The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of studies to show cocoa is good
vox.com
vox.com
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.
But isn't it also why Reagan announced war on drugs? So the government does answer when needed (eventually?)
It actually may be. The large about of sugar that usually accompanies it certainly is not.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12775932/sackler-famil...
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.
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.
From personal experience I've learned that few reporters are knowledgeable about anything outside how to be a reporter.
"EU report on weedkiller safety copied text from Monsanto study"
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/15/eu-repor...
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.
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.
Because you're not supposed to chew it (I believe that's even written in the "tasting tips" on the Lindt packaging at least). Bite off small bits and let them melt in your mouth. It's kind of like a dark and very tasty coffee, if that sounds good to you, give it a try.
Now if only I could find it in the supermarkets around here... (as is common in France)
Try the 70% and then work your way up to 90%. They make a 99% as well, but it is harder to find.
What would you suggest is better?
I think that gives the perception and benefits of being high end to the high volume but lower blends, but means the over 90s seem a bit too poor. But I'm not really sure how the botique 95% blends are and I'm glad lindt's aren't up to the challenge. It is hard enough to travel with a 90% addiction.
Look for an Endangered Species Panther bar. They're in almost every grocery store around here (I can only assume they're popular), 88% cacao, and much less bitter/harsh.
Evidently you're in Utah, USA.
It's good to mention actual location, rather than 'around here', for people that don't know where you are.
McDonalds are pretty much everywhere - that means they're popular, by definition, however most discerning consumers wouldn't consider them a high quality product.
Some tomatoes are considered acidic, but in practice most tomato varieties have the same acidity - just varying levels of sugars, which makes them taste more / less acidic. Is the 'much less bitter' quality of this bar you're referring to a result of a higher ratio of sugars?
> It's good to mention actual location, rather than 'around here', for people that don't know where you are.
Why? What difference would that have made? Either the bars exist where the parent lives or they don't. My location has nothing to do with that. I only mention that they're common in my area as a "maybe they're common enough to also be found where you are" data point.
> McDonalds are pretty much everywhere - that means they're popular, by definition, however most discerning consumers wouldn't consider them a high quality product.
What's your point? Are you saying that the Endangered Species bars are low quality because they happen to be popular(-ish) in my area?
> Is the 'much less bitter' quality of this bar you're referring to a result of a higher ratio of sugars?
Possibly. I don't really know enough about the respective bars to really speak to that. I wonder, though, if it's not something in the manufacturing process since all Lindt (even the "sweet" bars) have the same sour/acidic flavor to me.
It makes it easier for other people to determine the likelihood / difficulty of them finding this recommendation of yours.
The hyperbolic passion conveyed by 'hate' and 'taste like car battery' to describe a luxury item you are not compelled to consume meant I wasn't about to put much effort into looking anyway.
However, I've just now tried to locate a 'black panther bar' and have discovered it would cost me US$50+ in order to obtain.
Presumably because I'm not 'around here'.
> What's your point?
That popularity does not imply, let alone guarantee, quality.
> Possibly. I don't really know enough about the respective bars to really speak to that.
Could you perhaps review the nutritional information on one of your packets?
Reviewing their website, Endangered Species Natural Dark Chocolate (72% Cocoa) is about 27% sugar.
The Black Panther variety (88% Cocoa) is 11% sugar.
In the plain dark chocolate market there doesn't seem to be much variety - or indeed much room for variety - of ingredients:
Black Panther: BITTERSWEET CHOCOLATE (CHOCOLATE LIQUOR, CANE SUGAR, COCOA BUTTER, SOY LECITHIN, VANILLA).
Lindt does not seem to include soy lecithin in their comparably dark (90% Cocoa) chocolate. (Of course they may use it but not mention it -- this seems unlikely as around here (Australia) we're fairly strict on nutrition and ingredient advisories on processed foods.)
So, it might be informative for you to work out if soy lecithin's presence is the key.
