11 ms·

The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of studies to show cocoa is good

178 points by inertial 9y ago

sna1l 9y ago
This is a very common move by food companies right? Curious as to what can be done to stop it? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...
- ianai 9y ago
  Society either has to fund more researchers with more money and accept the ramifications of that or accept companies funding their own interests. The same applies to campaign funding.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    This seems like a more serious answer to me.
  - fleitz 9y ago
    Also, stop reading the news, when you see someone healthy, ask them what they do and/or pay for their advice. (A lot of healthy people are in the wellness industries) Being healthy isn't rocket science, but on the other hand it involves a lot of lifestyle changes.
- wallace_f 9y ago
  Stop perpetuating the cultural idea that 'anything white collar is OK as long as you do it for money.' The corrupt researchers should be left without a job, just as, say, a food truck worker who plotted to intentionally profit from selling expired products would be fired and criminally charged. In both cases the actors are unethically profiting from your misfortune.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Surely it is primarily the organization which deserves censure, rather than individuals operating within the system. Unless you basically want to lock up entire fields' worth of scientists I don't see how individual responsibility is a solution.
    - bdamm 9y ago
      Isn't this part of the problem? When we (Americans) work for money, we don't do much investigation of where that money comes from. And really, how could we? It would take forensic accountant type of skills to really do that job. Maybe that's the fundamental cultural basis; if people felt it was important to know where the money comes from that is paying them they might think more about what work to take. There's a sense of urgency to getting and staying employed in America which counteracts this ability to be judicious about what work you take, which is perhaps the underlying cultural driver.
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        > There's a sense of urgency to getting and staying employed in America which counteracts this ability to be judicious about what work you take, which is perhaps the underlying cultural driver. Uh, yeah, of course there is, because the alternative is penury. If you make scientists liable and change nothing else the result is not going to be a great scientific system that works for the average Joe.
        wallace_f 9y ago
        So what is your solution? This happens in every industry, by the way: “Patterson's award for this discovery [the age of the earth]? A world of trouble. He didn’t know it, but he was on a collision course with some of the most powerful people on the planet [for discovering widespread lead pollution by accident].”-from the 2nd Cosmos
        emodendroket 9y ago
- afandian 9y ago
  Better bibliographic metadata and links, recording authorship, funding and affiliation. This is what organisations like Crossref (where I work), DataCite, ORCID etc are trying to do. Setting standards for, collecting and making available this information makes joining the dots and scrutiny easier. If you're interested in this kind of thing I recommend PIDapaloooza conference. https://pidapalooza.org https://pidapalooza.org (Posting in a personal capacity)
rpazyaquian 9y ago
I was eating a chocolate bar recently and I had this exact thought. Don't trust articles that say "X is good for you" when X is a commonly advertised commodity. Which is most things.
norswap 9y ago
> Cadbury Jr.’s newest confection loaded just about every buzzy health trend into a fresh green-and-white package: vegan, ethically sourced, organic dark chocolate and creamy, superfood avocado. Hardly incompatible with it being candy. Avocado is super fat, chocolate is super fat. What did you expect? Also fat and even "candy" are not synonymous with unhealthy. Sidebar: my first thought upon seeing the title: there isn't even that much chocolate in a Mars bar.
- sp332 9y ago
  Yeah that's exactly what the article says two sentences later.
  - norswap 9y ago
    I think it says exactly the opposite. > Wait, what? Make no mistake: This vegan avocado chocolate bar is candy. With nearly 600 calories and 43 grams of fat per 100-gram serving, the bar packs more fat and calories than Cadbury Dairy Milk, and just a little less sugar. > So how in the world could a chocolate bar be convincingly sold as a health food? You can thank a decades-long effort by the chocolate industry. I say candy (some, not stuff with lots of refined sugar) & fat can be healthy (in moderate doses, obviously).
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      The latest research seems to claim that fat has been unfairly maligned and you should actually be eating more of it.
    - sp332 9y ago
      An extra 600 calories from whatever source is not going to be healthy.
Dirlewanger 9y ago
>It may be that chocolate eaters are wealthier or have other characteristics, aside from their chocolate-eating habit, that protect them from disease. May be the main key to take away from this. Correlation != causation etc. etc. Cant deny though: biting into a square of 90% cacao dark chocolate(make sure it has more fiber than sugar) is an exquisitely divine experience.
scrapcode 9y ago
