Report linking depression with chocolate leaves bad aftertaste

It's pretty much an irresistible combination -- chocolate and depression -- and everyone from the Boston Globe to the BBC took a bite the other week.

Researchers from two campuses of the University of California released a report that said people who consider themselves depressed eat more chocolate than people who consider themselves otherwise.

It sounded all learned and scholarly and stuff. Heck, it was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, and any magazine most of us have never laid eyes on must be smart.

As another very wise person from a college on the opposite side of the country points out, though, the report had all the weight and heft of a Kit Kat bar. Like so many of the health tidbits that wind up in print or on the 11 o'clock news, this one melts in your hand.

Maybe chocolate makes you depressed. Maybe it cures depression. Maybe it ruins your complexion and then you get depressed so you need to buy more chocolate when you stop at Rite Aid for Clearasil. The only thing you can tell for sure from the report, suggests Rebecca Goldin, is that the people who compiled it don't know diddley-squat about the candy aisle.

A flawed report

Goldin, 38, serves as associate professor of mathematics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and director of research at the Statistical Assessment Service, or STATS. STATS is a nonprofit associated with George Mason whose mission is to point out missteps like the one the New York Times made a few years ago when it reported that, for the first time, more American women were living without a husband than with one.

That number only works, STATS said, if you count women ages 15 to 17, most of whom still have curfews and live in states where they can't legally marry. So there's no need for unintentionally single women to reach for sharp objects, Xanax or Milky Way bars.

Goldin went to Harvard and MIT, and her academic interests include "Schubert polynomials and the intersection properties of Schubert varieties, toric varieties, equivariant cohomology, moment maps and symplectic and hyperkahler reduction, and orbifold cohomology."

As much fun as it would be to discuss those, let's instead take it as a given that she is sharper than the serrated edge of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, and move on to the most glaring flaw in the chocolate-and-depression report.

It's not that the amount of chocolate consumed by even the heaviest eaters in the study is fairly minimal -- the equivalent of eight candy bars a month. It's that much of what we think of as chocolate isn't.

Chocolate imposters

Take a Snickers. (Hey, if you won't, I will.) To most of us, as we stand in front of a vending machine, it's a chocolate bar. But it's actually just a coating of milk chocolate, which has a trifling cacao content to start with, wrapped around other ingredients.

To earn the lofty title of "chocolate," according to the rules of the Food and Drug Administration, a candy bar must be at least 10 percent cacao. A Hershey's bar, for instance, has been reported to contain 11 percent.

Contrast that to Hershey's Extra Dark, at 60 percent, or a high-end dark chocolate that might hit an 85 percent combination of cacao solids and cacao butter. They're barely related. The range is so wide, Goldin points out, that a chipper, upbeat nibbler who favors Godiva might actually consume more chocolate than a sullen heavy eater from the study who likes 3 Musketeers.

"What you're really seeing," she says, "is that some groups of people are more likely to eat candy." But if that's all the report had said, you'd never have seen it on TV.

"It's such bad research," she concludes, "the whole study was completely informationless."

She recommends another round of research with a more controlled environment.

All those friends of science who'd like to help out, raise your hands.

nrubin@detnews.com">nrubin@detnews.com (313) 222-1874