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2012-11-18 11:37:11
By Charlotte Pritchard
Eating more chocolate improves a nation's chances of producing Nobel Prize
winners - or at least that's what a recent study appears to suggest. But how
much chocolate do Nobel laureates eat, and how could any such link be
explained?
The study's author, Franz Messerli of Colombia University, started wondering
about the power of chocolate after reading that cocoa was good for you.
One paper suggested regular cocoa intake led to improved mental function in
elderly patients with mild cognitive impairment, a condition which is often a
precursor to dementia, he recalls.
"There is data in rats showing that they live longer and have better cognitive
function when they eat chocolate, and even in snails you can show that the
snail memory is actually improved," he says.
So Messerli took the number of Nobel Prize winners in a country as an indicator
of general national intelligence and compared that with the nation's chocolate
consumption. The results - published in the New England Journal of Medicine -
were striking.
Chocolate consumption and Nobel laureates
Graph showing countries' chocolate consumption per head and Nobel Laureates per
10 million people
"When you correlate the two - the chocolate consumption with the number of
Nobel prize laureates per capita - there is an incredibly close relationship,"
he says.
"This correlation has a 'P value' of 0.0001. This means there is a less than
one-in-10,000 probability that this correlation is simply down to chance."
It might not surprise you that Switzerland came top of the chocolate-fuelled
league of intelligence, having both the highest chocolate consumption per head
and also the highest number of Nobel laureates per capita.
Sweden, however, was an anomaly. It had a very high number of Nobel laureates
but its people consumed much less chocolate on average.
Messerli has a theory: "The Nobel prize obviously is donated or evaluated in
Sweden [apart from the Peace Prize] so I thought that the Swedes might have a
slightly patriotic bias.
Visitors taste different sorts of chocolate at the International Salon des
Chocolatiers et du Chocolat, in Geneva, Switzerland The Swiss eat the most
chocolate... and have been rewarded with the most Nobel Prizes, per head of
population
Start Quote
Christopher Pissarides
To win a Nobel Prize you have to produce something others haven't thought about
- chocolate that makes you feel good might contribute
Prof Christopher Pissarides
"Or the other option is that the Swedes are excessively sensitive and only
small amounts stimulate greatly their intelligence, so that might be the reason
that they have so many Nobel Prize laureates."
We conducted our own, entirely unscientific, survey to ascertain just how much
chocolate Nobel laureates ate.
Christopher Pissarides, from the London School of Economics, reckons his
chocolate consumption laid the foundations for his Nobel Prize for Economics in
2010.
"Throughout my life, ever since I was a young boy, chocolate was part of my
diet. I would eat it on a daily basis. It's one of the things I eat to cheer me
up.
"To win a Nobel Prize you have to produce something that others haven't thought
about - chocolate that makes you feel good might contribute a little bit. Of
course it's not the main factor but... anything that contributes to a better
life and a better outlook in your life then contributes to the quality of your
work."
However, Rolf Zinkernagel - the largely Swiss-educated 1996 Nobel Prize winner
for medicine - bucks his national trend.
Meatballs with Swedish flag cocktail sticks Swedes eat only half as much
chocolate as Germans but the country has twice as many Nobel laureates per
head... perhaps it's down to the meatballs?
"I am an outlier, because I don't eat more than - and never have eaten more
than - half a kilogram of chocolate per year," he says.
Start Quote
Eric Cornell
Milk chocolate makes you stupid dark chocolate is the way to go
Eric Cornell
Robert Grubbs, an American who shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2005,
says he eats chocolate whenever possible.
"I had a friend who introduced me to chocolate and beer when we were younger. I
have transferred that now to chocolate and red wine.
"I like to hike and I eat chocolate then, I eat chocolate whenever I can."
But this is a controversial subject.
Grubbs' countryman, Eric Cornell, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001,
told Reuters: "I attribute essentially all my success to the very large amount
of chocolate that I consume. Personally I feel that milk chocolate makes you
stupid dark chocolate is the way to go. It's one thing if you want a medicine
or chemistry Nobel Prize but if you want a physics Nobel Prize it pretty much
has got to be dark chocolate."
But when More or Less contacted him to elaborate on this comment, he changed
his tune.
"I deeply regret the rash remarks I made to the media. We scientists should
strive to maintain objective neutrality and refrain from declaring our
affiliation either with milk chocolate or with dark chocolate," he said.
"Now I ask that the media kindly respect my family's privacy in this difficult
time."
Visitors enjoy the chocolate-spa pool at the Hakone Kowakien Yunessun hot
springs resort, Japan But while the Japanese clearly enjoy a cocoa-based snack,
their chocolate consumption is relatively low - as is their Nobel Prize haul
It might surprise you that we are trying to make a serious point. This is a
classic case where correlation, however strong, does not mean causation.
Messerli gave us another example. In post-war Germany, the human birth rate
fell along with the stork population. Were fewer storks bringing fewer babies?
The answer was that more homes were being built, destroying the storks'
habitat. And the homes were small - not the sort of places you could raise a
large family in.
"This is a very, very common way of thinking," he says.
"When you see a correlation, you do think there is causation in one way or
another. And in general it's absolutely true. But here we have a classic
example where we cannot find a good reason why these two correlate so closely."