Chocolate Makes You Thin! (Wait No, Never Mind)

Chocolate Makes You Thin! (Wait No, Never Mind). Did anyone else get hit with one of those headlines that were ricocheting around the blogosphere a few days back? You know, the ones declaring that chocolate is pretty much a magic weight loss drug and we should all be eating it because science says so? Right. Well. Before you eat that Wonka bar whole and buy a pair of jeans the next size down, please check out this point-by-point blogger breakdown on the chocolate study‘s gaping errors:

“So to recount — basically here we have a study with no controls whatsoever rendering conclusions impossible, authors who rather than mention their study’s pretty much insurmountable methodological limitations instead made up a “growing body of literature” on magic calorie neutral or negative foods, a press release that spins it all as fact and as a result, as of early this morning, less than 24 hours after publication, there were already 443 chocolate makes you thin stories on the newswire to further misinform an already nutritionally confused world.”

We for one, will not be stopping with our chocolate consumption any time soon, but sadly we’ll also keep in mind that no matter what the headlines say, it’s extremely unlikely to give us the lithe, lean body we secretly wish it would. Some things really are too good to be true. [Reporting on Health]