I recently pondered the possibility that this is happening in the vegetable industry right now. There are seemingly endless documentaries on Netflix at the moment promoting better health through vegetables (What the Health, Forks vs. Knives, etc). They have some compelling evidence towards their claims, but also towards possible corruptions within foundations such as the AHA and the Beef, Pork and poultry industries. Sure, it sounds like something a conspiracist would think up, but it'd just be the same tactics that these groups claim the meat industry et. al. have done to us for years, right?
JosephLark 9y ago
> “Dark chocolate probably has some beneficial properties to it,” said Salt Sugar Fat author Michael Moss, “but generally you have to eat so much of it to get any benefit that it’s kind of daunting, or something else in the product counteracts the benefits. In the case of chocolate, it’s probably going to be sugar.” Interestingly, the chart just below this quotation shows that it takes ~70 calories of straight cocoa powder to get a "heart healthy" dose of flavanols. With dark chocolate, which has less sugar as the cocoa percentage goes up, they don't distinguish the type but you need 750 calories. That's quite a bit. 70% cocoa dark chocolate is somewhat (not entirely) palatable to most people, but getting up to 85% becomes a distinguished taste even for dark chocolate lovers. Jives with my first thoughts after reading the submitted headline: that even if they could show cocoa was good for you, there is no way that translates into the standard Mars chocolate bars. I can totally see how it benefits Mars though - I've seen people give way more twisted justifications for eating junk food than "cocoa is good for you" as an excuse when eating a chocolate bar.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Not really a dark chocolate connoisseur, but your post got me wondering. Hershey's Special Dark (which a lot of people are probably familiar with and is way better than regular Hershey's milk chocolate) is 45%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey%27s_Special_Dark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey%27s_Special_Dark Can't imagine 80%, but it's easy to get on Amazon. Thanks for the extra weight.
  - lokerfoi 9y ago
    75% is pretty standard in Europe. I've tried a couple of 99% cocoa chocolates too, but these are really for the hardcore lovers (gets glued to the teeth and other taste issues).
    - pierrec 9y ago
      >gets glued to your teeth Because you're not supposed to chew it (I believe that's even written in the "tasting tips" on the Lindt packaging at least). Bite off small bits and let them melt in your mouth. It's kind of like a dark and very tasty coffee, if that sounds good to you, give it a try. Now if only I could find it in the supermarkets around here... (as is common in France)
maxxxxx 9y ago
It seems most nutritional advice is somehow skewed by commercial interests. The fat vs sugar discussion was influenced by industry and the sugar industry just had better lobbyists.
bllguo 9y ago
Would be less of an issue if society valued research properly, and enabled scientists to refuse corporate funds
gnicholas 9y ago
Revelations like this are why I'm skeptical about the current science on eggs. The existence of a huge, well-funded egg lobby makes me wonder whether we'll find out in 20 years that dietary cholesterol is actually bad for you after all.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Who knows? Plenty of manufacturers stand to benefit from selling low-cholesterol alternatives to dairy and eggs too, no?
air7 9y ago
> "... New York University nutrition researcher Marion Nestle (no relation to the chocolate maker)" I know this is off topic, but what do you make of the fact that the researcher's name is Nestle? Is it a total coincidence? Turns out the commonly repeated idea that "Denis's are more likely to become Dentists" (i.e nominative determinism) was proven false [1]. Yet, it seems there are only about 500 people named Nestle in the whole US... [2] It's of course just one data point, but it's still curious. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2014/01/09/no-of-course-dennis-is-not-more-likely-to-be-a-dentist-but-youre-reading-that-he-is-because-journalists-cant-do-math https://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2014/01/09/... [2] http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Map/Nestle http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Map/Nestle
BFatts 9y ago
Someone has to do the research and "Big" whatever seems to be the ones with the money to do so. So, what should we expect from them? They are going to look for research that is compelling to their business model, but as long as it's not wholly misleading, why is it bad? All research should be taken with a grain of salt. I also have another question: Everyone in media is always looking for that story to break about "Big Business" doing something. Big Pharma, Big Chocolate, Big Auto... but what's the alternative? I doubt that mom and pop have the cash to do research. And I sure as hell won't trust any mom and pop research about pharmacology.
- ianai 9y ago
  The only alternative is public funding.
- trendia 9y ago
  Suppose that cocoa does not have direct effects on health. Recruit 60 people, give 30 of them cocoa and 30 of them placebo. Due to random chance, you'll sometimes get positive results, and sometimes get negative results. If all of those studies are published, then there isn't a huge problem -- a metastudy would show that on average cocoa doesn't affect health. But instead, support that only the positive studies are published. A third party reviewing the relevant literature will assume that all studies conducted showed a positive result, when in fact they were only the studies that were published. This is the problem with having sponsored research: the research itself can be done properly, but a bias in publishing can give an inaccurate view of the true science at hand.
