11 ms·

I fooled millions into thinking chocolate helps weight loss (2015)

217 points by worez 4y ago

t0bia_s 4y ago
It is really just about trust, nothing else. Unfortunately those "studies" are pure science or data for many people. Worst part is, that it is also justification for implementing unlawful practices (ie covid policy).
mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
Reminds of me of a recent article and a comment I made there [0] > If industry tells you "we need a study that shows X" there's almost certainly a way to design a study in such a way to get result X. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32948871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32948871
- glandium 4y ago
  I'd posit that there's almost certainly a way to design a study in such a way to get the opposite result.
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago
    Yes, but often only one side has money available to run such a study. It's not like the anti-chocolate lobby has a huge corporate base.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  "If you got a dead body and you think his brother did it, you're gonna find out you're right." - Verbal Kint
themodelplumber 4y ago
This was weird to read personally. I used chocolate in all kinds of ways for extreme weight loss, so "fooled millions into thinking" certainly has the subjectively-not-correct feel to it. But the headline also does a great job of leaving this open question of, "but in the end chocolate is really not a weight loss tool, right?" "Right?" (Anakin stare) When I was wrapping up my first big cut, I was feasting on boxes of chocolate bars that I found on clearance at local stores. There is nothing quite like watching the scale numbers go down while you eat junk food. My BMI entered the "normal" zone while I was literally eating like a kid in a candy store. These days, I still buy chocolate bars and try to keep them stocked up. I also buy cacao powder and add it to my coffee with some salt and low-calorie sweetener, in lieu of breakfast. It can provide a really awesome calorie-efficient uplift for those of us who are sensitive to cacao. So, stuff like this really stood out: > Testing bitter chocolate as a dietary supplement was his idea. When I asked him why, Frank said it was a favorite of the “whole food” fanatics. “Bitter chocolate tastes bad, therefore it must be good for you,” he said. “It’s like a religion.” It just seems like the kind of anecdote you'd want to avoid. Like why not use some science to identify a population & a practice? Or is part of the follow-up also going to point out "plus we just ran with somebody's anecdote to get the ball rolling lol"?
- lake_vincent 4y ago
  This is the first time I'm hearing about this...and I have so many questions. What did this do to your body aside from the weight loss? Did you have anything anything else to supplement? How did you poop (there's almost fiber in junk food)? How did you manage your blood sugar? Did the caffeine in the chocolate have an effect? And just how much chocolate are we talking here?
  - themodelplumber 4y ago
    IMO it's a fun topic. Look up dirty cuts on /r/loseit, you'll probably find some funny pictures. I remember a photo of an absolute bean pole holding up his food for the day, IIRC something like a king-size oreo chocolate bar. (Eating all the king size stuff like it's a "meal in a bar" is an amazing feeling btw) The worst effect I had from any food was from salad. This was at a different point, when I was cutting down on fat and lining up my macros. I ate so much spinach (along with my almonds) that I over-oxalated myself and went to the ER with massive pain from my fresh new kidney stones. Pooping is very nicely taken care of by hydration. This is a surprising one to a lot of people. It's not a problem. I drank over 100 oz a day. BTW never do that with mainly pickle juice. Funny experience. I also sprinkled some other foods in there for variety. But maybe at least 2/3 of my meals were junk food for a substantial period. And for some solid period of time it was all junk. As much junk as possible. It's a very extreme state of mind when you are cutting that much so you need the emotional support of a pretty candy wrapper and child-like attitude sometimes. Blood sugar is not a problem for me or in my family history--it's a safe zone. Subjective factors like this are very, very important btw. I was also exercising lots, like 2 hours hiking every day and the BWF routine from reddit, gobs of pull-ups since I could never do them before, etc. Resting pulse was in low 40s, always got grilled on that one when I went to the doctor. > And just how much chocolate are we talking here? IDK, how would you measure it going beyond the powder mix-ins? I consume at least 5 tbsp of raw cacao powder a day, plus all the other times when I'm eating chocolate, but that's less straight up chocolate. (I also have a weird theory that chocolate and sweets are a very good match for my subjective psychology and it's kinda related in general to people who eat like Warren Buffett btw.)
vouaobrasil 4y ago
This is why I actually don't trust newspapers or news sites for any medical advice for statements like "a glass of wine a day will help you live longer", or some nonsense like that. In fact, the best place to find this information is through the primary literature. You can use Google Scholar and Sci-hub to do your own research. For most issues, it's actually not to hard to understand the primary literature, and it will be much more accurate than the crap you read on popular websites.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  The primary literature is a huge waste of time in so many cases though. It can be really frustrating. IF there's not a problem in one of hundreds of representational practices, you can find out later there was some other compromise (and some are HUGE) of the data or methodology. And then if you point out a problem with a research undertaking or study when it is brought up, you can get some set of true-science-believers looking at you like it can't possibly be. It's unreal sometimes. It's really no wonder people spread their subjective experiences as if they are science. Institutional "science" is great as a set of models and perspectives, but when you dip into the product you can start to wonder if you are effectively doing the equivalent of product research by watching the home shopping network.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    The only people who trust science blindly are those who have never seen how science gets done. It's scientism pure and simple. Or to quote a bunch of people who had a great idea: Nullius In Verba.
