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.
> On a related idea, 10-15 years ago, the news media was full of stories reporting on how doctors were underprescribing pain medicines.
I remember around the same time, there were tons of stories about how malpractice lawsuits were out of control and Americans were all suing anything that moved, which lead to a lot of states passing bills to cap malpractice awards. When I got older I read Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent". Powerful people are working hard to push narratives that benefit them, and it's important that we be skeptical whenever we don't know where the narrative is coming from.
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.
The same is true for agricultural. Company lobbyists try to sneak in laws and publish studies and reports. Then we wonder why bees die left and right, and humans get sick.
"EU report on weedkiller safety copied text from Monsanto study"
> “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.
A really good dark chocolate need not be an acquired taste.
In the UK, Co-op's own brand 85% dark chocolate is excellent. It's rich enough that you'll probably never want more than a square or two at one go (which I count as a point in is favour), but it's fruity and delicious. Also Sainsbury's Organic Santo Domingo 74% gives much fancier bars at several times the price a run for their money.
Green & Black's 70%, on the other hand, which is widely available, is over-priced, chalky, bitter, marketing-led nonsense.
I am a diabetic (since 2015) and have come to really appreciate 90% dark chocolate. Maybe it's weird coming from me, because I was legit addicted to it, but added sugar is sooooo overrated.
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%.
I had to cut sugar, I tried things with less in it, so I ramped up the dark chocolate %. 70% is my sweet spot.
I hope I can get a little benefits from this (and other nutrients of course). Although dark chocolate also contains bromide derivatives who can be harmful too.
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.
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.
Someone has to do the research and "Big" whatever seems to be the ones with the money to do so.
Ask yourself why this is so. Could it have to do with a reduction in public investment in original research, or, alternatively, an overall reduction in investment in unencumbered research?
Point being: this work used to get done by non-corporate scientists, too.
If only there were some sort of organization that was not driven by profit and had the ability to allocate the entire society's resources toward the common good.
And incidentally I'd say a big part of the problem is that the research is totally misleading.
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.
You basically just answered your own question. You hate it when Big (Whatever) does the research, but you are actually more distrusting of a small operation.
I have spent a lot of years getting myself healthier. I have gone through something like 5 iterations of a health blog to try to talk about that and share information completely for free with people who desperately need a better answer than society is giving them currently.
I kept redoing the blog in part because it was such a total and complete shit show. I got all kinds of open hatred from people for trying to say "X, y and z were helpful for me. I think thus and such is why. Here is supporting research I found that fits with my experience." and making that information available absolutely for free.
I don't know an answer for you. But maybe think about how you are part of the problem here. Ask yourself: What would it take for you to trust a small operation? You are simply dismissing them out of hand. What if a small operation could be useful? What would they need to do to be useful and get taken seriously?
> "All research should be taken with a grain of salt"
It's hard for any one person to read tens or hundreds of papers on a subject and critically examine them for fallacies, look for fake data, etc. It's just not plausible.
At this rate, if us commonfolk are just expected to take a default position of not believing a scientific study or consensus until we personally vet them, what are we to actually believe? Do I need to go out and personally vet that evolution is real by personally reproducing some fruit fly studies?
We're heading down a scary road if we cannot trust our scientific institutions to be unbiased.
> All research should be taken with a grain of salt.
The very fact of science is that you can take the same experiment and under the said assumptions; you can repeat the same experiment yourself and come to similar conclusions as the one done by the original scientists.
> 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.
AD Hominem fallacy - the status of someone has no relation to the outcome of a scientific experiment.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
"
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."
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.
> "... 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
[+] [-] WheelsAtLarge|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jmcgough|8 years ago|reply
I remember around the same time, there were tons of stories about how malpractice lawsuits were out of control and Americans were all suing anything that moved, which lead to a lot of states passing bills to cap malpractice awards. When I got older I read Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent". Powerful people are working hard to push narratives that benefit them, and it's important that we be skeptical whenever we don't know where the narrative is coming from.
[+] [-] ggg9990|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostromo|8 years ago|reply
It actually may be. The large about of sugar that usually accompanies it certainly is not.
[+] [-] dforrestwilson|8 years ago|reply
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12775932/sackler-famil...
[+] [-] frik|8 years ago|reply
"EU report on weedkiller safety copied text from Monsanto study"
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/15/eu-repor...
