The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of studies to show cocoa is good

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/10/18/15995478/chocolate-health-benefits-heart-disease

by inertial • 9 years ago

178 122 9 years ago

vox.com

sna1l• 9 years ago

This is a very common move by food companies right? Curious as to what can be done to stop it?

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...

ianai3• 9 years ago

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.

emodendroket11• 9 years ago

This seems like a more serious answer to me.

fleitz• 9 years ago

Also, stop reading the news, when you see someone healthy, ask them what they do and/or pay for their advice. (A lot of healthy people are in the wellness industries)

Being healthy isn't rocket science, but on the other hand it involves a lot of lifestyle changes.

wallace_f3• 9 years ago

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.

emodendroket11• 9 years ago

Surely it is primarily the organization which deserves censure, rather than individuals operating within the system. Unless you basically want to lock up entire fields' worth of scientists I don't see how individual responsibility is a solution.

afandian• 9 years ago

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

(Posting in a personal capacity)

rpazyaquian• 9 years ago

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.

norswap2• 9 years ago

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.

sp3322• 9 years ago

Yeah that's exactly what the article says two sentences later.

norswap2• 9 years ago

I think it says exactly the opposite.

Wait, what? Make no mistake: This vegan avocado chocolate bar is candy. With nearly 600 calories and 43 grams of fat per 100-gram serving, the bar packs more fat and calories than Cadbury Dairy Milk, and just a little less sugar.
So how in the world could a chocolate bar be convincingly sold as a health food? You can thank a decades-long effort by the chocolate industry.

I say candy (some, not stuff with lots of refined sugar) & fat can be healthy (in moderate doses, obviously).

Dirlewanger• 9 years ago

It may be that chocolate eaters are wealthier or have other characteristics, aside from their chocolate-eating habit, that protect them from disease.

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.

scrapcode• 9 years ago

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?

JosephLark• 9 years ago

“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.

aaron-lebo• 9 years ago

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%.

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.

lokerfoi• 9 years ago

75% is pretty standard in Europe. I've tried a couple of 99% cocoa chocolates too, but these are really for the hardcore lovers (gets glued to the teeth and other taste issues).

blackguardx2• 9 years ago

I recommend trying Lindt chocolate bars. It is a good, entry-level (sort of cheap) chocolate brand that is pretty wildly available.

Try the 70% and then work your way up to 90%. They make a 99% as well, but it is harder to find.

bdamm2• 9 years ago

82% can be found in common drug stores; at least in SF Bay Area and Portland area.

athenot2• 9 years ago

70%, 85% and even higher are available at the regular grocery store (Publix here in the Southeast). Lindt is one of the available brands.

sn9• 9 years ago

Most large grocery stores carry dark chocolates of anywhere from 60% to 100% dark chocolate. It's not hard to find 100% in my experience.

dwighttk• 9 years ago

Trader Joe's has a 72% bar that is really good.

surfmike• 9 years ago

The first 100% cocoa bar I've had that was actually pretty good was: Montezuma Absolute Dark Chocolate Black from the UK. I found it once at my Trader Joe's and sadly haven't seen it since. Seriously tempted to order a supply from abroad despite the high shipping cost.

gilbetron• 9 years ago

My wife has a square or two of Ghirardelli 86% dark chocolate each day - one square being about 60 calories. I can't imagine eating over a dozen per day!

nobodyorother• 9 years ago

What does 70 calories of chocolate weigh, and what's chocolate's LD50?

