Monday, February 23, 2015
Looking into the possible reasons for this, I have found something that may explain it: I do not eat enough chocolate.
I say ‘may explain it’ because for more than two years a fierce dispute has been going on in the academic world over whether one’s chances of winning a Nobel Prize are indeed affected by chocolate consumption.
It began with a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2012 entitled ‘Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function and Nobel Laureates’ in which the author, Franz H Messerli, showed there is a remarkably strong correlation between the number of Nobel Prizes a nation has won per hear of population and the average chocolate consumption of its people.
The 23 countries for which data was available were displayed on a graph charting chocolate consumption against Nobel Prizes which made the correlation strikingly clear.
From China, with both the lowest average chocolate consumption and lowest number of Nobels per capita, to Switzerland, which was highest on both measures, almost every nation’s Nobel success seemed to be predicted by its chocolate-eating habits.
The only country out of this general pattern was Sweden, which was found to have won twice as many Nobels as its chocolate consumption merits.
“One cannot quite escape the notion,” Messerli writes, “that either the Nobel Committee in Stockholm has some inherent patriotic bias … or, perhaps, that the Swedes are particularly sensitive to chocolate, and even minuscule amounts greatly enhance their cognition.”
He did, however, admit one limitation of the study, which was that it had not been possible to base the calculations on the chocolate intake of individual Nobel laureates.
That omission, however, was remedied in a letter by the experienced researcher Beatrice Golomb and 13 colleagues to the journal Nature in 2013, reporting a survey among 23 Nobel Prize winners which showed that 43 per cent reported eating chocolate more than twice a week compared with only 25 per cent of non-winners.
In 2014, however, a paper appeared in the journal PLOS ONE with the highly provocative title: “Scientific Activity is a Better Predictor of Nobel Award Chances than Dietary Habits and Economic Factors”.
Challenging Messerli’s suggestion than the Nobel-chocolate link may be the effect of flavanols in the chocolate which are known to enhance memory and other cognitive skills, they point out that figures for other flavanol-rich foodstuffs, such as tea and wine, show no correlation with Nobel prizes.
The argument, I am sure, will go on, but in the meantime, I shall be leading the campaign to encourage Britons to eat more chocolate.
Messerli’s figures clearly show that an annual increase of only 400 grams per person is worth another Nobel Prize. It could be mine.
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Kara Scott
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