[+] [-] jayess|8 years ago|reply
From personal experience I've learned that few reporters are knowledgeable about anything outside how to be a reporter.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Nursie|8 years ago|reply
There are a lot of people who die in needless pain all around the world. They're just not the same folks who are being over-prescribed oxy.
[+] [-] joering2|8 years ago|reply
But isn't it also why Reagan announced war on drugs? So the government does answer when needed (eventually?)
[+] [-] warent|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JosephLark|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gmac|8 years ago|reply
In the UK, Co-op's own brand 85% dark chocolate is excellent. It's rich enough that you'll probably never want more than a square or two at one go (which I count as a point in is favour), but it's fruity and delicious. Also Sainsbury's Organic Santo Domingo 74% gives much fancier bars at several times the price a run for their money.
Green & Black's 70%, on the other hand, which is widely available, is over-priced, chalky, bitter, marketing-led nonsense.
[+] [-] armandososa|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron-lebo|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] agumonkey|8 years ago|reply
I hope I can get a little benefits from this (and other nutrients of course). Although dark chocolate also contains bromide derivatives who can be harmful too.
[+] [-] nobodyorother|8 years ago|reply
...What's the maximum number of heart-healthy flavanol doses?
[+] [-] kaybe|8 years ago|reply
It's actually really good, though not a candy anymore, more like nuts. I can recommend mixing with yoghurt and banana.
[+] [-] jibe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BFatts|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] trendia|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rhizome|8 years ago|reply
Ask yourself why this is so. Could it have to do with a reduction in public investment in original research, or, alternatively, an overall reduction in investment in unencumbered research?
Point being: this work used to get done by non-corporate scientists, too.
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
And incidentally I'd say a big part of the problem is that the research is totally misleading.
[+] [-] Mz|8 years ago|reply
You basically just answered your own question. You hate it when Big (Whatever) does the research, but you are actually more distrusting of a small operation.
I have spent a lot of years getting myself healthier. I have gone through something like 5 iterations of a health blog to try to talk about that and share information completely for free with people who desperately need a better answer than society is giving them currently.
I kept redoing the blog in part because it was such a total and complete shit show. I got all kinds of open hatred from people for trying to say "X, y and z were helpful for me. I think thus and such is why. Here is supporting research I found that fits with my experience." and making that information available absolutely for free.
I don't know an answer for you. But maybe think about how you are part of the problem here. Ask yourself: What would it take for you to trust a small operation? You are simply dismissing them out of hand. What if a small operation could be useful? What would they need to do to be useful and get taken seriously?
[+] [-] fenwick67|8 years ago|reply
It's hard for any one person to read tens or hundreds of papers on a subject and critically examine them for fallacies, look for fake data, etc. It's just not plausible.
At this rate, if us commonfolk are just expected to take a default position of not believing a scientific study or consensus until we personally vet them, what are we to actually believe? Do I need to go out and personally vet that evolution is real by personally reproducing some fruit fly studies?
We're heading down a scary road if we cannot trust our scientific institutions to be unbiased.
[+] [-] asdfasfhretwt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] denzil_correa|8 years ago|reply
The very fact of science is that you can take the same experiment and under the said assumptions; you can repeat the same experiment yourself and come to similar conclusions as the one done by the original scientists.
> 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.
AD Hominem fallacy - the status of someone has no relation to the outcome of a scientific experiment.
[+] [-] ianai|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drak0n1c|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jesperlang|8 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] colordrops|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrapcode|8 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] Dirlewanger|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ourmandave|8 years ago|reply
(De Nile is not just a chocolate river in Egypt.)
[+] [-] sna1l|8 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...
[+] [-] wallace_f|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianai|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afandian|8 years ago|reply
If you're interested in this kind of thing I recommend PIDapaloooza conference. https://pidapalooza.org
(Posting in a personal capacity)
[+] [-] bllguo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duncan_bayne|8 years ago|reply
" 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."
[+] [-] maxxxxx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] air7|8 years ago|reply
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/... [2] http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Map/Nestle
[+] [-] gnicholas|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jv22222|8 years ago|reply
I've always wondered if that was true, or even possible.
[+] [-] rpazyaquian|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoodleBuggy|8 years ago|reply
Now it's applicable to nearly everything
[+] [-] guelo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lawpoop|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] norswap|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply