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Comment by jey | Hacker News Reader

This sounds extremely confounded by lifestyle, socioeconomic status, and overall diet. The kinds of people who eat dark chocolate are clearly a self-selected bunch of outliers. Even though they tried to correct for some of these covariates, I'm personally going to take these results with a pinch of salted chocolate.

To be fair, the authors do acknowledge these limitations of their methodology, and these kinds of studies are a useful part of the overall enterprise of science to explore and propose hypotheses.

> First, we cannot entirely rule out the role of confounding in our observed associations. We controlled for multiple lifestyle and dietary covariates that might confound the associations of interest, although residual or unmeasured confounding, or both, may still exist owing to the observational nature of the analysis.

Regardless, I'll go ahead and take this finding as a further justification to keep eating dark chocolate.

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I'm also suspect for similar reasons, but this at least seems consistent with lots of other stuff we're finding out about the random things humanity has been imbibing for millennia (coffee, tea, cacao, etc). Anything that's anti-inflammatory seems to help fix a lot of stuff, as long as whatever you do to get that anti-inflammatory effect doesn't have too many downsides.

For instance, I wonder if we'll eventually find an NSAID that isn't hard on the liver, and low doses end up in things like vitamins. (My understanding is that that's the main reason you can't just constantly take small doses of advil - the marginal positive effects of reduced inflammation are outweighed by your kidneys and liver being made to constantly work harder).

To arrive at a conclusion which suggests you should always just add a fixed amount of some substance to your diet seems generally flawed to me. It treats bodies like they're all average machines with fixed inputs and predictable results and zero emergent properties.

If wonder if we'll eventually improve genetic and blood testing to the point where everyone can have customized daily information to help them make the best individual choice.

Hopefully there will be a follow up RCT. I volunteer for the test group.

This is always the top comment on these studies, but come on, it’s a medical journal. As you already pointed out they did adjust for confounding factors, you simply cannot exclude them completely with a single study.

Yes, this also measures how well of these individuals are as Chocolate is a luxury product. This needs to be examined sorting into economic cohorts.

Dark chocolate often has very high sugar levels. You might try to self correct but corporations are always on your heels.

> Dark chocolate often has very high sugar levels.

Milk chocolate usually has higher sugar levels than dark chocolate.

The point you cite was relative to other foods, not other chocolates.

Should’ve been more clear. You can now buy chocolate that is marketed as “dark chocolate” but has similar sugar content to milk chocolate. Manufacturers have adapted to our buying behaviour.

If you're going to eat chocolate, dark has by far the lowest sugar content among chocolate types.

That's whataboutism. There's still a lot of sugar in it. Additionally, chocolate often has a high amount of heavy metals in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzWWOQMLttE

I like chocolate as much as the next guy, but personally my skin always starts itching all over (inflammation!) and breaking out in acneic pustules on the chin, be it dark, milk, cacao powder, whatever. It's the same reaction I get from other high sugar content candy.

> That's whataboutism.

The discussion is about chocolate in general, so noting that one form of chocolate is much lower in sugar than another is hardly "whataboutism".

Dark chocolate has about half as much sugar as milk chocolate. Seems reasonable to be OK with eating a bit of dark chocolate but not milk or white.

Dark chocolate cannot have more sugar than 100% minus how much cacao is inside. And usually if we're talking dark chocolate then we're talking 60%+ chocolate. My personal suggestion is to go for nothing less than 80-85% chocolate, which certainly does not trigger my sugar addiction (meaning it suffices to eat one or two pieces); even more it appears to reduce my appetite (similar to tea). And also makes me feel happy (there are articles about these effects, but I don't know how good the studies behind it are, but certainly worth a mention!). Truly a gift.

It's usually almost exactly the amount of sugar that is not cacao if you look at the label. Milk chocolate is like over half sugar by weight.

There sad reality is that cacao is extremely bitter, so every gram of sugar is sorely needed to balance it out. I've settled on 70% cacao (so like 29% sugar) as a good balance of being dark for the endorphins and still enjoyable to even eat. Over 90% it stops even being the consistency of chocolate and starts to approach something resembling a brick of raw cocoa.

I tried a 99% Lindt bar once. Took me 6 months to finish it

The manufacturers are being dishonest. They will call it dark chocolate when in reality it is high sugar. Sometimes food coloring is used to make it look darker.

Dark chocolate is great, but check the label carefully!

It isn't food coloring, it's Dutch process - mixing cocoa powder with alkali makes the cocoa powder darker, and repeating the process makes it darker and darker until it's black. It alters the taste too, making it less bitter - Oreo cookies are an example of Dutched chocolate. It's possible to have an 80% light-brown chocolate bar, but the cocoa is more bitter than the darker dutched cocoa, so you don't see lighter-colored chocolate bars at 80%. Milk chocolate is typically not made with dutched cocoa powder, and it appears lighter in color, and has more sugar and milk to compensate for the more bitter flavor of the non-dutched cocoa powder.

Depends on the specific dark chocolate. Yeah, Hershey's dark chocolate is mostly sugar. But a lot of people prefer dark chocolates with much higher cacao ratios.

85% dark chocolate has something like 3-4g sugar per serving. That’s less than what’s in a typical slice of bread in the US. Which may say more about the bread than about the chocolate — but the point is that you’re probably getting more sugar in your “healthy” lunch sandwich than in the morsel of dark chocolate you have for dessert afterwards.

(P.S. the chocolate also has more fiber than the bread!)

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