    - orangepurple 4y ago
      In so much of the world today, "science" is a brand, and everyone is told to listen to "scientists" because they "follow the science" and know the best way. The genpop couldn't possibly even begin to wrap their heads around text written above a 5th grade level, so they are told they need to listen to the "scientists" by "authorities"
kiwih 4y ago
This is absolutely brilliant and a fascinating walkthrough of how to make bad science seem "legitimate". Kudos to the journalists here, this is good work. I'm especially amused that they mentioned that online commenters usually did a better job of fact checking than the publications!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
melling 4y ago
Bild is a tabloid. “Bild has been described as "notorious for its mix of gossip, inflammatory language, and sensationalism” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild The next headline will be “I fooled Hacker News readers…” Another HN story that should have been flagged.
- TillE 4y ago
  It's weird, in some countries the tabloids aren't exactly respected, but they are taken very seriously, even though they're the same sort of absolute trash. This is very much the case in the UK with quite a number of papers like the Daily Mail and the Sun, and it's the case in Germany with Bild in particular. They have a status which no American would give, say, the New York Post.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Tabloid was originally the size of the paper itself. Daily Mail is if I remember correctly not a "tabloid"? So I guess bad reputation for tabloids only come to be in countries where all the bad papers and only those had the tabloid paper format.
    - lambertsimnel 4y ago
      I thought the Daily Mail was in tabloid format and had been for a long time, but I think the Daily Mail is called "a tabloid" because of its market positioning, rather than its format. At the turn of the century, the high-circulation, sensationalist daily newspapers were all tabloids, and the more sober of the major daily newspapers were all in the larger broadsheet format. At least, in England they were; I don't know about the other nations of the United Kingdom. The Guardian (via the Berliner format) and the Times have since gone tabloid (and the Independent went from broadsheet to tabloid before going digital-only), but the Telegraph and the Financial Times are still broadsheets. People still include the Guardian, Times and Independent among "the broadsheets". Wikipedia suggests the Daily Mail was also once a broadsheet, and became a tabloid in 1971: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail#Overview
brutusborn 4y ago
This is great, more work needs to be done exposing epistemic failures in science. Reminds me of the data thugs. https://narratively.com/nick-brown-smelled-bull/ https://narratively.com/nick-brown-smelled-bull/
sriram_malhar 4y ago
I really DETEST people like this. All they do is rob people of their trust and leave the world worse off. They are no different from the likes of Tucker Carlson who chuckle that they got a rise out of their critics. "We weren't being serious. We are entertainment, not news", when caught out. Then they have their usual defenders, including in this thread, who take the stance that it serves the uninformed reader right, that one should do one's own research and not trust everything that is written or said. What does one base one's research on? What sources does one trust? What does one do when one is not an expert on that topic, but merely interested in it? Trust is a beautiful thing. Let the trust-breakers not get a free ride.
- digdugdirk 4y ago
  I saw this specific instance as somewhat differently. These were all people with inside knowledge of a system that they saw as broken, and wanted an effective way to communicate that fact to the world. They accomplished their goal. So in a slight twist on your example, it'd be like if Tucker Carlson had actually been spending the past few decades putting together a documentary about how Fox News and the Republican party sold out democracy in exchange for political power and money. You certainly might not be a fan, but it would absolutely change how you look at him.
  - sriram_malhar 4y ago
    > So in a slight twist on your example, it'd be like if Tucker Carlson had actually been spending the past few decades putting together a documentary about how Fox News and the Republican party sold out democracy in exchange for political power and money. > You certainly might not be a fan, but it would absolutely change how you look at him Um, no. You are hundred percent wrong. I'd be white-hot with rage at the destruction of society that his large-scale deceit had wrought in the time he was conducting his experiment.
- DecoPerson 4y ago
  I'm thankful for people like this. They make apparent the systemic flaws that we--the people of the earth who depend on those systems--may otherwise be unaware of. I see this as a form of white-hat hacking. Telling off white-hat hackers leads to less white-hat hackers, which leads to less vulnerabilities discovered by white-hats, which leaves you open and vulnerable to grey- and black- hat hackers (e.g.: a student of dietary studies hoping to receive acclaim for their research, even if the outcome of that research being published is overall harmful). This is one white-hat publishing one paper. I assure you there are far more grey- and black-hats out there producing a greater many more papers. The people of the groups that we have delegated authority to (the governments, megacorps, and supporting companies/associations/schools of the world) are doing a rather mediocre job of managing all this stuff, so I don't mind an individual stepping up and trying to bring attention to something like this that has such negative effects on so many people.
ta988 4y ago
With every fad there are people like that behind that benefit from selling not too toxic and pretty much inactive material to gullible people. Take turmeric, raspberry lactones, maca, lion's mane, the list is long...