...What's the maximum number of heart-healthy flavanol doses?

thinkharder• 9 years ago

70 Calories of chocolate is about 11-12g of (70-85%) dark chocolate, or 12-13g of Milk Chocolate(1). Chocolate's LD50 is approximately 1000g/Kg(2). So basically your body weight in chocolate. It's the theobromine that kills you, same as dogs, but they're much more sensitive to it. And it strongly depends on the kind of chocolate, pure cocoa is much higher in theobromine than milk chocolate: So 5 oz of Cocoa powder ~= 8.6 oz of Baking chocolate ~= 26 oz of Semi-sweet ~= 27oz of dark chocolate ~= 59 oz of Milk Chocolate ~= 3583 oz of White chocolate.(3) (White chocolate has no cocoa powder in it, just cocoa butter.) Note that these comparisons are of just the theobromine content, not the the 'healthy' stuff in chocolate.

I have personally tested this back when my metabolism was young by eating 2 pounds of Hershey's Kisses in one evening with no ill effects. :)

I don't think we know that much about flavonols, quercetin is the most studied and most of the studies used a 1000 mg/day dose, but I don't find any info about a most effective or maximum dosage.(4)

The reason to eat chocolate is cause it tastes fucking awesome. If you're trying to eat it for your health I feel sad for you. ;-)

1.)http://www.calorieking.com/foods/calories-in-average-all-bra... 2.)http://blogs.plos.org/speakeasyscience/2012/02/14/the-curiou... 3.)http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/10/pets/chocolate-cha... 4.)https://examine.com/supplements/cocoa-extract/

oliwarner• 9 years ago

"~70 calories of straight cocoa powder" is what the parent comment says, not 70 calories of chocolate.

That's an odd way to measure it though. Maybe they meant grams. If they didn't you have another battle because the calorific content between brands of cocoa powder varies wildly 70kcal may be as little as 17g, or as much as 40g.

Who knows.

armandososa2• 9 years ago

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.

bitexploder• 9 years ago

85% or better and some no sugar almond butter is really nice. I have come to prefer it, and occasionally Justin's with some sugar (but not a lot, 20g-30g of carbs). It is underrated health food. Easy to travel with, filling, etc.

QAPereo• 9 years ago

To be fair, “come to appreciate” sounds a lot an “acquired taste” you know? Curious aside though, what brand do you go for? I have a friend who likes similarly dark chocolate and I’m always on the lookout for presents.

agumonkey• 9 years ago

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.

gmac• 9 years ago

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.

kaybe• 9 years ago

Nowadays I'm eating pure chocolate beans directly. One can even get them in 'nib' form at the supermarket (not cheap but it lasts a while).

It's actually really good, though not a candy anymore, more like nuts. I can recommend mixing with yoghurt and banana.

lisper• 9 years ago

I'm eating pure chocolate beans

You probably meant CACAO beans (note: not cocoa, which is a product made from cacao). There are actually products called chocolate beans, but they are typically just pieces of chocolate that have been formed to look like beans.

jibe2• 9 years ago

Jibes with your first thought.

maxxxxx• 9 years ago

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.

bllguo2• 9 years ago

Would be less of an issue if society valued research properly, and enabled scientists to refuse corporate funds

gnicholas• 9 years ago

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.

emodendroket11• 9 years ago

Who knows? Plenty of manufacturers stand to benefit from selling low-cholesterol alternatives to dairy and eggs too, no?

air7• 9 years ago

"... 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.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2014/01/09/... [2] http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Map/Nestle

BFatts• 9 years ago

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.

ianai3• 9 years ago

The only alternative is public funding.

trendia• 9 years ago

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.

carbocation• 9 years ago

Yours is a good description of publication bias. I think it's worth mentioning that funnel plots can give you a visual sense of whether there is publication bias, and tools such as Egger regression can help to try to tease out a less biased estimate in the face of publication bias.

drak0n1c• 9 years ago

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.

emodendroket11• 9 years ago

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.

njarboe3• 9 years ago

Any organization that has come close to "the ability to allocate the entire society's resources toward the common good" have created societies of great suffering and desperation so far. Maybe some super-intelligent computer system could do better?

rhizome• 9 years ago

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.

fenwick67• 9 years ago

"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.

arcbyte• 9 years ago

It's a scary road if everyone is just blanket assuming their sources of information are correct. We're living it.

