Cursed Tongue: Chocolate Defies Odds By Reducing Risk of Death

Posted by CursedTongue on March 25, 2006

News reports touting or condemning some food or another spurt from the pages of medical journals, pelting the public like mulch from a chipper shredder. Every day there’s something you should be eating, or something you shouldn’t even touch with a 32-foot pole, let alone digest.

When the food item in question is confined to the “other” category on the USDA food pyramid, and it contains miraculous healing properties worthy of an Infomercial, then it gains media attention rivaling only that received by baby pandas.

From recent news reports on scientific studies, one might come to believe that one’s continued survival is dependant on the consumption of mass quantities of chocolate. It may prevent cancer and heart disease, it keeps skin young and supple, it lowers blood pressure and according to several news stories that I read, it also “reduces the risk of death.” Unless you, Dear Reader, are Thor, the Norse God of Thunder, or Nosferatu, Prince of the Undead, there ain’t nothing you can do to reduce the risk of death.

Upon reading several versions of any particular Food Study Story (or FSS), eventually I find a statement so similar to the following, that someone must be secretly cloning researchers with the aid of chocolate: “It’s way too early to make recommendations about whether people should eat more cocoa or chocolate.” This quote is attributed to the responsible killjoy researcher-clone Brian Buijsse, a co-author of the newly heralded “Chocolate is the Nectar of the Gods” study. (I’m sure the actual title is something much more sober, unappealing and conscientious.)

Of course, scientific studies of food are complex and narrow things. To obtain results that mean anything, scientists must use a group of people (who are often in the same age group, or same sex, or race) and hone in on a very specific hypothesis. Which means that a particular study may only apply to female Aleutian Islanders in their 20’s. Add a heaping helping of reporter-who-just-barely-passed-Chemistry-for-Trees and you get a mostly accurate FSS. The mostly accurate FSS is copied from diligent news source to diligent news source, in a digital game of Telephone. Sometimes the mostly accurate FSS makes the evening news, in which, a news reporter reads it to the public after it has been reduced to the broadest strokes and becomes absolutely devoid of meaning.

It is thusly that eating a third of a bar of chocolate a day may help Dutch men in their 70’s lower their blood pressure and decrease cardiovascular mortality becomes, “If you aren’t eating a dozen Oreos every day, you really should be taking a chocolate supplement. And now, over to Stan with the weather forecast.”

A classic example of the populace overreacting to a FSS is the 1980’s egg scare. Eggs went from innocent breakfast food to gelatinous, evil, yellow, cholesterol-laden orbs that will kill you. It was as if the news media produced their own anti-egg advertising campaign–Eggs: Evil. Yellow. Different. Egg farmers were at the mercy of a totally freaked out public.

While eggs do indeed contain cholesterol, subsequent studies found that they are actually relatively healthy and nutritional, in moderation. Especially when compared to foods they frequently share a plate with such as bacon and hash browns. It may well have been that the people in the “Eggs are Nails in Your Coffin” study had eggs with traditional, fat-laden accompaniments, and not a nutritious bowl of industrial-strength bran flakes.

These food studies go from interesting health tidbits to creeds to be lived by, in the eternal quest for a more fit, healthier, longer-lived self. Far be it for me to expect people who are already overburdened with information to sort through each FSS. But, as with every news story, we would all do well to remember to take these things with a grain of salt, despite reports that salt will raise your blood pressure and increase your risk of death.

- Sarah Letnes

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