed to make it healthy."
But you still get all the healthy sugar and calories!
But those flavanols largely disappear once the cocoa bean is heated, fermented and processed into chocolate. In other words, making chocolate destroys the very ingredient that is supposed to make it healthy.
Cooking destroys most of the healthful compounds in our foods.
Chocolate/wine/dogs/etc. are not always the best things to research in scientific terms, but they are some of the very best ways for a mediocre scientist in an obscure field to get his name in the paper.
Why bother finding a cure for cancer (which is really fucking hard), when you can feed half your friends from your chocolate stash for three months, measure the hell out of them once a week, then massage the data into something click-baitable, and *poof* you now meet Wikipedia's standards for notability.
Interest with funding from any source? Yes. Science costs money. If no one is funding your research, it isn't getting done. Since the world isn't chock full of philanthropist billionaires chomping at the bit to fund every grad student's dream project, you kinda can't fault someone for taking money from Mars to study chocolate. If the science is done properly, it doesn't matter where the money comes from. If the science isn't done properly, it doesn't hold up to scrutiny from the scientific community. Whether the science is done properly or not, the media will continue to grab six or eight words out of every extract to see if they can make a sensational claim that'll generate clicks, regardless of its proximity to reality.
I just bought eight bags of Xmas M&M's for 75% off ($1.07 per bag) at CVS!
Are you suggesting that we let a bunch of pinko commie academics decide what to study with public money instead? By using funding from the Mars Corporation, research is channeled into what is important to more of us. Lets be honest, far more of our lives revolve around chocolate than they do the tse tse fly of of Northen Tanzania.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Just like politicians. Self-interest comes first. What a surprise.
Beware headlines of asteroid mining .... private space tourism... Mars colonies...
Oh that's different!
The reigning rule of thumb is if it tastes really good, it's bad for you.
If it's good for you, it doesn't taste really good.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The cocoa content of a chocolate bar is very, very small. And, it has been decreasing over time.
But what has also been INCREASING over time, is consumption of dark chocolate - sometimes very dark. These usually do have a lot more deal cocoa powder than the "traditional" chocolate bar ever did.
Any more I will not even bother with "chocolate" below 85%...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Would academic scientists in publicly funded institutions be so interested in the cocoa bean if the chocolate industry wasn't supporting so much of the research?"
I love the idea that this somehow invalidates the research. The researchers investigated what they could get funding to investigate, there's no allegations that the research was non-rigorous or of any other improper practice. Presumably the results are valid and therefore valuable. Further, presumably this research wouldn't have been done otherwise so we've got some additional research we wouldn't have done otherwise. So what if it supports someone's interests? We all benefit because now we know more about the world around us and what is, and isn't, good for our bodies. Now go and take your ad hominems elsewhere.
Is there any question of chocolate's benefits? I mean, really?
Jesus wept. Chocolate has been one of mankind's go-to pantydroppers for centuries. Some guys get beer goggles, I get chocolate goggles. Three truffles with >72% cocoa content and I'm yours for the asking.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm going to go ahead and assume you have no idea how science works. For starters researching natural products, as these scientists did, is a very fertile starting ground when searching for a "cure for cancer". Unfortunately you seem to have bought into the myth that only big glamorous research is valuable, ignoring the facts that, by definition, we don't know what the outcome of research will be until we do it and that most glamorous research will probably mostly involve work that looks "mediocre" in value to you.
... It is scientists will agree with whomever pays them.
And least we forget... Someone is always paying the scientist. There is no side that can be trusted sight unseen.
Science has earned the credibility it has today because when push came to shove it created a framework by which bullshit could be told from truth.
Some scientists tell lies. Some do not. This is true of scientists from all factions and sides.
How do you tell the difference? Personally evaluate the results. Short of that you're getting it all second or third hand... and somewhere in there you could have some misplaced trust.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Beware of /. headlines.
Hell fuck beware of them, /. editors are pustules just like Dr. Oz.
Silly you. You have apparently read the article and not the summary. This is slashdot. We skim the summary while ignoring the article, and if we're lucky we understand half of the summary. I have no clue what the article says, but the last sentence of the summary was "Would academic scientists in publicly funded institutions be so interested in the cocoa bean if the chocolate industry wasn't supporting so much of the research?" And my answer to that question is hell yes, even if the science isn't.
"Feeding half your friends from your chocolate stash for three months, measuring the hell out of them once a week, then massaging the data into something click-baitable" is not an example of real science. Even the MythBusters would at least be testing something very specific (i.e.: testing chocolate's effects on blood-pressure), based on a fairly good understanding of the what should happen theoretically, rather then doing a battery of tests and BSing the results into something marketable.
But quite a few real scientists would do something like that, even absent grant-funding, just to get their names in the paper.
Odds are it's not a mediocre scientist. Odds are it's a really good scientist paid to "find" results supporting a particular pre-determined conclusion.
That's how industry sponsored science works, and why US science is so guarded to accepting "mainstream knowledge" without scrutiny. For the US Science, that's a great thing; however, for the US Citizen it seems that the Scientists are these kooks who don't really understand anything because (if they hear real science) on day they seem to believe X (and then they hear the industry counter point) and the next day they seem to believe (not (X)).