I don't have a particularly acute sense of taste, and haven't eaten chocolate for a couple of decades, but some casual googling on the subject turns up some quite passionate tomes in both directions (no difference, lots of difference). Impossible to summarise, so I'll let you do your own research & taste tests if you're so inspired.
The original parent asked for an opinion, and I gave it. Perhaps hyperbolic, but also concise in its description.
It would not be “informative” for me to research anything, since I already know about the soy lecithin angle and didn’t think it was worth mentioning.
What makes each bar taste differently wasn’t part of the discussion until you brought it up, and you obviously have answers to that question, so there’s no need to belabor it.
Whereas I would suggest it's precisely the kind of interesting insight that you should have shared, given its potential importance to the discussion, and the fact the word lecithin doesn't appear anywhere in TFA or HN comments (at the time).
Anyhoo, ultimately I did manage to learn something interesting from your 'where I'm standing right now there's shops nearby that sell chocolate that I like' contribution. So that's good.
Aside -- can hyperbole be concise? Brief, certainly. Concise to me suggests accuracy.
I have a friend that runs a coffee shop, where he also makes chocolate. The 100% chocolate he made was really, really good.
...What's the maximum number of heart-healthy flavanol doses?
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/
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.
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.
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.
It's actually really good, though not a candy anymore, more like nuts. I can recommend mixing with yoghurt and banana.
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.
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.
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.
And incidentally I'd say a big part of the problem is that the research is totally misleading.
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.
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.
There are NO institutions WHATSOEVER that we should trust.
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.
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.
It is not an ad hominem fallacy. I don't know how you twisted his meaning to come to that conclusion.
Not to mention supplies. I worked as a lab assistant for a dude studying the effects of zebra mussels in closed freshwater lake systems in Indiana (dams and whatnot, where the mussel would need to have been introduced to the lake). Microscopes capable of counting the young, ventilation hoods (for preservation chemicals), scales, and methods of disposing of biowaste from the traps for adults? Yeah, that's even more - and this dude had a pretty low budget. What he did have was the time to put into the research which is yet another thing that alludes folks. Some fields of study really needs better equipment than we were using - plus it has been 20 years since then.
It isn't that the low-budget stuff or the "mom and pop research" is less valid or not good enough. It is that even that level is cost-prohibitive.
Heck, we used xrays to fit shoes on people long after she died.[1] I'm sure part of that was humans being slow to regulate it, but still.
Knowing that x or y substance is dangerous brings a different perspective, I think. By the time I worked with formaldehyde, we knew we needed some precautions. I also think it is wise to consider age and mental capacity: IF someone isn't old enough to have full adult rights (including drinking, warring, and renting cars) they probably shouldn't be able to decide to not be careful. But then again, by the time one is educated to today's standards, they are old enough.
Because the comment also mentioned this
> And I sure as hell won't trust any mom and pop research about pharmacology.
The comment essentially means that peer reviewed scientific experimental results from mom & pop are untrustworthy over big companies.
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.
> And I sure as hell won't trust any mom and pop research about pharmacology.
Regardless of Mom and Pop store investments, the outcome of scientific experiments don't depend on who does the experiments.
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
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?
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!
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?
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.
(De Nile is not just a chocolate river in Egypt.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...
Being healthy isn't rocket science, but on the other hand it involves a lot of lifestyle changes.
There's a sense of urgency to getting and staying employed in America which counteracts this ability to be judicious about what work you take, which is perhaps the underlying cultural driver.
Uh, yeah, of course there is, because the alternative is penury. If you make scientists liable and change nothing else the result is not going to be a great scientific system that works for the average Joe.
“Patterson's award for this discovery [the age of the earth]? A world of trouble. He didn’t know it, but he was on a collision course with some of the most powerful people on the planet [for discovering widespread lead pollution by accident].”-from the 2nd Cosmos
If you're interested in this kind of thing I recommend PIDapaloooza conference. https://pidapalooza.org
(Posting in a personal capacity)
" 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."
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
I've always wondered if that was true, or even possible.
Now it's applicable to nearly everything
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.
> 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).