So, did you join in the great Easter Egg rush set off by the stories last week that chocolate could prevent millions of heart attacks and strokes? Reports that Easter eggs “may be healthy” and even that “ chocolate every day can cut the risk of heart disease” followed a story from.
The European Heart Journal saying that researchers from the German Institute of Human Nutrition had found that eating 7.5g of chocolate daily can bring benefits.
So, throw away that defibrillator and grab a Creme Egg? Sorry, but reality got trampled in the stampede. The results in this study are so insignificant as to be meaningless.
The greatest benefits were found in subjects who ate 7.5g a day the equivalent of a small square. Their risk of heart attack and stroke was 39 per cent lower than.
The group who ate 1.7g a day. Who eats one square of chocolate a day and who eats just a quarter of a square a day? These are meaningless comparisons. These people don’t exist, they are statistical averages.
The unlikely amounts were arrrived at because it was a retrospective study of 19,357 people over a decade — the sort where researchers look at a huge load of population data and try to pick out something interesting — rather than a tightly controlled study of people’s future lives.
Retrospective trials are prone to lapse into “statistical fishing”, finding patterns that may just be the sort of numerical quirks you find in vast swirls of data. This trial’s odd results were pumped by media machinery into wild extrapolations such as: “Eating just one square of chocolate a day can cut the risk of heart attack and stroke by 39 per cent.”
Considering the number of chocs that are chomped in the UK, it seems amazing that anyone dies of a heart attack at all. Perhaps that’s because other factors — such as obesity, stress and genes — have a far bigger influence on people’s risk of heart attack and strokes.
As for the life-enhancing flavinols that might underpin the claims, don’t count on them. As The Lancet recently reported, in an attempt to stem “healthy choc” research stories, manufacturers often remove them because consumers dislike the bitter taste.
So, lifesaving Easter eggs are not what they’re cracked up to be.