On the other hand, eating a piece every day for 3 years will likely bring other health effects (primarily, obesity and diabetes) that will ruin that person's life before the metals get them, not that they should ignore the metals, mind.
Firstly, depending on the product and amount, you're looking at under 100 calories. Since daily requirements are something over 2000 calories per day the rest of your diet matters more.
Diabetes is a complex disease caused by excessive insulin production. Sugar is a part of the causal chain, but not a direct cause. See https://www.uhhospitals.org/blog/articles/2023/03/can-eating....
Yes, the levels of metals are important. I presume their presence is caused by metal components in their manufacture. Which begs the question if there are other products in play here not just chocolate.
No, eating chocolate every day (and in my mind I thought of the kind of chocolate confectionary one would buy in a corner shop) would suggest an unhealthy lifestyle in general and an inability to eat healthily, again, in general.
> Sugar is a part of the causal chain, but not a direct cause.
Again, why are you reading things that I did not state? I wrote "obesity and diabetes". Obesity is definitely a major risk factor, if not a direct cause of type 2 diabetes. The risk of it increases linearly with BMI.
To think I suggested that eating one bar of chocolate alone would cause diabetes is absurd.
I simply took your original post as it was stated;
>> On the other hand, eating a piece every day for 3 years will likely bring other health effects (primarily, obesity and diabetes)
I appreciate you glorifying your original intent.
glorifying? I don't know if that's autocorrect or a dig but it did make me smile! Anyway, no bother either way.
So someone who eats a bit of 80% chocolate each day would not be consuming that many calories, compared to the amount of heavy metals. Someone who ate milk chocolate would get very little in the way of calories, but quite a bit more calories.
Luckily, we have some ideas. From a paper titled Habitual Chocolate Consumption May Increase Body Weight in a Dose-Response Manner:
> More frequent chocolate consumption was associated with a significantly greater prospective weight gain over time, in a dose-response manner.
Do we know if "significantly greater prospective weight gain over time" can lead to obesity and diabetes? Well, yes, obesity is the result of significantly greater prospective weight gain over time. As to diabetes, from Why does obesity cause diabetes?:
> the risk of type 2 diabetes increases linearly with an increase in body mass index
[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34986330/#article-details
They 'adjusted' to try and compensate for this, but I don't think anyone would be suprised that respondents that had diets rich in calories and fat gained weight. There appear to be a lot of adjustments in the linked study. Besides this, the 'study' was just a survey (only from two out of four surveys due to missing data) and appears to not adequately take into account the serving size, exercise, or other dietary intake. Finally, it references three others with the opposite findings and hedges its conclusions with 'may cause'. I'm not convinced.
Not quite. The Finnish study was about chocolate versus other sweets. The "Candy consumption…" in US adults was also chocolate versus sweets. The Association Between More Frequent Chocolate Consumption and Lower Body Mass Index was indeed as the authors concluded - intriguing.
However, Habitual Chocolate Consumption May Increase Body Weight in a Dose-Response Manner was, again as the authors say, more rigorous, and also had larger numbers of participants (one of those three studies had 19 participants, the intriguing one thousands but still less). It also was designed to check the smaller studies.
I would also find it hard to dismiss the larger study because it uses a survey as the smaller studies used surveys too, and the intriguing study used a very similar questionnaire (if not the same, I'm not going to check any further).
> Besides this, the 'study' was just a survey (only from two out of four surveys due to missing data) and appears to not adequately take into account the serving size, exercise, or other dietary intake.
I've no idea why you've put quotes around "study", because it is a study.
Regardless, references to stuff like fruit and vegetable consumption are all over the paper, and there's this from the heading Assessment of Dietary and Chocolate Intake:
“Participants reported the frequency of consumption of specific foods and beverages in nine predefined categories, ranging from never or <1 per month to ≥6 times per day. Standard portion sizes were given as a reference for intake estimation.”
Depends how you word these Q&As. Each individual has varying susceptibility to diabetes and heavy metal poisoning. You can't apply population statistics to individuals, except that population effects will find certain individuals, and except to say "more is worse, less is better" if it's something harmful.
If all people took that non-fact to heart and started eating a piece of candy a day that they weren't eating before, without changing the rest of their diet, then we would have more people with diabetes and other health conditions, all without moving any goalposts.
That rough calculation won't be highly accurate for a number of reasons, but you could halve it and it still is very bad, thus it goes to show how easily fat can accumulate once maintenance calories are breached. Take care of the pennies and the pounds add up. Same goes for calories.
Secondly, why would that alone make one obese? It's the correlation between a single data point and an outcome that suggests other behaviours which would contribute are also present (hence the first question).
The vast amount of chocolate bought and consumed in every major economy is not dark, nor, if the figures are to be believed, are they being eaten in small amounts. Cadbury, Hershey et al are doing fine.
> CR tested 48 chocolate products in various categories—from milk chocolate bars to brownie mixes, chocolate chips, and hot chocolate
The UK's top selling chocolate is Cadbury's Dairy Milk. It's 45 grams in total, and each of the 60 pieces is indeed 40 calories. Most people I know eat the whole thing, and those people are overweight, like the majority of the UK public, an obesity rate that is matched in many countries world wide. As of a couple of years ago, diabetes diagnoses have doubled in the last 15 years
> that over 4.9 million people are currently living with diabetes in the UK, with 90 per cent of those with type 2
type 2 diabetes being the one that correlates, if not is caused by, obesity. Additionally:
> 13.6m people are now at increased risk of type 2 diabetes in the UK
Again, this is a world wide problem[1]. Just the other day I was listening to the Huberman Lab podcast about eye health and the expert pointed out that the upsurge in diabetes in the US and elsewhere was threatening eye health[2].
So, you may say it's only 40 calories but the data shows that people are getting fatter, because those eating a piece per day aren't only eating a piece per day, whether that's chocolate or other things. If it were just the extra 40 calories there wouldn't be a problem.
[0] https://www.diabetes.org.uk/about_us/news/diabetes-diagnoses...
[1] https://www.worldobesity.org/resources/resource-library/covi...
[2] https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/dr-jeffrey-goldberg-how-...
what?