Upfront: A Nobel Snack?

A Nobel Snack?

Dark chocolate offers the most health benefits of other types.

A Nobel Prize; Switzerland has won many of these!

Some of Switzerland's fine chocolate.

Chocolate has been known, especially dark chocolate, for it’s antioxidants and contributions to the consumers health. Health rumors have been floating around that drinking chocolate milk after a work out helps to replenish your muscles, aid recovery, and has double the carbohydrates and proteins most sports drinks such as Gatorade. Chocolate consumption also aids in preventing blood clots, wards off stroke-caused brain damage, controls coughing, heart attacks and diabetes, reduces blood inflammation, helps your mental math thanks to it’s flavanols. Chocolate helps protect women’s skin from the sun’s ultra violet rays, it has a lot of psychoactive theobromine which stimulates happiness, and chocolate makes cancer cells travel slower through the body, while making blood flow faster in general and eating chocolate supposedly adds two years to your life. Sayings such as, “Chocolate is awful for your health!” are wrong, chocolate isn’t so bad after all, just be careful with the over processed chocolate that is found in most stores, since it looses most of it’s natural nutritional value. But, due to a recent study, chocolate has more than health benefits, a country’s per capita chocolate consumption is linked to how many Nobel Prize winners a country has. The more chocolate, the more Nobel winners! Dr. Franz Messerli was randomly comparing chocolate consumption to how many Nobel Prize winners a country had, and found the new relation. Switzerland, which produced 148,270 tons of chocolate in 2004, and the natives consumed about 54% of it, that’s about 120 three ounce chocolate bars eaten by one person per year! In 2004, Switzerland’s gross income from chocolate was 1.37 billion U.S. dollars. Switzerland proudly boasts 1.111 Nobel Prizes per million inhabitants, awarded between 1950 and 2001 for physics, chemistry, medicine and economics, which is the highest amount of winners per country in the world. Following Switzerland, are Sweden and Denmark with chocolate consumption and Nobel Prize winners. With all that chocolate consumption containing psychoactive theobromine, no wonder Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland are among the top happiest countries! (Denmark being first, Sweden second, and Switzerland seventh.) With the average U.S. citizen only consuming about 11.7 pounds of chocolate a year, we better up the ainty and hopefully also gain some more Nobel Prize winners for our country. Countries such as China, Japan, and Brazil are at the end of the spectrum with low chocolate consumption and Nobel Prize winners. Sadly though, eating more chocolate doesn’t directly prove to winning more Nobel Prizes, but it is a cool thought any how! If I could win a Nobel Prize just by eating chocolate, chocolate would become the only food in my diet! The connection may be just a weird and strange coincidence like body hair linked to intelligence and how human birth rates in Europe correlate with their stork population and other strange, quirky correlations that make our world connected the way it is today.

“New York Times: Upfront” News & Trends: Chocolate. Page 4, Issue: January 7th, 2013. Reported by Randal C. Archibold, Anahad O’Connor, Emma Bryce, and Tara Parker-Pope of The New York Times; and Veronica Majerol and Alessandra Potenza

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Keep On Chasin' Your Dreams,
Caitlin