  - carbocation 9y ago
    Yours is a good description of publication bias. I think it's worth mentioning that funnel plots can give you a visual sense of whether there is publication bias, and tools such as Egger regression can help to try to tease out a less biased estimate in the face of publication bias.
- drak0n1c 9y ago
  Just like how "big business" has a motivation to fund certain types of research, people in media have ideological and business motivations for only investigating certain types of organizations and people.
colordrops 9y ago
I noticed a while ago how every three months or so a new big study would be at the top of google news about how great coffee is for you. I decided one time to dig into the sources and of course the study was funded by a coffee industry consortium.
jesperlang 9y ago
some random thoughts: these companies benefit from _vague_ terms like "chocolate" and exploit customer's pre-conceived notion of what these terms actually mean. Of course no scientific study is going to find that Mars/snickers bars are good for you. The trick is to make sure the good result from cocoa bean studies gets linked to your Mars/snickers/product. So the process might look like this.. 1. A compound in raw cocoa bean is found to help blood levels 2. Cocoa powder is made from cocoa beans, therefor cocoa powder is healthy 3. Chocolate with high cocoa powder content should also be healthy 4. "Chocolate" is healthy 5. Mars/snickers is chocolate right? Therefor these products are also healthy. Posts on health blogs, marketing campaigns, etc. water down the results from (1) and draw their own conclusions, and there you go. People go out and by all kinds of chocolate products. Similar stuff happen with things like green tea (super healthy, but your sugar drenched matcha latte is not), fruits and vegetables in general. A "productized" version of these raw foods is easier to control and cheaper than the real deal. That's the sad reality I guess. edit: Key take... it's not that sponsored studies are necessarily misleading or "fake". It's the purpose of exploiting the key results of the study by somehow linking them with your product in a positive way!
WheelsAtLarge 9y ago
I've decided that any study presented by the media is the result of hype/marketing by a company with a bias. Year after year I've seen a constant flow of "health news" that eventually turns out to be marginally true or outright false. Here's another one. No, chocolate is not health food. I suspect coffee is the next one to fall. Most reporters aren't knowledgeable enough to distinguish between hype and true breakthroughs. Because of this, they have to go to experts to determine whether the news is valid or not- if they do it at all. Unfortunately, they then get pointed to experts by the same companies that have a vested interest. Additionally, given the news cycle deadlines, its impossible to do the story justice. On a related idea, 10-15 years ago, the news media was full of stories reporting on how doctors were underprescribing pain medicines. The big point was that when people needed them narcotics were safe and not addictive. Now, 15 years later see the results. We now have thousands of people addicted and many of the dying. The tragedy is that the narcotic manufacturers were behind those stories. They did it to sell more pills. The reality is that we need to understand that we can't take these stories as advice but as, what they are, entertainment and as something to research if we have a real interest.
- joering2 9y ago
  > We now have thousands of people addicted and many of the dying. But isn't it also why Reagan announced war on drugs? So the government does answer when needed (eventually?)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - smallworld99 9y ago
    Is this sarcasm? The war on drugs is the exact opposite of how you should handle public health crises, like how he handled mental health issues by closing numerous mental hospitals, whose occupants are now homeless and wandering the streets.
- ggg9990 9y ago
  Solid cacao and black coffee both have some good and reasonably well-established therapeutic properties in small amounts. But "American-style" (huge servings with tons of sugar and fats added) they are just junk food.
jv22222 9y ago
There's a story (urban legend?) in Ireland that the Mars company forced a pub to changed it's name from "Mahr's Bar" to another name. I've always wondered if that was true, or even possible.
guelo 9y ago
Besides the sugar my main concern with chocolate is that a lot of it is contaminated with toxic levels of cadmium & lead.
- doctorstupid 9y ago
  That's why it's called Cadbury's.
ourmandave 9y ago
If Big Chocolate wants to spend money to help me rationalize my 2nd (or 3rd) Twix, who am I to get in their way? (De Nile is not just a chocolate river in Egypt.)
lawpoop 9y ago
OP means cacao
duncan_bayne 9y ago
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html " Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms."
- duncan_bayne 9y ago
  Upon re-reading that, I wonder how often "politics, crimes, or disasters" occur in the _same_ stories ... ;)
DoodleBuggy 9y ago
> [Fill in the blank company] has sponsored hundreds of studies to show [fill in the blank] is [good/bad] Now it's applicable to nearly everything

