Article Summary
Maurage, Pierre, Alexandre Heeren, and Mauro Pesenti. “Does chocolate consumption really boost Nobel award chances? The peril of over-interpreting correlations in health studies.” The Journal of Nutrition 143.6 (2013): 931-933.
- Article Purpose
Authored by Maurage, Alexandre, and Mauro and published in 2013, the purpose of the article is to disprove previous researches that linked increased uptake of chocolate to the increased number of Nobel Prize winners at the national level. Further, the authors use a scientific experiment to warn the dangers of suing nutrition correlations to make such conclusions.
- Background issues
The “New England journal Medicine” had recently reported an increased correlation between chocolate intake and the number of Noble Prize winners in particular areas. These previous researchers’ findings were based on the flavonoids present in Cocoa, the primary ingredient of chocolate (Maurage et al. 1). Flavonoids comprise a class of polyphenol plant-based substances capable of preventing neurodegeneration and consequently improving cognitive functioning. Owing to this surprising discovery, previous research has further encouraged people to increase chocolate uptake, increasing the number of Nobel Prize winners.
- Findings
A close examination of the previous studies’ methodological approach revealed that the data was based on the county’s average consumption of chocolate instead of the Nobel laureates. These findings expose the weakness of previous studies. Since chocolate is just one of the many food substances containing flavonoids, then the number of Nobel Prize winners should also show a positive correlation with increased uptake of other flavonoid-rich food substances. However, such a correlation was not observed (Maurage et al. 2). The lack of correlation of Nobel Prize winners with the uptake of flavonoid-rich food substances further discredits the previous findings.
Conclusively, correlation does not necessarily mean causation because there are many types of correlation on which mutual relationship between the involved items does not make sense. Consider a high correlation between IKEA furniture stores and the number of Nobel Prize Winners. It isn’t easy to establish causation in this scenario.
Work Cited
Maurage, Pierre, Alexandre Heeren, and Mauro Pesenti. “Does chocolate consumption really boost Nobel award chances? The peril of over-interpreting correlations in health studies.” The Journal of Nutrition 143.6 (2013): 931-933.