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Curcumin is actually a mild anti inflammatory. Not as effective as aspirin, but still useful for many things. I found either of those as well acetaminophen significantly more effective than the opiates my doctor kept pushing on me for post surgical pain relief.
  - morsch 4y ago
    You appear to be an outlier. The scientific evidence for the efficacy of curcumin taken orally appears to be very thin to say the least.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      Unless I'm missing some systematic flaws, this seems credible enough to say 'probably a good low side-effect nsaid similar in effectiveness to aspirin': https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-019-3327-2 https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13... https://applications.emro.who.int/imemrf/Pak_J_Pharm_Sci/Pak_J_Pharm_Sci_2019_32_1_43_51.pdf https://applications.emro.who.int/imemrf/Pak_J_Pharm_Sci/Pak... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306274124_Efficacy_of_Turmeric_Extracts_and_Curcumin_for_Alleviating_the_Symptoms_of_Joint_Arthritis_A_Systematic_Review_and_Meta-Analysis_of_Randomized_Clinical_Trials https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306274124_Efficacy_...
dataflow 4y ago
Imagine a random guy posing as a construction worker, redirecting people away from some street, then laughing at everyone's gullibility for trusting his word instead of demanding proof of his credentials first. So what's the conclusion here? That people are gullible and should start demanding credentials from everyone in an orange vest? Do you really want a world where everybody mistrusts you and nobody believes your word without cryptographic proof or something? Note that I am not claiming this is the situation with p-hacking, but I've heard a lot more about p-hacking than this article, and a prank wasn't really helpful for me either. A reader reading about a prank like this would have no way to know whether to view it like the above situation. For all they know, it could be a similar kind of not-so-funny prank. Shouldn't there be some evidence provided that p-hacking is a real problem, to actually convince people that the the vulnerability you've identified merits addressing?
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Your analogy would apply to someone posting a fake article on one of the news sites. The correct analogy would be the council shutting down a street based on any plan with no checking of credentials repeatedly for decades, and then someone pointing it out by submitting a provably wrong plan. p-hacking and journalists publishing junk science or downright lies is a very well known problem. People have been pointing it out for years. Publicly shaming them via a story that will sell well is just using the systamic flaw to patch itself. It won't change the net number of sham stories these journalists publish and if anything slightly increases the quality by marginally diluting the harmful stuff being pushed by snake oil salesmen with something comparatively harmless.
- cakoose 4y ago
  There are analogies that make this seem bad (fake construction worker) and analogies that make this seem good (ethical security researcher). We need to go past the analogy and make a deeper assessment of the factors that matter. For example, what does the bad actor stand to gain? How much harm can they cause? How often is this happening? For example, if the fake construction worker scheme was used to rob people and it was happening regularly, it might be worth doing something about it. And "doing something about it" doesn't necessarily mean throwing away trust. There are a bunch of other interventions when you look at the problem holistically, e.g. can we reduce the benefit, reduce the prevalence, reduce the net harm?
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
It has been well established in a wide variety of studies that cocoa (chocolate) significantly reduces blood pressure. While this is unrelated to weight loss, one might come away from this article with the idea that studies that proved the health benefits of cocoa were all nonsense. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28439881/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28439881/
dryanau 4y ago
I don't think it's particularly fair to push the responsibility of peer review onto journalists. Given that the state of diet science is in bad shape, I suppose journalists should be conscious of this fact and do their due diligence, but ultimately this is a failing of the academic world more so than the journalistic one.
- skybrian 4y ago
  This is sort of like saying “the problem is not that our security is bad, it’s that people post malware on the Internet. Someone should put a stop to that.” There is no way to prevent anyone from starting a fake science journal. There is no worldwide registry of which academic journals are legitimate. They are just different groups of people who do their own thing. “Academia” is not a sufficiently coherent group of people to set standards in this way. Maybe there should be a worldwide registry for which journals are real, but it wouldn’t be any easier to set up than a registry of which newspaper websites are real. Journalists operate in a world where people try to trick them. That’s just how it is.
  - lupire 4y ago
    s/journalits/readers and all the same applies.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    > There is no worldwide registry of which academic journals are legitimate. I never thought about that before, and it genuinely surprises me. Educational institutions like universities need to be accredited in order to be able to attract decent students, investment, etc. It seems genuinely odd that there's no equivalent version of accreditation for journals and academic publishers. That ensures a certain level of qualification for board members, rigor in review process, peer review etc. The academic world is so much about gatekeeping... that there's no gatekeeping around journals?
Kibae 4y ago
I remember growing up in Canada, there were commercials about "house hippos" [1] and the first time I saw the commercial, I actually believed what was being presented. Thinking back, I think the campaign actually worked on me because it made me realize how obviously fake things can be made to seem real if it's presented by a seemingly authoritative figure. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TijcoS8qHIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TijcoS8qHIE