178 points by inertial 9y ago

This is a very common move by food companies right? Curious as to what can be done to stop it? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...

ianai 9y ago
Society either has to fund more researchers with more money and accept the ramifications of that or accept companies funding their own interests. The same applies to campaign funding.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  This seems like a more serious answer to me.
- fleitz 9y ago
  Also, stop reading the news, when you see someone healthy, ask them what they do and/or pay for their advice. (A lot of healthy people are in the wellness industries) Being healthy isn't rocket science, but on the other hand it involves a lot of lifestyle changes.
wallace_f 9y ago
Stop perpetuating the cultural idea that 'anything white collar is OK as long as you do it for money.' The corrupt researchers should be left without a job, just as, say, a food truck worker who plotted to intentionally profit from selling expired products would be fired and criminally charged. In both cases the actors are unethically profiting from your misfortune.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Surely it is primarily the organization which deserves censure, rather than individuals operating within the system. Unless you basically want to lock up entire fields' worth of scientists I don't see how individual responsibility is a solution.
  - bdamm 9y ago
    Isn't this part of the problem? When we (Americans) work for money, we don't do much investigation of where that money comes from. And really, how could we? It would take forensic accountant type of skills to really do that job. Maybe that's the fundamental cultural basis; if people felt it was important to know where the money comes from that is paying them they might think more about what work to take. There's a sense of urgency to getting and staying employed in America which counteracts this ability to be judicious about what work you take, which is perhaps the underlying cultural driver.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      > There's a sense of urgency to getting and staying employed in America which counteracts this ability to be judicious about what work you take, which is perhaps the underlying cultural driver. Uh, yeah, of course there is, because the alternative is penury. If you make scientists liable and change nothing else the result is not going to be a great scientific system that works for the average Joe.
      - wallace_f 9y ago
        So what is your solution? This happens in every industry, by the way: “Patterson's award for this discovery [the age of the earth]? A world of trouble. He didn’t know it, but he was on a collision course with some of the most powerful people on the planet [for discovering widespread lead pollution by accident].”-from the 2nd Cosmos
        emodendroket 9y ago
afandian 9y ago
Better bibliographic metadata and links, recording authorship, funding and affiliation. This is what organisations like Crossref (where I work), DataCite, ORCID etc are trying to do. Setting standards for, collecting and making available this information makes joining the dots and scrutiny easier. If you're interested in this kind of thing I recommend PIDapaloooza conference. https://pidapalooza.org https://pidapalooza.org (Posting in a personal capacity)

