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Comment by batch12 | Hacker News Reader

Eating a piece of chocolate every day is not going to give someone obesity and diabetes.

Tell me, what is the correlation between chocolate consumption, frequency, and obesity?

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

> Compared to participants who ate chocolate less frequently at visit 1, those who consumed it more frequently were more likely to be younger, thinner, white, female, and smokers, to consume less alcohol, and to have diets rich in calories and fat, and low in vegetables and fruit (Table 1).

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.

> 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.”

adding one piece a day per person to the national diet would probably have a dramatic effect, especially since that increase will be a bell curve too, with half consuming more.

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.

You moved the goalposts from a piece a day to a bell curve of volume-- and added metal poisioning. No, a piece of chocolate a day would alone cause neither obesity nor diabetes.

it is false to say in the context of general advice for people without regard to where they stand diet and healthwise that a piece of candy a day won't cause them diabetes.

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.

This is also true for apples, but if you said "eating an apple every day for 3 years will likely bring other health effects (primarily, obesity and diabetes) that will ruin that person's life before the lack of access to medical care gets them" you would probably be mocked. You're not going to get fat from one piece of chocolate a day unless you're already on the edge, and if you're on the edge then it doesn't matter very much that chocolate is what took you over it.

No we wouldn't. If these hypothetical people are that close to the edge where 10 grams of sugar and 70 calories would do this, they'd develop the diseases anyway. So the number would be the same.

If someone is eating exactly enough calories to covere TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) and is thus at maintenance, given that 70 calories given in the most efficient form (carbohydrate) would mean little energy lost to processing, and 1 gram of fat is 9 calories, that's 7.7 grams of fat added every day. In 3 months, that's ~700 grams of fat added. 1 year, ~2.8 kilos. In 5 years, over 14 kilos.

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.

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