- lupire 4y ago
  Ha, the Association of Professional Liars ("Concerned Children's Advertisers) put out an ad warning you about obvious lies, so they can deflect blame to the victim for believing their less obvious lies.
ck2 4y ago
applies to everything in "news media" > The key is to exploit journalists’ incredible laziness. If you lay out the information just right, you can shape the story that emerges in the media almost like you were writing those stories yourself. In fact, that’s literally what you’re doing, since many reporters just copied and pasted our text.
lofaszvanitt 4y ago
But anorexic girls/models use chocolate to quell their hunger... afaik.
hamasho 4y ago
“Bitter chocolate tastes bad, therefore it must be good for you,” he said. “It’s like a religion.” This is exactly what I think too. If I read the fake article, I would easily fail his trap. Fast food tastes good, and it's bad for health because a huge amount of money has been spent on how to make it addictive. Use addictive and unhealthy ingredients like sugar, salt, and fat as much as allowed by regulation. So it's tasty and unhealthy. But this doesn't necessarily mean not tasty food is healthy.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  High-cacao chocolate (bitter) is definitely healthy in moderate amounts. Bitter chocolate has a lot of fat in it as well.
  - lupire 4y ago
    How do you know?
    - avgcorrection 4y ago
      The label on the back says how much fat is in 100g.
    - wrycoder 4y ago
      Trader Joe’s 72% Cacao Dark Chocolate is about right for me. Per the label, a square is 170 calories, of which 44 is due to carb (added sugar), and the rest is fat and protein.
Trouble_007 4y ago
Chocolate - Phytochemicals : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate#Phytochemicals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate#Phytochemicals
renewiltord 4y ago
People act like "Oh my god this guy did a thing that no real scientist would do". Yet, my cousin was in a biotech lab where she was unable to replicate the result she was relying on to do her next work. The reason? Original result photoshopped the outcome. She quit and went elsewhere. Meanwhile, I'm sure some online expert has gone and linked that study saying something like "There's evidence that this gene does that" and whatnot. There's wholesale fraud in science. And if you guys want to act like it's not then fine. Go ahead and believe what you want. It's your funeral.
UIUC_06 4y ago
This isn't a bad construction worker OR an ethical security researcher story. This is a straight-up exposé of "journalists" and nothing more. They print "experts say" and "studies show" stories when they don't or can't even do the most rudimentary verification. So yes, trust IS a beautiful thing, and he's demonstrated that any trust you still have in "trusted sources" (looking at you, fact-checkers) is misplaced.
- maxbond 4y ago
  We already knew this. That's why they knew that "chocolate" and "weight loss" were the magic words.
  - data_maan 4y ago
    We knew it - but in a kind of theoretical way. Like you know that there is poverty in the world. (Yes, it kinda sucks, but it doesn't suck too much because it doesn't really affect you.) Now we know it in a much more tangible way that affected us (perhaps you yourself fell for it, I at least hears it in my friends' circle) and that made us act.
    - maxbond 4y ago
      Seems to me more like metaexplotation, clickbait "exposing" clickbait. If this helped you I'm glad. I haven't seen this call to action you're describing but if you want to discuss what actions we can take, that sounds productive & I'm interested. I'd like to suggest that your attitude towards poverty may be something to examine; your remarks about it were strange. Consider for instance that when you say to a stranger on the internet, "poverty kinda sucks but it doesn't effect you," it's entirely possible that that stranger is currently experiencing it (this is not the case for me, just a thought experiment).
- ztqejq 4y ago
  It's an exposé of society that will believe anything that makes us feel good about our bad behavior
ReptileMan 4y ago
Did you really fooled them? One common theme that I have found when looking into bitter/pungent/spicy substances was that they all had in common was that they improved insulin response and helped blood sugar regulation. Cinnamon, sumac, pepper, chillies etc. My intuition tells me that probably cocoa has some effect in that department. And just googling cocoa blood sugar - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5745494/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5745494/
bmacho 4y ago
“Bitter chocolate tastes bad, therefore it must be good for you,” he said. “It’s like a religion.” I am pretty sure that it was the opposite idea: feeling bad (stressed, depressed, angry, apathetic) is unhealthy, and chocolate can make you feel a bit better. (Same with coffee, wine, and such.)
aszantu 4y ago
Real chocolate has like 50% magnesium the stuff that's sold as chocolate is like 50/50 sugar/fat Eating a piece of real chocolate in the morning helps curb cravings throughout the day though, at least for me.
- lupire 4y ago
  3oz dark chocolate has 50% of your recommended daily magnesium intake. Only 0.2% of chocolate is magnesium.
karol 4y ago
Imagine thinking that eating chocolate daily in limited quantities as the most carbsy snack of the day (90% chocolate might have 8% of sugars) equates to eating any chocolate snack daily on top of a shitty diet.
robswc 4y ago
I feel like a lot of people are missing a big point. This isn't some "annoying person" or someone causing harm. If its this easy to do it _intentionally_ imagine how easy it is to do something with subtle, unconscious (or conscious) bias.
lupire 4y ago
This you doesn't really know what he's talking about. You can take any valid result, add in 20 totally irrelevant measurements, and then claim that the valid result is "p-hacking". There's an obvious reason to suspect that a low calorie tasty snack would help with appetite control and weight loss.
Jemm 4y ago
Got to love people who believe that eating causes weight loss.
themeiguoren 4y ago
Has anyone fact-checked this story? Did the author actually do a bogus study, or did he save time and money by photoshopping some fake news articles and write a fun story about not believing things at face value?