rpazyaquian 9y ago

I was eating a chocolate bar recently and I had this exact thought. Don't trust articles that say "X is good for you" when X is a commonly advertised commodity. Which is most things.

norswap 9y ago

> Cadbury Jr.’s newest confection loaded just about every buzzy health trend into a fresh green-and-white package: vegan, ethically sourced, organic dark chocolate and creamy, superfood avocado. Hardly incompatible with it being candy. Avocado is super fat, chocolate is super fat. What did you expect? Also fat and even "candy" are not synonymous with unhealthy. Sidebar: my first thought upon seeing the title: there isn't even that much chocolate in a Mars bar.

sp332 9y ago
Yeah that's exactly what the article says two sentences later.
- norswap 9y ago
  I think it says exactly the opposite. > Wait, what? Make no mistake: This vegan avocado chocolate bar is candy. With nearly 600 calories and 43 grams of fat per 100-gram serving, the bar packs more fat and calories than Cadbury Dairy Milk, and just a little less sugar. > So how in the world could a chocolate bar be convincingly sold as a health food? You can thank a decades-long effort by the chocolate industry. I say candy (some, not stuff with lots of refined sugar) & fat can be healthy (in moderate doses, obviously).
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    The latest research seems to claim that fat has been unfairly maligned and you should actually be eating more of it.
  - sp332 9y ago
    An extra 600 calories from whatever source is not going to be healthy.

Dirlewanger 9y ago

>It may be that chocolate eaters are wealthier or have other characteristics, aside from their chocolate-eating habit, that protect them from disease. May be the main key to take away from this. Correlation != causation etc. etc. Cant deny though: biting into a square of 90% cacao dark chocolate(make sure it has more fiber than sugar) is an exquisitely divine experience.

scrapcode 9y ago

I recently pondered the possibility that this is happening in the vegetable industry right now. There are seemingly endless documentaries on Netflix at the moment promoting better health through vegetables (What the Health, Forks vs. Knives, etc). They have some compelling evidence towards their claims, but also towards possible corruptions within foundations such as the AHA and the Beef, Pork and poultry industries. Sure, it sounds like something a conspiracist would think up, but it'd just be the same tactics that these groups claim the meat industry et. al. have done to us for years, right?

JosephLark 9y ago

> “Dark chocolate probably has some beneficial properties to it,” said Salt Sugar Fat author Michael Moss, “but generally you have to eat so much of it to get any benefit that it’s kind of daunting, or something else in the product counteracts the benefits. In the case of chocolate, it’s probably going to be sugar.” Interestingly, the chart just below this quotation shows that it takes ~70 calories of straight cocoa powder to get a "heart healthy" dose of flavanols. With dark chocolate, which has less sugar as the cocoa percentage goes up, they don't distinguish the type but you need 750 calories. That's quite a bit. 70% cocoa dark chocolate is somewhat (not entirely) palatable to most people, but getting up to 85% becomes a distinguished taste even for dark chocolate lovers. Jives with my first thoughts after reading the submitted headline: that even if they could show cocoa was good for you, there is no way that translates into the standard Mars chocolate bars. I can totally see how it benefits Mars though - I've seen people give way more twisted justifications for eating junk food than "cocoa is good for you" as an excuse when eating a chocolate bar.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
Not really a dark chocolate connoisseur, but your post got me wondering. Hershey's Special Dark (which a lot of people are probably familiar with and is way better than regular Hershey's milk chocolate) is 45%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey%27s_Special_Dark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey%27s_Special_Dark Can't imagine 80%, but it's easy to get on Amazon. Thanks for the extra weight.
- lokerfoi 9y ago
  75% is pretty standard in Europe. I've tried a couple of 99% cocoa chocolates too, but these are really for the hardcore lovers (gets glued to the teeth and other taste issues).
  - pierrec 9y ago
    >gets glued to your teeth Because you're not supposed to chew it (I believe that's even written in the "tasting tips" on the Lindt packaging at least). Bite off small bits and let them melt in your mouth. It's kind of like a dark and very tasty coffee, if that sounds good to you, give it a try. Now if only I could find it in the supermarkets around here... (as is common in France)

