| Friday, April 6, 2007 |
| Daily Quirk: A Mars Bar A Day Keeps The Doctor Away |
Presenting this week's health revelation: Chocolate is good for your arteries. According to a study conducted at Yale, people who eat eight ounces of sugar-free cocoa daily have healthier blood vessels. People who did not eat the cocoa all DIED, all at once, on Aug. 14, 2006.
by James Lileks, Star Tribune
Presenting this week's health revelation: Chocolate is good for your arteries. According to a study conducted at Yale, people who eat eight ounces of sugar-free cocoa daily have healthier blood vessels. People who did not eat the cocoa all DIED, all at once, on Aug. 14, 2006.
OK, they were on a bus that was heading for the testing center and it drove off a cliff, and that might have skewed the findings. Even so, the results are promising.
Just kidding about the bus part. Actually, the Yale study seems to confirm earlier findings by British researchers, and the researchers credit flavonoids, a substance that sounds like aliens from some Pufnstuf planet where everyone looks like a giant tongue. So what does this mean?
1. Until the chocolate patch is invented, people will be duct-taping Hershey squares to their thighs.
2. Someone has a good job spending grant money to try all sorts of arbitrary combinations. You never hear about the studies that fail. Eggs do not prevent those weird super-strength hairs in the ear; gargling Spam smoothies has no measurable effect on liver function, although it seems to strengthen the gag reflex. And so on. Right now, some researcher no doubt is assembling a proposal to test the effect of Pixy Stix on nasal congestion. (They seem to work, if you push hard enough.)
3. Someone is doing their best to find out if it's flavonoids alone that do it, or flavonoids in certain substances. In which case I should stop poking fun at them and offer thanks.
4. In three years, as experience has taught us, we will be told the exact opposite, and reassured that this is what the evidence suggests.
Which will be great, because I love white chocolate.
jlileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858 More daily at lileks.com.
from http://www.startribune.comLabels: chocolate info, healthy chocolate |
posted by All About Home @ 5:45 PM  |
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