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34 sats \ 2 replies \ @orangecheckemail_isthereany 31 Oct \ parent \ on: Is Chocolate healthy? health
Another thing to keep in mind in this context: Publishing studies is not mandatory.
It very well could be the case that a company keeps ordering studies while not publishing them when they get a result they don't like. Eventually randomness / chance will seem to show a statistically significant result. We'd have to know how many studies they did as compared to how many they published.
Not directly related to this particular question, but just to point out how truly flawed nutrional studies can be:
Some of the famous "studies" (IIRC some of Harvard's Walter Willet's studies are of this kind) purporting to show that red meat causes various kinds of disease count things like macdonalds, pizza, lasagna etc as "red meat" because some parts of those foods may consist of meat. Sloppy and misleading "studies" of this kind are commonplace in nutrirtion studies. Unstated asasumptions (e.g. of all the things in there the meat surely is the ingredient causing the problems) and dearth of controls (e.g. healthy user bias. mgiht the people avoiding the junk food be doing other healthy behaviours which are responsible for better health outcomes?) seems to be the norm rather than the exception in these so-called studies which might more appropriately be called propaganda pieces.
It really largely seems to be a junk science / pseudo-science field, especially nutritional epedemiology.
Poorly controlled correlation studies and + spurious theoretical mechanism does not a sturdy reliable scientific argument make.,
I agree that many studies in nutritional epidemiology are flawed.
But lets stay on the chocolate topic: I think the weight of evidence supports the claim that dark chocolate consumption provides a net benefit for cardiovascular health. Lets look at more data points:
- In a recent controlled clinical trial daily intake of cocoa extract vs placebo for 3.6 years was compared in several thousand healthy volunteers. While the difference in cardiovascular events was non-significant, there was a significant reduction of cardiovascular death in the cocoa group (https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqac055)
- Two mechanisms were identified by which cocoa constituents exert beneficial effects on the cardiovascular system: Reduction of platelet reactivity, ultimately decreasing the risk for thrombosis (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1097/SMJ.0b013e31818859eb and https://doi.org/10.1080/0953710031000123681) Improvement of endothelial function, resulting in reduced blood pressure (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1080/07315724.2004.10719361 and https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16172911)
Btw, if you can´t access the publications, try Sci-Hub ;)
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Thanks for the info. I don't have any specific knowledge about these studies but I still have zero trust in them. (Also I'm not knowledgeable enough in study design and methodology to critique these particular ones).
But here's the reason for my zero trust. I was fooled by studies like this for a long time, in many different nutritional areas. However, the studies all had one thing in common - they all pointed to the same direction. Meat and animal is bad, fiber, whole grains, fruit and veggies is good. That's the way the propaganda is going now.
And when I read The Big Fat Surprise (and many other books, but that was the first and most influential), I learned that most of the studies were trash. And studies that showed the opposite were actively suppressed.
And more importantly, when I actually started eating the EXACT OPPOSITE of what the studies recommended, I found my health massively, massively improved. And it didn't even take long.
So bottom line - no faith in these types of studies, I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. And that doesn't include chocolate.
;-)
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