Finally, the most accurate reactions come from the web itself: <a href="http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=166912491" rel="nofollow">http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=166912491</a><p>> study invalid. no control for calories at all.<p>> Why are calories not counted on any of the individuals?<p>> Free reign is not a way to go about doing a study. They might very well have, we don't know. We all know cocoa has weight loss properties (Theobromine), but to do such a poorly constructed study was pointless.
<a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/30/that-chocolate-study/" rel="nofollow">http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/30/that-chocolate-study/</a><p>> For me, the takeaway from this affair is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to make statistics impossible to hack. Getting rid of p-values is appropriate sometimes, but not other times. Demanding large sample sizes is appropriate sometimes, but not other times. Not trusting silly conclusions like “chocolate causes weight loss” works sometimes but not other times. At the end of the day, you have to actually know what you’re doing. Also, <i>try to read more than one study.</i>
By the way, this is the documentary for which this was done:<p>In French: <a href="http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/052711-000/pour-maigrir-mangez-du-chocolat" rel="nofollow">http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/052711-000/pour-maigrir-mangez-d...</a><p>And in German: <a href="http://www.arte.tv/guide/de/052711-000/schlank-durch-schokolade" rel="nofollow">http://www.arte.tv/guide/de/052711-000/schlank-durch-schokol...</a>
The real story here is that, even after being shown proof of that it was a hoax all along, a chunk of the same population will continue to hold that eating chocolate helps to lose weight.
On the flip side, you have some well-heeled corporations and industry groups working to discredit good science that's bad for them. Would be interesting to read a piece on how that's done.
It's difficult to understand why anyone would ever pay any attention to nutrition "science". Everything is wrong. TFA complimented the meatheads on some bodybuilding site for their skepticism. People who pay very close attention to <i>their own</i> habits and results are probably going to be more right about their own nutrition than all the scientists in the world put together.
To be honest, chocolate may help in an indirect way...<p>If someone's on a diet, and never gets any 'reward', they might be tempted to cheat or give up.<p>If they're told a little chocolate every day is good, they'll stick with their diet, have their chocolate, and forego worse 'cheat' items (even though chocolate has plenty of fat and sugar, the amount you consume before you're content is relatively small compared to say, ice-cream, cookies, etc...).<p>Studies (and anecdotes) have shown that chocolate makes people happy, so that little happiness at the end might just help people stay on their diet and not stress out (stress can cause the body to store fat). Maybe it's something like the French paradox...<p>The study was pretty funny though, and I appreciate their honesty. And it goes to show why pretty much all research on fad diets is nonsense. Still though, if you choose between drinking a gallon of pop per day or chocolate, chocolate wins. So maybe their 'research' didn't go to waste.
@reamworks<p>[Your post is flagged/dead, so I'm replying here. I hope you see it.]<p>The relationship between counting calories and weight loss is not quite as simple as the formula [Calories Injested] - [Calories Burned] = [Delta body fat] might indicate.<p>Details here: <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/12/the-physics-diet/" rel="nofollow">http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/12/the-physics-diet/</a>
It's not news that the peer-review system isn't safe from exploits. People have been using Markov chains to generate studies which have then been published. And journalists uncritically picks up everything they can. All functions in society are based on trust and are easily exploitable if a person is not behaving trustworthy.<p>So making a fake study about chocolate and getting lots of magazines to publish it I think is a little unethical. It's not news, and the reason most people don't do it is because they want to act trustworthy. For example, someone could, if they wanted, submit patches to some free software projects which would introduce awful security holes and get them merged or just write shit on Wikipedia.
'everyone'?<p>I don't recall being fooled into thinking this.<p>Slightly less flippantly - the assertion, conclusion, and title are wrong.