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 Columbia University, started wondering
about the power of chocolate after reading that cocoa was good for you.
1. 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.
2. "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.
"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." says Messerli. This means there is a
less than one-in-10,000 probability of getting results like these if no correlation
exists.
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.
"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.
"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.
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."
 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."