Does Chocolate Make you Smarter?
We all know that sugar consumption is on the rise, especially with our children but is all the news bad. Maybe not. I stumbled across this interesting piece of research that shows a relationship between a country’s chocolate consumption and Nobel Prize winners.
One would assume, when seeing the chart that it's one of those jokey relationship charts like the ones that try to correlate homicides with frequency of playing computer video games.
But apparently the chocolate chart isn't a joke.
The chocolate chart actually comes from a New England Journal of Medicine paper published in 2012 called: Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates.
The paper was written by Franz H. Messerli, MD. Messerli writes:
Since chocolate consumption could hypothetically improve cognitive function not only in individuals but also in whole populations, I wondered whether there would be a correlation between a country’s level of chocolate consumption and its population’s cognitive function. To my knowledge, no data on overall national cognitive function are publicly available. Conceivably, however, the total number of Nobel laureates per capita could serve as a surrogate end point reflecting the proportion with superior cognitive function and thereby give us some measure of the overall cognitive function of a given country.
The principal finding of this study is a surprisingly powerful correlation between chocolate intake per capita and the number of Nobel laureates in various countries. Of course, a correlation between X and Y does not prove causation but indicates that either X influences Y, Y influences X, or X and Y are influenced by a common underlying mechanism. However, since chocolate consumption has been documented to improve cognitive function, it seems most likely that in a dose-dependent way, chocolate intake provides the abundant fertile ground needed for the sprouting of Nobel laureates. Obviously, these findings are hypothesis-generating only and will have to be tested in a prospective, randomized trial.
So don’t hold back . . . Eat more Chocolate!
Comments