A very happy lady munching on a huge candy bar caught my eye in The Times of India on Friday, May 25. Not the lady—the chocolate.
After tasting a variety of delectable darks from a chocolatier in Belgium many years ago, I became hooked. However, I never imagined this addiction would provide a side benefit of weight loss. It turns out that a clinical trial set up by journalist John Bohannon and two colleagues came up with this finding and showed it to be statistically significant. This made headlines worldwide.
Unfortunately, at least so far as I’m concerned, the whole study was a hoax based on deliberate application of junk science done to expose phony claims made by the diet industry.
It turns out to be very easy to generate false positive results that favor a dietary supplement. Simply measure a large number of things on a small group of people. Something surely will emerge that out of this context tests significantly significant. What this will be, whether a reduction in blood pressure, or loss in weight, etc., is completely random.
Read the whole amazing story here.
My thinking is while Bohannan’s study did not prove that eating chocolate leads to weight loss, the subjects did in fact shed pounds faster than the controls. That is good enough for me. Any other studies showing just the opposite results have become irrelevant now—I will pay no attention to them.
Now, having returned from my travel to India, I am going back to dip into my horde of dark chocolate.