REAL LIFE NEWS: CHOCOLATE MAKES YOU WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE
by Hazed
New research shows something terrible exciting for anyone who’s a chocoholic like me. It turns out that if you eat lots of chocolate, you will win the Nobel prize.
What, you didn’t know there’s a Nobel prize for chocolate-eating?
Well no, of course there isn’t, and of course chocolate doesn’t have any effect on your ability win prizes. (Well, maybe a Man v Food style chocolate eating contest - but not a Nobel prize.)
No, what this story shows is how you have to be careful with statistics. It demonstrates what I go on about quite a lot when I report on surveys: correlation is not the same as causation.
In other words, two things can be linked, but one does not cause the other.
And so to this survey, which looked at national chocolate consumption, and how many Nobel laureates were produced by various countries, to demonstrate that the higher a country’s consumption of chocolate, the more Nobel prize winners it spawns per capita.
Top of the list come the Swiss, closely followed by the Swedes and the Danes.
“I attribute essentially all my success to the very large amount of chocolate that I consume,” said Eric Cornell, an American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in 2001.
“Personally I feel that milk chocolate makes you stupid,” he added. “Now dark chocolate is the way to go. It’s one thing if you want like a medicine or chemistry Nobel Prize, OK, but if you want a physics Nobel Prize it pretty much has got to be dark chocolate.”
Sounds pretty convincing, no?
But of course the researchers who carried out this research realise the whole thing is absurd. The data they use is absolutely genuine, but the way they use it is deliberately bogus.
Dr. Franz Messerli came up with the idea for this study after reading a report that linked flavonoids, a type of antioxidants found in cocoa and wine, to higher scores on cognitive tests.
Read the source article to find out how he went about his chocolate-Nobel prize research, and what it shows about other surveys - particularly those linked to the so-called benefits of particular foodstuffs on health.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/10/us-eat-chocolate-win-the-nobel-prize-idUSBRE8991MS20121010
Stop press: here’s another article about this study, which gives a lot more interesting detail: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20356613