There are NO institutions WHATSOEVER that we should trust.

Retric• 9 years ago

My suggestion is to ignore anything that's not a meta study.

Material science puts out thousands of papers a year, and ignoring them is easy because I lack context to understand them. IMO, the same is true of any field without a lot of study and literature review.

denzil_correa3• 9 years ago

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.

bllguo2• 9 years ago

It has a relation to the ability of someone to actually conduct an experiment... Larger groups have more resources, from knowledge to experience to money.

It is not an ad hominem fallacy. I don't know how you twisted his meaning to come to that conclusion.

alexanderstears3• 9 years ago

AD Hominem fallacy - the status of someone has no relation to the outcome of a scientific experiment.

That's not what the parent comment is arguing. The parent comment points out that research is expensive and not available equally to all groups.

The status of mom and pop doesn't effect the outcome of their research. Mom and pop weighing R&D against making their mortgage that month usually means they don't invest much in research.

gaius• 9 years ago

Except that you can't: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39054778

Science is facing a "reproducibility crisis" where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, research suggests

asdfasfhretwt3• 9 years ago

Government funding, universities and charitable foundations are the traditional model for research.

Mz• 9 years ago

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?

colordrops• 9 years ago

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.

jesperlang• 9 years ago

some random thoughts:

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!

WheelsAtLarge• 9 years ago

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.

joering2• 9 years ago

We now have thousands of people addicted and many of the dying.

But isn't it also why Reagan announced war on drugs? So the government does answer when needed (eventually?)

ggg9990• 9 years ago

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.

dovdovdov• 9 years ago

okay, what if I have them with diet coke?

nostromo• 9 years ago

No, chocolate is not health food.

It actually may be. The large about of sugar that usually accompanies it certainly is not.

squarefoot• 9 years ago

The same principle can be applied with just about anything: water is not just healthy but essential for life, but if you drink 10 liters in a shot you either get hospitalized or dead. Most advertising is more subtle than the traditional snake oil bullshit which can be easily detected and sanctioned; it usually is based on a true principle which is then stretched so it can be used to sell something that doesn't work.

dforrestwilson• 9 years ago

If anyone doubts that massive amounts of money have gone to a few (now extremely wealthy) legal drug dealers.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12775932/sackler-famil...

Nursie• 9 years ago

Unfortunately, as always, the pain med thing was mis_targetted.

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.

warent• 9 years ago

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1853/

jmcgough2• 9 years ago

also obligatory :) http://phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

jmcgough2• 9 years ago

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.

jayess• 9 years ago

Most reporters aren't knowledgeable enough to distinguish between hype and true breakthroughs.

From personal experience I've learned that few reporters are knowledgeable about anything outside how to be a reporter.

frik• 9 years ago

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"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/15/eu-repor...

jv22222• 9 years ago

There's a story (urban legend?) in Ireland that the Mars company forced a pub to changed it's name from "Mahr's Bar" to another name.

I've always wondered if that was true, or even possible.

guelo• 9 years ago

Besides the sugar my main concern with chocolate is that a lot of it is contaminated with toxic levels of cadmium & lead.

doctorstupid• 9 years ago

That's why it's called Cadbury's.

ourmandave• 9 years ago

If Big Chocolate wants to spend money to help me rationalize my 2nd (or 3rd) Twix, who am I to get in their way?

(De Nile is not just a chocolate river in Egypt.)

lawpoop• 9 years ago

OP means cacao

duncan_bayne2• 9 years ago

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

" 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."

duncan_bayne2• 9 years ago

Upon re-reading that, I wonder how often "politics, crimes, or disasters" occur in the _same_ stories ... ;)

DoodleBuggy• 9 years ago

[Fill in the blank company] has sponsored hundreds of studies to show [fill in the blank] is [good/bad]

Now it's applicable to nearly everything

The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of studies to show cocoa is good

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