The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of studies to show cocoa is good
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Re: The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of studies to show cocoa is good
#2This is a very common move by food companies right? Curious as to what can be done to stop it?
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...
Re: The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of studies to show cocoa is good
#3I was eating a chocolate bar recently and I had this exact thought. Don't trust articles that say "X is good for you" when X is a commonly advertised commodity. Which is most things.
Re: The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of studies to show cocoa is good
#4This is a very common move by food companies right? Curious as to what can be done to stop it? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...
Society either has to fund more researchers with more money and accept the ramifications of that or accept companies funding their own interests. The same applies to campaign funding.
Re: The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of studies to show cocoa is good
#5> Cadbury Jr.’s newest confection loaded just about every buzzy health trend into a fresh green-and-white package: vegan, ethically sourced, organic dark chocolate and creamy, superfood avocado.
Hardly incompatible with it being candy. Avocado is super fat, chocolate is super fat. What did you expect? Also fat and even "candy" are not synonymous with unhealthy.
Sidebar: my first thought upon seeing the title: there isn't even that much chocolate in a Mars bar.
Re: The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of studies to show cocoa is good
#6This is a very common move by food companies right? Curious as to what can be done to stop it? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...
Stop perpetuating the cultural idea that 'anything white collar is OK as long as you do it for money.' The corrupt researchers should be left without a job, just as, say, a food truck worker who plotted to intentionally profit from selling expired products would be fired and criminally charged. In both cases the actors are unethically profiting from your misfortune.
Re: The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of studies to show cocoa is good
#7>It may be that chocolate eaters are wealthier or have other characteristics, aside from their chocolate-eating habit, that protect them from disease.
May be the main key to take away from this. Correlation != causation etc. etc.
Cant deny though: biting into a square of 90% cacao dark chocolate(make sure it has more fiber than sugar) is an exquisitely divine experience.
Re: The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of studies to show cocoa is good
#8I recently pondered the possibility that this is happening in the vegetable industry right now. There are seemingly endless documentaries on Netflix at the moment promoting better health through vegetables (What the Health, Forks vs. Knives, etc). They have some compelling evidence towards their claims, but also towards possible corruptions within foundations such as the AHA and the Beef, Pork and poultry industries.
Sure, it sounds like something a conspiracist would think up, but it'd just be the same tactics that these groups claim the meat industry et. al. have done to us for years, right?
Re: The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of studies to show cocoa is good
#9> “Dark chocolate probably has some beneficial properties to it,” said Salt Sugar Fat author Michael Moss, “but generally you have to eat so much of it to get any benefit that it’s kind of daunting, or something else in the product counteracts the benefits. In the case of chocolate, it’s probably going to be sugar.”
Interestingly, the chart just below this quotation shows that it takes ~70 calories of straight cocoa powder to get a "heart healthy" dose of flavanols. With dark chocolate, which has less sugar as the cocoa percentage goes up, they don't distinguish the type but you need 750 calories. That's quite a bit.
70% cocoa dark chocolate is somewhat (not entirely) palatable to most people, but getting up to 85% becomes a distinguished taste even for dark chocolate lovers.
Jives with my first thoughts after reading the submitted headline: that even if they could show cocoa was good for you, there is no way that translates into the standard Mars chocolate bars. I can totally see how it benefits Mars though - I've seen people give way more twisted justifications for eating junk food than "cocoa is good for you" as an excuse when eating a chocolate bar.
Re: The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of studies to show cocoa is good
#10It seems most nutritional advice is somehow skewed by commercial interests. The fat vs sugar discussion was influenced by industry and the sugar industry just had better lobbyists.