Chocolate Is Clearly the Preferred Treat of Geniuses the World Over
LatestWith the Nobel Prize ceremony now a few days behind us, it might be worth asking, “Where the fuck do all these smart-ass people come from?” I mean, I certainly don’t know any Nobel-caliber people. Do you? Don’t lie to everyone — it’s unseemly. Of course you don’t know any Nobel winners, and, if you don’t start hanging out with people who eat chocolate all the time, odds are pretty good that you’ll forever be stuck hanging out with stupids until the day you choke to death on a Werthers.
A “study” that appeared recently in the New England Journal of Medicine (it was published as a “note,” not as an actual peer-reviewed study) has correlated countries’ rates of chocolate consumption with the number of Nobel Prizes they’ve scored. According to study author Dr. Franz Messerli, of St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital and Columbia University in New York, there is evidence (disputed evidence) that flavanols in green tea, red wine, and chocolate can help “in slowing down or even reversing” age-related mental decline. Messerli built a very rickety bridge from these flavanols to Nobel-prone countries, and found, after examining a country’s per capita chocolate consumption, that those countries with the most Nobel winners generally had the highest rates of chocolate consumption. The correlation, based on data from major chocolate producers on sales in 23 countries, is, Messerli explained, “surprisingly powerful.”