This new study, based on nearly 1,000 people from New York, is not the first to link chocolate to brain function, but what it actually tells us remains very vague.

 

“It’s not possible to talk about causality, because that’s nearly impossible to prove with our design,” said one of the researchers, meaning that we can’t tell whether clever people like chocolate or chocolate makes you clever. 

 

But it is also said to help improve weight loss. How? I hear you all ask. It was certainly widely reported last year, but in fact, the news turned out to be a scam, perpetrated by the science journalist John Bohannon to prove how susceptible the media is to pseudoscience. Bohannon did conduct a real trial with some people eating chocolate and some not, but he measured so many things about them that he knew some sort of fluke “effect” would probably show up. And what do you know? The chocolate-eaters happened to lose weight; the abstainers didn’t. Bingo.