217 points by worez 4y ago

It is really just about trust, nothing else. Unfortunately those "studies" are pure science or data for many people. Worst part is, that it is also justification for implementing unlawful practices (ie covid policy).

mudrockbestgirl 4y ago

Reminds of me of a recent article and a comment I made there [0] > If industry tells you "we need a study that shows X" there's almost certainly a way to design a study in such a way to get result X. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32948871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32948871

glandium 4y ago
I'd posit that there's almost certainly a way to design a study in such a way to get the opposite result.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  Yes, but often only one side has money available to run such a study. It's not like the anti-chocolate lobby has a huge corporate base.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
"If you got a dead body and you think his brother did it, you're gonna find out you're right." - Verbal Kint

themodelplumber 4y ago

This was weird to read personally. I used chocolate in all kinds of ways for extreme weight loss, so "fooled millions into thinking" certainly has the subjectively-not-correct feel to it. But the headline also does a great job of leaving this open question of, "but in the end chocolate is really not a weight loss tool, right?" "Right?" (Anakin stare) When I was wrapping up my first big cut, I was feasting on boxes of chocolate bars that I found on clearance at local stores. There is nothing quite like watching the scale numbers go down while you eat junk food. My BMI entered the "normal" zone while I was literally eating like a kid in a candy store. These days, I still buy chocolate bars and try to keep them stocked up. I also buy cacao powder and add it to my coffee with some salt and low-calorie sweetener, in lieu of breakfast. It can provide a really awesome calorie-efficient uplift for those of us who are sensitive to cacao. So, stuff like this really stood out: > Testing bitter chocolate as a dietary supplement was his idea. When I asked him why, Frank said it was a favorite of the “whole food” fanatics. “Bitter chocolate tastes bad, therefore it must be good for you,” he said. “It’s like a religion.” It just seems like the kind of anecdote you'd want to avoid. Like why not use some science to identify a population & a practice? Or is part of the follow-up also going to point out "plus we just ran with somebody's anecdote to get the ball rolling lol"?

lake_vincent 4y ago
This is the first time I'm hearing about this...and I have so many questions. What did this do to your body aside from the weight loss? Did you have anything anything else to supplement? How did you poop (there's almost fiber in junk food)? How did you manage your blood sugar? Did the caffeine in the chocolate have an effect? And just how much chocolate are we talking here?
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  IMO it's a fun topic. Look up dirty cuts on /r/loseit, you'll probably find some funny pictures. I remember a photo of an absolute bean pole holding up his food for the day, IIRC something like a king-size oreo chocolate bar. (Eating all the king size stuff like it's a "meal in a bar" is an amazing feeling btw) The worst effect I had from any food was from salad. This was at a different point, when I was cutting down on fat and lining up my macros. I ate so much spinach (along with my almonds) that I over-oxalated myself and went to the ER with massive pain from my fresh new kidney stones. Pooping is very nicely taken care of by hydration. This is a surprising one to a lot of people. It's not a problem. I drank over 100 oz a day. BTW never do that with mainly pickle juice. Funny experience. I also sprinkled some other foods in there for variety. But maybe at least 2/3 of my meals were junk food for a substantial period. And for some solid period of time it was all junk. As much junk as possible. It's a very extreme state of mind when you are cutting that much so you need the emotional support of a pretty candy wrapper and child-like attitude sometimes. Blood sugar is not a problem for me or in my family history--it's a safe zone. Subjective factors like this are very, very important btw. I was also exercising lots, like 2 hours hiking every day and the BWF routine from reddit, gobs of pull-ups since I could never do them before, etc. Resting pulse was in low 40s, always got grilled on that one when I went to the doctor. > And just how much chocolate are we talking here? IDK, how would you measure it going beyond the powder mix-ins? I consume at least 5 tbsp of raw cacao powder a day, plus all the other times when I'm eating chocolate, but that's less straight up chocolate. (I also have a weird theory that chocolate and sweets are a very good match for my subjective psychology and it's kinda related in general to people who eat like Warren Buffett btw.)

vouaobrasil 4y ago

This is why I actually don't trust newspapers or news sites for any medical advice for statements like "a glass of wine a day will help you live longer", or some nonsense like that. In fact, the best place to find this information is through the primary literature. You can use Google Scholar and Sci-hub to do your own research. For most issues, it's actually not to hard to understand the primary literature, and it will be much more accurate than the crap you read on popular websites.

themodelplumber 4y ago
The primary literature is a huge waste of time in so many cases though. It can be really frustrating. IF there's not a problem in one of hundreds of representational practices, you can find out later there was some other compromise (and some are HUGE) of the data or methodology. And then if you point out a problem with a research undertaking or study when it is brought up, you can get some set of true-science-believers looking at you like it can't possibly be. It's unreal sometimes. It's really no wonder people spread their subjective experiences as if they are science. Institutional "science" is great as a set of models and perspectives, but when you dip into the product you can start to wonder if you are effectively doing the equivalent of product research by watching the home shopping network.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  The only people who trust science blindly are those who have never seen how science gets done. It's scientism pure and simple. Or to quote a bunch of people who had a great idea: Nullius In Verba.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    In so much of the world today, "science" is a brand, and everyone is told to listen to "scientists" because they "follow the science" and know the best way. The genpop couldn't possibly even begin to wrap their heads around text written above a 5th grade level, so they are told they need to listen to the "scientists" by "authorities"

kiwih 4y ago

This is absolutely brilliant and a fascinating walkthrough of how to make bad science seem "legitimate". Kudos to the journalists here, this is good work. I'm especially amused that they mentioned that online commenters usually did a better job of fact checking than the publications!

