Chocolate as part of a healthy diet. Yeah right

There is a kind of news story is‘too good to check’ where the desire for the story to be true over-rides the negative cynicism that is the default state of any decent news room. It’s what hoaxers and pranksters rely on when they persuade reporters and their editors to publish stories that are plainly complete bollocks.

Usually, but not always, these baseless narratives are ‘harmless’ enough and may prompt a weary smile among the media-savvy. The journalists and reader are, arguably, in a conspiracy: ‘we know this is probably crap, but there is a minute chance it might possibly be true, and it’s a laugh, isn’t it?’

Sometimes these stories are ‘what we would like to believe is true, but isn’t’, and one of the best examples is the ‘chocolate is good for you’ meme. Every now and then, some researchers somewhere will have carried out some research on mood and chocolate, or looked at some of the chemicals in cocoa, and found that they are (big fanfare) antioxidants. And we all know from the face cream ads that antioxidants are good for us.

The latest in this Mobius loop of articles are stories suggesting depressed people self-medicate with chocolate. My former colleagues at NHS Choices have done a decent job of picking the study apart here. There’s a story about chocolate and heart disease from the Telegraph; and one here from the Mail about
from the Mail about chocolate reducing stress.
But I’m not really talking about the details of the studies here, more the cumulative effect that might suggest to the nutritionally illiterate that chocolate has significant health benefits.
Now I like chocolate. A lot. Now that my beer consumption is more sporadic, it’s probably the reason that my waistline is what it is. But a food which is 18.5% saturated fat and 56.7% sugar by weight cannot be healthy, not in any universe where Newton’s law on the conservation of energy apply. No marginal antioxidants or mood-enhancing properties make up for the fact that eating chocolate regularly will contribute to, at the least, becoming overweight, and increasing risk of diabetes and heart disease.
I would like chocolate to be good for me, just like other people would like red wine to be good for them. But it isn’t, and the attractive stories are wishful thinking.
What is worrying is the well-known psychological effect of repetition: if you say something often enough 'it becomes true'. But it doesn't, and the repetition encourages out efforts to catch up with US levels of obesity.