Industry funded studies on cocoa and health were turned into imaginative story headlines:<\/p>\n
The resulting cocoa and chocolate studies are catnip for journalists, who often write about them under headlines like \u201cGood news for chocolate lovers: The more you eat, the lower your risk of heart disease,\u201d or simply \u201cChocolate is good for you.\u201d<\/p>\n
In one example, a Columbia University researcher, Adam Brickman, led a Mars-funded study, looking at how cocoa flavanols might affect the dentate gyrus, a region of the brain whose deterioration with age is associated with memory decline. His paper concluded that flavanols may improve dentate gyrus function, according to specific cognitive ability tests.<\/p>\n
But the university public relations team and the media hyped the findings, and turned a small flavanol supplement study into a big chocolate study.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Source: Dark chocolate is now a health food. Here\u2019s how that happened.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n
Propaganda – its now on the menu!<\/p>\n
\n
- “7 proven health benefits of dark chocolate”<\/a><\/li>\n
- “Dark chocolate is rich in minerals”<\/a><\/li>\n
- “What are the health benefits of dark chocolate?”<\/a> (after noting its high in fat and sugar, the author recommends eating less than 3\/4th of one ounce of dark chocolate per day. Typical candy bars in the U.S. are up to 10x that size.)<\/li>\n
- It is even sold as a health food supplement<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How did dark chocolate become a health food in the United States? Industry funded studies finding obscure benefits were then touted by press release, then rewritten into health food stories by news reporters. It’s been a highly successful propaganda campaign that turned high fat, high sugar foods into health foods (contrary to the earlier meme that high fat and sugar foods are bad for us).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,24,25,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advertising","category-business","category-in-practice","category-internet-meme","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9030\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}