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

melling 4y ago

Bild is a tabloid. “Bild has been described as "notorious for its mix of gossip, inflammatory language, and sensationalism” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild The next headline will be “I fooled Hacker News readers…” Another HN story that should have been flagged.

TillE 4y ago
It's weird, in some countries the tabloids aren't exactly respected, but they are taken very seriously, even though they're the same sort of absolute trash. This is very much the case in the UK with quite a number of papers like the Daily Mail and the Sun, and it's the case in Germany with Bild in particular. They have a status which no American would give, say, the New York Post.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Tabloid was originally the size of the paper itself. Daily Mail is if I remember correctly not a "tabloid"? So I guess bad reputation for tabloids only come to be in countries where all the bad papers and only those had the tabloid paper format.
  - lambertsimnel 4y ago
    I thought the Daily Mail was in tabloid format and had been for a long time, but I think the Daily Mail is called "a tabloid" because of its market positioning, rather than its format. At the turn of the century, the high-circulation, sensationalist daily newspapers were all tabloids, and the more sober of the major daily newspapers were all in the larger broadsheet format. At least, in England they were; I don't know about the other nations of the United Kingdom. The Guardian (via the Berliner format) and the Times have since gone tabloid (and the Independent went from broadsheet to tabloid before going digital-only), but the Telegraph and the Financial Times are still broadsheets. People still include the Guardian, Times and Independent among "the broadsheets". Wikipedia suggests the Daily Mail was also once a broadsheet, and became a tabloid in 1971: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail#Overview

brutusborn 4y ago

This is great, more work needs to be done exposing epistemic failures in science. Reminds me of the data thugs. https://narratively.com/nick-brown-smelled-bull/ https://narratively.com/nick-brown-smelled-bull/

sriram_malhar 4y ago

I really DETEST people like this. All they do is rob people of their trust and leave the world worse off. They are no different from the likes of Tucker Carlson who chuckle that they got a rise out of their critics. "We weren't being serious. We are entertainment, not news", when caught out. Then they have their usual defenders, including in this thread, who take the stance that it serves the uninformed reader right, that one should do one's own research and not trust everything that is written or said. What does one base one's research on? What sources does one trust? What does one do when one is not an expert on that topic, but merely interested in it? Trust is a beautiful thing. Let the trust-breakers not get a free ride.

digdugdirk 4y ago
I saw this specific instance as somewhat differently. These were all people with inside knowledge of a system that they saw as broken, and wanted an effective way to communicate that fact to the world. They accomplished their goal. So in a slight twist on your example, it'd be like if Tucker Carlson had actually been spending the past few decades putting together a documentary about how Fox News and the Republican party sold out democracy in exchange for political power and money. You certainly might not be a fan, but it would absolutely change how you look at him.
- sriram_malhar 4y ago
  > So in a slight twist on your example, it'd be like if Tucker Carlson had actually been spending the past few decades putting together a documentary about how Fox News and the Republican party sold out democracy in exchange for political power and money. > You certainly might not be a fan, but it would absolutely change how you look at him Um, no. You are hundred percent wrong. I'd be white-hot with rage at the destruction of society that his large-scale deceit had wrought in the time he was conducting his experiment.
DecoPerson 4y ago
I'm thankful for people like this. They make apparent the systemic flaws that we--the people of the earth who depend on those systems--may otherwise be unaware of. I see this as a form of white-hat hacking. Telling off white-hat hackers leads to less white-hat hackers, which leads to less vulnerabilities discovered by white-hats, which leaves you open and vulnerable to grey- and black- hat hackers (e.g.: a student of dietary studies hoping to receive acclaim for their research, even if the outcome of that research being published is overall harmful). This is one white-hat publishing one paper. I assure you there are far more grey- and black-hats out there producing a greater many more papers. The people of the groups that we have delegated authority to (the governments, megacorps, and supporting companies/associations/schools of the world) are doing a rather mediocre job of managing all this stuff, so I don't mind an individual stepping up and trying to bring attention to something like this that has such negative effects on so many people.

ta988 4y ago

With every fad there are people like that behind that benefit from selling not too toxic and pretty much inactive material to gullible people. Take turmeric, raspberry lactones, maca, lion's mane, the list is long...

