Study is here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/da.22950 …
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The basic study design was very simple - take a big sample of people, see how much chocolate they ate and compare that to their self-reported depressionpic.twitter.com/iVxka6R5Fv
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The study found that (after adjusting for confounding) there was no association between chocolate eating and depression SURPRISEpic.twitter.com/7LK1qF7TJt
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But, in the study, there was a small group of people who reported eating dark chocolate These people had a VERY low rate of depression When the researchers plugged this into their logistic model, they found an odds ratio of 0.3 - a 70% reduction in risk of depressionpic.twitter.com/gZEdqGcEAR
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So, basically, people who report eating dark chocolate are less likely to also report having depressive symptoms (depression) Not exactly a mammoth finding, that
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See, people who ate dark chocolate were also MUCH healthier than the average Joe in this study The were richer, smoked less, less likely to be overweight/obese, less likely to drink, had better education, etc etcpic.twitter.com/9zAW9EVJKq
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So it's very hard to know whether it was the chocolate making them healthier, or just that they were more healthy to begin with Or, as the scientists put it in the study itself...pic.twitter.com/nzdnBUq7MB
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It's also impossible from this study design to exclude reverse causality - in this case, it's possible that depression makes people less likely to eat chocolate
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On top of all of that, the number of people who reported eating dark chocolate in this study was TINY (148), which makes it very hard to know if the results are realistic or whether it's just statistical noise due to the small sample of dark chocolate eaters
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To put it in perspective, it looks like only 2 of the 148 people who ate dark chocolate reported depressive symptoms, which means to an extent this entire analysis rests on just 2 people
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(And, to add insult to injury, the researchers used a logistic regression model, which is known to exaggerate effects like this with small numbers of outcomes)
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So what if we look at other studies? A recent umbrella meta-analysis (that was somehow missed in the reporting cycle) found that chocolate is unlikely to help with mood or depressive symptomshttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261561418302048 …
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TL: DR - study didn't show a benefit for chocolate - for DARK chocolate, smallish benefit but very confounded - evidence so far seems to indicate chocolate is not useful for depression
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