
Chocolate intake is associated with better cognitive function - brahmwg
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666316300459
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fishtoaster
I haven't read the study yet, but I'm immediately reminded of the great
chocolate p-hacking article from last year: [http://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-
millions-into-thinking-choco...](http://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-
into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800)

~~~
raattgift
io9 used to be such a good site. Gawker's merger of io9 and gizmodo is messier
and less useful than even the rest of their sites.

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BurningFrog
Of course smart people are better at accumulating chocolate.

What else did anyone expect?

~~~
acchow
Kale consumption associated with better cognitive function.

Winning competitive chess matches associated with better cognitive function.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

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keyle
Note that it says chocolate as in cacao, not sugar and milk fats.

As a fine chocolate connoisseur (ahem), I recommend sticking to 70% cacao
minimum. 90% is usually disgusting. Always check the ingredients. A decent
commercial international one is the Lindt 70% black. And I don't work for
Lindt.

~~~
GuiA
> As a fine chocolate connoisseur

> 90% is usually disgusting

Tsk tsk. Amateur.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Semi-related topic - hot chocolate (the drink). Am I the only one who actually
prefers the taste of the non-dutch (non-alkali-processed)?

If it's processed, it loses all its kick. Also I suspect processing reduces
whatever benefits it may provide.

~~~
Gracana
Where can I get some of the hot chocolate you describe? I've never had it and
it sounds interesting.

~~~
raddad
raw cacao nibs, 100% cacao

[https://nuts.com/nuts/cacao/organic-
nibs.html](https://nuts.com/nuts/cacao/organic-nibs.html)

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marcell
Doesn't chocolate contain caffeine? Would that fact explain this result? Ie.
Is there a similar effect from just consuming the equivalent amount of
caffeine.

~~~
arikrak
Chocolate doesn't have that much caffeine as normally eaten. An entire bar of
dark chocolate has less caffeine than a cup of coffee, but people generally
eat much less.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=caffeine+in+coffee+vs+chocol...](https://www.google.com/search?q=caffeine+in+coffee+vs+chocolate)

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hippich
For what it worth - in the span of 1998-2000 I was participating in national
programming competitions between high school students in Belarus. On a day of
actual event every participants were given bar of chocolate. Can't say if it
helped my cognitive function or not, but it was nice to have chocolate snack
before working on solving problems :)

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devNoise
And remember that dark chocolate is better for you than milk chocolate.

~~~
brahmwg
> "Chocolate intake was self-reported, and therefore subject to inherent
> reporting error. The dietary questionnaire used did not require the
> respondent to differentiate between dark, milk or white chocolate. ... We
> can therefore make the assumption that the majority of chocolate consumed in
> this sample was dark or milk, both containing cocoa flavanols to varying
> degrees."

It would be cool to have a study looking specifically at the effects of dark
chocolate.

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dj-wonk
At first the cynic in me thought, "Scientists find that people with higher
cognition like to habitually eat chocolate?"

But from the article: "Benefits to information processing speed and working
memory were observed in these studies within hours of consuming cocoa
flavanols or dark chocolate. Less research has examined the effects from the
longer-term consumption of chocolate or cocoa."

~~~
arikrak
But it could influence the longer term effect that they're studying. They
address this issue in the section "Secondary Analyses":

> In a secondary analysis, we asked whether cognitive performance predicted
> chocolate consumption rather than the other way round. This analysis was
> conducted on a sample of participants who had completed a cognitive
> assessment in waves 1-4 of the MSLS, but also completed the dietary
> questionnaire at wave 6, a mean of 18.0 years later. Cognition was assessed
> using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)... There were no
> significant associations between chocolate intake and the total WAIS...

Seems like the chocolate eaters weren't more intelligent to begin with.

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halis
Before an interview I make sure that I have caffeine and chocolate while
driving to the interview. I always seem to communicate better when I do this.

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andrew950
So are blueberries .. much better!

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robertcorey
B.S Nutritional study.

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tokenadult
We have simply got to stop taking submissions of preliminary research findings
from low-impact factor primary research journals for discussion on Hacker
News. Let's first of all see a neutral review of the issue by an active
scientist or (better still) a competent science journalist (that's a rare kind
of person) to see what of methodological problems there may be in this study,
and how well it represents the prior literature on the topic.

~~~
mikekchar
I'm not really qualified to comment and I didn't spend very much time
analysing the paper. However, I'll comment a bit since reading nutrition
papers used to be a hobby of mine. First, the sample size is relatively good -
nearly 1000 people, taken from a similar area and over a long period of time
(30 years). What's missing is any obvious mention of how the participants were
chosen, so it's hard to see if there is any selection bias. However, I didn't
look at the links provided, so hopefully it goes into more detail there. I
mention this because I have often seen papers published in this area with
obviously flawed sample selection. This seems better than most.

The main things that stand out for me is that they did not attempt to measure
how much chocolate people consumed, nor the type of chocolate consumed. They
simply measured the number of times a week "chocolate" was consumed (which
could have been a large variety of things). The other main point is that they
mention that there was a significant reduction in alcohol consumption in the
groups that ate the most chocolate, however they did not try to correct for
this. Just scanning through the data they present, I don't think it is
possible to tell if the increased cognitive performance is related to
chocolate intake, or a lack of alcohol intake.

So, it is an interesting paper, but I wouldn't go out and start eating
chocolate because of it.