Schroedingersat 4y ago
Curcumin is actually a mild anti inflammatory. Not as effective as aspirin, but still useful for many things. I found either of those as well acetaminophen significantly more effective than the opiates my doctor kept pushing on me for post surgical pain relief.
- morsch 4y ago
  You appear to be an outlier. The scientific evidence for the efficacy of curcumin taken orally appears to be very thin to say the least.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Unless I'm missing some systematic flaws, this seems credible enough to say 'probably a good low side-effect nsaid similar in effectiveness to aspirin': https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-019-3327-2 https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13... https://applications.emro.who.int/imemrf/Pak_J_Pharm_Sci/Pak_J_Pharm_Sci_2019_32_1_43_51.pdf https://applications.emro.who.int/imemrf/Pak_J_Pharm_Sci/Pak... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306274124_Efficacy_of_Turmeric_Extracts_and_Curcumin_for_Alleviating_the_Symptoms_of_Joint_Arthritis_A_Systematic_Review_and_Meta-Analysis_of_Randomized_Clinical_Trials https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306274124_Efficacy_...

dataflow 4y ago

Imagine a random guy posing as a construction worker, redirecting people away from some street, then laughing at everyone's gullibility for trusting his word instead of demanding proof of his credentials first. So what's the conclusion here? That people are gullible and should start demanding credentials from everyone in an orange vest? Do you really want a world where everybody mistrusts you and nobody believes your word without cryptographic proof or something? Note that I am not claiming this is the situation with p-hacking, but I've heard a lot more about p-hacking than this article, and a prank wasn't really helpful for me either. A reader reading about a prank like this would have no way to know whether to view it like the above situation. For all they know, it could be a similar kind of not-so-funny prank. Shouldn't there be some evidence provided that p-hacking is a real problem, to actually convince people that the the vulnerability you've identified merits addressing?

Schroedingersat 4y ago
Your analogy would apply to someone posting a fake article on one of the news sites. The correct analogy would be the council shutting down a street based on any plan with no checking of credentials repeatedly for decades, and then someone pointing it out by submitting a provably wrong plan. p-hacking and journalists publishing junk science or downright lies is a very well known problem. People have been pointing it out for years. Publicly shaming them via a story that will sell well is just using the systamic flaw to patch itself. It won't change the net number of sham stories these journalists publish and if anything slightly increases the quality by marginally diluting the harmful stuff being pushed by snake oil salesmen with something comparatively harmless.
cakoose 4y ago
There are analogies that make this seem bad (fake construction worker) and analogies that make this seem good (ethical security researcher). We need to go past the analogy and make a deeper assessment of the factors that matter. For example, what does the bad actor stand to gain? How much harm can they cause? How often is this happening? For example, if the fake construction worker scheme was used to rob people and it was happening regularly, it might be worth doing something about it. And "doing something about it" doesn't necessarily mean throwing away trust. There are a bunch of other interventions when you look at the problem holistically, e.g. can we reduce the benefit, reduce the prevalence, reduce the net harm?

StanislavPetrov 4y ago

It has been well established in a wide variety of studies that cocoa (chocolate) significantly reduces blood pressure. While this is unrelated to weight loss, one might come away from this article with the idea that studies that proved the health benefits of cocoa were all nonsense. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28439881/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28439881/

dryanau 4y ago

I don't think it's particularly fair to push the responsibility of peer review onto journalists. Given that the state of diet science is in bad shape, I suppose journalists should be conscious of this fact and do their due diligence, but ultimately this is a failing of the academic world more so than the journalistic one.

skybrian 4y ago
This is sort of like saying “the problem is not that our security is bad, it’s that people post malware on the Internet. Someone should put a stop to that.” There is no way to prevent anyone from starting a fake science journal. There is no worldwide registry of which academic journals are legitimate. They are just different groups of people who do their own thing. “Academia” is not a sufficiently coherent group of people to set standards in this way. Maybe there should be a worldwide registry for which journals are real, but it wouldn’t be any easier to set up than a registry of which newspaper websites are real. Journalists operate in a world where people try to trick them. That’s just how it is.
- lupire 4y ago
  s/journalits/readers and all the same applies.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  > There is no worldwide registry of which academic journals are legitimate. I never thought about that before, and it genuinely surprises me. Educational institutions like universities need to be accredited in order to be able to attract decent students, investment, etc. It seems genuinely odd that there's no equivalent version of accreditation for journals and academic publishers. That ensures a certain level of qualification for board members, rigor in review process, peer review etc. The academic world is so much about gatekeeping... that there's no gatekeeping around journals?