maxxxxx 9y ago

It seems most nutritional advice is somehow skewed by commercial interests. The fat vs sugar discussion was influenced by industry and the sugar industry just had better lobbyists.

bllguo 9y ago

Would be less of an issue if society valued research properly, and enabled scientists to refuse corporate funds

gnicholas 9y ago

Revelations like this are why I'm skeptical about the current science on eggs. The existence of a huge, well-funded egg lobby makes me wonder whether we'll find out in 20 years that dietary cholesterol is actually bad for you after all.

emodendroket 9y ago
Who knows? Plenty of manufacturers stand to benefit from selling low-cholesterol alternatives to dairy and eggs too, no?

air7 9y ago

> "... New York University nutrition researcher Marion Nestle (no relation to the chocolate maker)" I know this is off topic, but what do you make of the fact that the researcher's name is Nestle? Is it a total coincidence? Turns out the commonly repeated idea that "Denis's are more likely to become Dentists" (i.e nominative determinism) was proven false [1]. Yet, it seems there are only about 500 people named Nestle in the whole US... [2] It's of course just one data point, but it's still curious. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2014/01/09/no-of-course-dennis-is-not-more-likely-to-be-a-dentist-but-youre-reading-that-he-is-because-journalists-cant-do-math https://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2014/01/09/... [2] http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Map/Nestle http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Map/Nestle

BFatts 9y ago

Someone has to do the research and "Big" whatever seems to be the ones with the money to do so. So, what should we expect from them? They are going to look for research that is compelling to their business model, but as long as it's not wholly misleading, why is it bad? All research should be taken with a grain of salt. I also have another question: Everyone in media is always looking for that story to break about "Big Business" doing something. Big Pharma, Big Chocolate, Big Auto... but what's the alternative? I doubt that mom and pop have the cash to do research. And I sure as hell won't trust any mom and pop research about pharmacology.

ianai 9y ago
The only alternative is public funding.
trendia 9y ago
Suppose that cocoa does not have direct effects on health. Recruit 60 people, give 30 of them cocoa and 30 of them placebo. Due to random chance, you'll sometimes get positive results, and sometimes get negative results. If all of those studies are published, then there isn't a huge problem -- a metastudy would show that on average cocoa doesn't affect health. But instead, support that only the positive studies are published. A third party reviewing the relevant literature will assume that all studies conducted showed a positive result, when in fact they were only the studies that were published. This is the problem with having sponsored research: the research itself can be done properly, but a bias in publishing can give an inaccurate view of the true science at hand.
- carbocation 9y ago
  Yours is a good description of publication bias. I think it's worth mentioning that funnel plots can give you a visual sense of whether there is publication bias, and tools such as Egger regression can help to try to tease out a less biased estimate in the face of publication bias.
drak0n1c 9y ago
Just like how "big business" has a motivation to fund certain types of research, people in media have ideological and business motivations for only investigating certain types of organizations and people.

colordrops 9y ago

I noticed a while ago how every three months or so a new big study would be at the top of google news about how great coffee is for you. I decided one time to dig into the sources and of course the study was funded by a coffee industry consortium.

jesperlang 9y ago

some random thoughts: these companies benefit from _vague_ terms like "chocolate" and exploit customer's pre-conceived notion of what these terms actually mean. Of course no scientific study is going to find that Mars/snickers bars are good for you. The trick is to make sure the good result from cocoa bean studies gets linked to your Mars/snickers/product. So the process might look like this.. 1. A compound in raw cocoa bean is found to help blood levels 2. Cocoa powder is made from cocoa beans, therefor cocoa powder is healthy 3. Chocolate with high cocoa powder content should also be healthy 4. "Chocolate" is healthy 5. Mars/snickers is chocolate right? Therefor these products are also healthy. Posts on health blogs, marketing campaigns, etc. water down the results from (1) and draw their own conclusions, and there you go. People go out and by all kinds of chocolate products. Similar stuff happen with things like green tea (super healthy, but your sugar drenched matcha latte is not), fruits and vegetables in general. A "productized" version of these raw foods is easier to control and cheaper than the real deal. That's the sad reality I guess. edit: Key take... it's not that sponsored studies are necessarily misleading or "fake". It's the purpose of exploiting the key results of the study by somehow linking them with your product in a positive way!

WheelsAtLarge 9y ago

I've decided that any study presented by the media is the result of hype/marketing by a company with a bias. Year after year I've seen a constant flow of "health news" that eventually turns out to be marginally true or outright false. Here's another one. No, chocolate is not health food. I suspect coffee is the next one to fall. Most reporters aren't knowledgeable enough to distinguish between hype and true breakthroughs. Because of this, they have to go to experts to determine whether the news is valid or not- if they do it at all. Unfortunately, they then get pointed to experts by the same companies that have a vested interest. Additionally, given the news cycle deadlines, its impossible to do the story justice. On a related idea, 10-15 years ago, the news media was full of stories reporting on how doctors were underprescribing pain medicines. The big point was that when people needed them narcotics were safe and not addictive. Now, 15 years later see the results. We now have thousands of people addicted and many of the dying. The tragedy is that the narcotic manufacturers were behind those stories. They did it to sell more pills. The reality is that we need to understand that we can't take these stories as advice but as, what they are, entertainment and as something to research if we have a real interest.

joering2 9y ago
> We now have thousands of people addicted and many of the dying. But isn't it also why Reagan announced war on drugs? So the government does answer when needed (eventually?)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- smallworld99 9y ago
  Is this sarcasm? The war on drugs is the exact opposite of how you should handle public health crises, like how he handled mental health issues by closing numerous mental hospitals, whose occupants are now homeless and wandering the streets.
ggg9990 9y ago
Solid cacao and black coffee both have some good and reasonably well-established therapeutic properties in small amounts. But "American-style" (huge servings with tons of sugar and fats added) they are just junk food.

jv22222 9y ago

There's a story (urban legend?) in Ireland that the Mars company forced a pub to changed it's name from "Mahr's Bar" to another name. I've always wondered if that was true, or even possible.

guelo 9y ago

Besides the sugar my main concern with chocolate is that a lot of it is contaminated with toxic levels of cadmium & lead.

doctorstupid 9y ago
That's why it's called Cadbury's.

ourmandave 9y ago

If Big Chocolate wants to spend money to help me rationalize my 2nd (or 3rd) Twix, who am I to get in their way? (De Nile is not just a chocolate river in Egypt.)

lawpoop 9y ago

OP means cacao

duncan_bayne 9y ago

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html " Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms."

duncan_bayne 9y ago
Upon re-reading that, I wonder how often "politics, crimes, or disasters" occur in the _same_ stories ... ;)

DoodleBuggy 9y ago

> [Fill in the blank company] has sponsored hundreds of studies to show [fill in the blank] is [good/bad] Now it's applicable to nearly everything