So I hardly blame the US Citizenry for barely believing the Theory of Evolution, when in reality over 90% of all US Scientists believe it. It's not that the Citizens can't get to the real tests and results, it's that they can't filter the chaff from the wheat using the media. It's a rare Citizen that will (or even can) read a peer reviewed published paper vetted by a respectable journal; but, the common man can turn on a TV and get the "angle" which makes the peer review sound like it's a corrupt, stupid attempt to undermine what is obviously correct if you only use _common sense_ and discard all this scientific posturing for more grant money (the last part was how it is presented, not the truth).
With this in mind, it becomes a bit easier to understand why it took literally fifty years to move from "cigarettes are healthy" (yes they were once marketed that way initially, as a digestive) to "cigarettes harm you health", with the forever languishing "cigarettes might be harmful to your health" non-statement about the commonly accepted dangers. Public perception only shifted when nearly everyone knew someone who died due to heart or lung complications of smoking. I should know, I lost three relatives in ways that were obviously entangled with their smoking.
Yes hershey milk chocolate is about 11% cocoa. However Hersheys dark chocolate bar is 45% cocoa solids which is almost identical to lindt dark choclate truffles at 43%.
...say chocolate isn't good for you.
RAW. Eat it RAW. Duh. This is also not news. I have been hearing about this for a long time. You can buy raw cocoa nibs and powder. Kinda tangy but also delicious and you'll feel the kick.
So knowing this, why is the approach championed with a 5 score to engineer that specific molecule en masse? This really irks me. This fails an awful lot because extremely concentrated chemicals in isolation from their natural matrix of whatever (e.g. a cocoa bean growing and evolving, etc.) do not work the same. Ditto with heating them to an extreme, re: the point of the article.
I really think our biochemical approach of understanding enzyme pathways and engineering specific molecules to activate them is doomed. The failure rate for this is something like half (as far as studies of drugs and research into drugs that seems to work in models, mice, etc. but fails in humans). And basically every medical drug has extreme side effects, which is considered normal and I think it's basically a result of just going with one molecule.
But seriously, I knew about this like 10 years ago when I started eating raw chocolate.
So beware headlines like:
Beware Headlines Saying Chocolate Is Good For You
I know it is unfashionable to RTFA, but if you do you will see that the story is about the non peer reviewed non research of a "cultural geographer" who did not have anything to say about the health effects of cocoa, but raised a question about whether one tribe being studied sourced its cocoa beans locally or not. Excuse me, but the headline made me think this was about the health effects of cocoa, not whether there is something magical about some particular strain of bean. Is there a story here? Is there even a researcher here?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Speak for your own tastes.
I find cocoa powder + non-fat powered milk + hot water delicious. Also cocoa powder + coffee. My wife also likes the first, but not the second. OTOH, she likes to take unflavored non-fat yoghurt and mix it with cocoa powder.
Please note that these are just our most common ways to enjoy cocoa powder. There are many others that work quite well, and none of them require sugar.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
academia is basically a fraud. at least 90% of everything coming out of academia is bogus... academia, for example, came up with multiculturalism, which has damn near ruined america
The benefits of cocoa flavanols has been known for ages. This is why Mars Inc. and others have patented flavanol-safe cooking of cocoa beans. Cf. CocoaVia.
All this articles, and even this one is seriously. All the commercial chocolates, even the darker ones, are essentiality over priced milk and sugar spiked with cocoa. GMO corn is also used to give them body, including in sugar form in what you know as high-fructose corn syrup well because it is cheap. So telling people chocolate is healthy because is based in cocoa is a delusion, deception or rather, being ignorant most of the processed stuff is no longer food.
This is the entire problem with modern research. The funding model has evolved such that if a researcher wants to remain employed, he or she had better damn well come up with the desired results. Research used to be "here's some money to go find out what is going on." Today it's, "here's some money to prove my conclusion."
The confirmation bias is built into the funding model.
Spoken like someone truly looking for a scapegoat for their irresponsible, unhealthy lifestyle.
If you think there's some magic bullet (fats, whatever) that caused your heart attack, you're dead wrong. It's your overall lifestyle.
What? Chocolate is good for you? I think I'll have a bite and read the rest later.
Why can't they be researching chocolate because it's awesome? I want to "research" some right now!
What about the placebo effect? Eating dark chocolate makes me happy, and if I believe it's good for me, isn't it likely to have some health benefits due to this?
Plus, if I do all the things that they say will make me live longer - avoid sugar, avoid fat, get off the couch, drink my own piss - what's the point? Living longer won't be worth it if I can't do any of the things worth living for.
At least scientists have shown (possibly NSFW) that looking at breasts is good for your heart.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
If so, I can't believe your chocolate company is still operating after Augustus Gloop fell into your chocolate river. The USFDA would surely have shut you down.
And chocolate eggs laid by hens? Wow, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Chocolate consumption is correlated with a nice range of positive clinical effects. It doesn't matter if someone figures out one proposed mechanism is invalid, because the stuff still works. Just because we might still be learning *why* something works does not invalidate the effect at all.
That is all.
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.
Anything to offer of your own here that's legit? Obviously not. Do you just read some obscure passage from who knows who (or who paid them to say whatever it is you conveniently use) and you try pass it off like you are some expert? Yes. When YOU yourself are expert in a subject, then, sound off. Otherwise STFU (do yourself a favor).
I don't give a rats dick about dying from it's eating too much chocolate