Kibae 4y ago

I remember growing up in Canada, there were commercials about "house hippos" [1] and the first time I saw the commercial, I actually believed what was being presented. Thinking back, I think the campaign actually worked on me because it made me realize how obviously fake things can be made to seem real if it's presented by a seemingly authoritative figure. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TijcoS8qHIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TijcoS8qHIE

lupire 4y ago
Ha, the Association of Professional Liars ("Concerned Children's Advertisers) put out an ad warning you about obvious lies, so they can deflect blame to the victim for believing their less obvious lies.

ck2 4y ago

applies to everything in "news media" > The key is to exploit journalists’ incredible laziness. If you lay out the information just right, you can shape the story that emerges in the media almost like you were writing those stories yourself. In fact, that’s literally what you’re doing, since many reporters just copied and pasted our text.

lofaszvanitt 4y ago

But anorexic girls/models use chocolate to quell their hunger... afaik.

hamasho 4y ago

“Bitter chocolate tastes bad, therefore it must be good for you,” he said. “It’s like a religion.” This is exactly what I think too. If I read the fake article, I would easily fail his trap. Fast food tastes good, and it's bad for health because a huge amount of money has been spent on how to make it addictive. Use addictive and unhealthy ingredients like sugar, salt, and fat as much as allowed by regulation. So it's tasty and unhealthy. But this doesn't necessarily mean not tasty food is healthy.

avgcorrection 4y ago
High-cacao chocolate (bitter) is definitely healthy in moderate amounts. Bitter chocolate has a lot of fat in it as well.
- lupire 4y ago
  How do you know?
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    The label on the back says how much fat is in 100g.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    Trader Joe’s 72% Cacao Dark Chocolate is about right for me. Per the label, a square is 170 calories, of which 44 is due to carb (added sugar), and the rest is fat and protein.

Trouble_007 4y ago

Chocolate - Phytochemicals : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate#Phytochemicals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate#Phytochemicals

renewiltord 4y ago

People act like "Oh my god this guy did a thing that no real scientist would do". Yet, my cousin was in a biotech lab where she was unable to replicate the result she was relying on to do her next work. The reason? Original result photoshopped the outcome. She quit and went elsewhere. Meanwhile, I'm sure some online expert has gone and linked that study saying something like "There's evidence that this gene does that" and whatnot. There's wholesale fraud in science. And if you guys want to act like it's not then fine. Go ahead and believe what you want. It's your funeral.

UIUC_06 4y ago

This isn't a bad construction worker OR an ethical security researcher story. This is a straight-up exposé of "journalists" and nothing more. They print "experts say" and "studies show" stories when they don't or can't even do the most rudimentary verification. So yes, trust IS a beautiful thing, and he's demonstrated that any trust you still have in "trusted sources" (looking at you, fact-checkers) is misplaced.

maxbond 4y ago
We already knew this. That's why they knew that "chocolate" and "weight loss" were the magic words.
- data_maan 4y ago
  We knew it - but in a kind of theoretical way. Like you know that there is poverty in the world. (Yes, it kinda sucks, but it doesn't suck too much because it doesn't really affect you.) Now we know it in a much more tangible way that affected us (perhaps you yourself fell for it, I at least hears it in my friends' circle) and that made us act.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    Seems to me more like metaexplotation, clickbait "exposing" clickbait. If this helped you I'm glad. I haven't seen this call to action you're describing but if you want to discuss what actions we can take, that sounds productive & I'm interested. I'd like to suggest that your attitude towards poverty may be something to examine; your remarks about it were strange. Consider for instance that when you say to a stranger on the internet, "poverty kinda sucks but it doesn't effect you," it's entirely possible that that stranger is currently experiencing it (this is not the case for me, just a thought experiment).
ztqejq 4y ago
It's an exposé of society that will believe anything that makes us feel good about our bad behavior

ReptileMan 4y ago

Did you really fooled them? One common theme that I have found when looking into bitter/pungent/spicy substances was that they all had in common was that they improved insulin response and helped blood sugar regulation. Cinnamon, sumac, pepper, chillies etc. My intuition tells me that probably cocoa has some effect in that department. And just googling cocoa blood sugar - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5745494/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5745494/

bmacho 4y ago

“Bitter chocolate tastes bad, therefore it must be good for you,” he said. “It’s like a religion.” I am pretty sure that it was the opposite idea: feeling bad (stressed, depressed, angry, apathetic) is unhealthy, and chocolate can make you feel a bit better. (Same with coffee, wine, and such.)

aszantu 4y ago

Real chocolate has like 50% magnesium the stuff that's sold as chocolate is like 50/50 sugar/fat Eating a piece of real chocolate in the morning helps curb cravings throughout the day though, at least for me.

lupire 4y ago
3oz dark chocolate has 50% of your recommended daily magnesium intake. Only 0.2% of chocolate is magnesium.

karol 4y ago

Imagine thinking that eating chocolate daily in limited quantities as the most carbsy snack of the day (90% chocolate might have 8% of sugars) equates to eating any chocolate snack daily on top of a shitty diet.

robswc 4y ago

I feel like a lot of people are missing a big point. This isn't some "annoying person" or someone causing harm. If its this easy to do it _intentionally_ imagine how easy it is to do something with subtle, unconscious (or conscious) bias.

lupire 4y ago

This you doesn't really know what he's talking about. You can take any valid result, add in 20 totally irrelevant measurements, and then claim that the valid result is "p-hacking". There's an obvious reason to suspect that a low calorie tasty snack would help with appetite control and weight loss.

Jemm 4y ago

Got to love people who believe that eating causes weight loss.

themeiguoren 4y ago

Has anyone fact-checked this story? Did the author actually do a bogus study, or did he save time and money by photoshopping some fake news articles and write a fun story about not believing things at face value?