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If you want to lose weight, you’re better off giving up hope on all the miraculous new methods, no matter how much they are advertised in the media. Just to demonstrate how misleading these techniques are, a group of journalists conducted a study on a very attractive hypothesis: chocolate can help you lose weight.
Naturally, when their study came out, it spread like wildfire, precisely because their results asserted that chocolate, out of all things, can help you slim down. It was literally all over the news, and so many people ended up actually considered eating chocolate every day so as to improve their weight loss outcome.
The study was called “Chocolate with high cocoa content as a weight-loss accelerator” and it ended up being published in the International Archives of Medicine, simply because it had covered a subject so popular that was bound to generate a lot of publicity.
It was not even subjected to peer review, that normally clears such studies from scientific journals and made its way to the final print. And to be honest, the study appeared to be legit, since it was allegedly conducted by Johannes Bohannon PhD, the research director of the Institute of Diet and Health.
In reality, the study was envisioned by a journalist named John Bohannon, who actually does have a PhD in molecular biology and who has quite some experience in research. Therefore, it was easy for him to create a real study, carried out on real actual people who followed real diets, but that finally rendered unreal conclusions.
There is a reason why there are so many rules regarding the correct ways of conducting studies. Bohannon used a small number of subjects in his study, 5 men and 11 women in total, and tested them for a wide range of things, basically fishing for appealing results.
The 16 people were separated into three groups. The first followed a low-carbohydrate diet, the second followed the same diet but also included a daily intake of 43g of chocolate and the third group was the whiteness group, who ate their regular food.
All subjects were weighed daily and were subjected to extensive testing at the beginning and end of the study, that consisted of questionnaires and blood tests. The whole experiment lasted 3 weeks.
“Our study included 18 different measurements — weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, wellbeing, etc — from 15 people. (One subject was dropped.) That study design is a recipe for false positives.” said Bohannon.
Practically, they did this 3-week experiment and looked at the results and something was bound to show up, whether it was regarding the effects of chocolate on sleep patterns, overall mood, cholesterol levels or pretty much any appealing change it might have provoked.
Since the group who ate chocolate ended up losing weight 10% faster, it was the best case scenario for Bohannon’s group because this was bound to draw massive attention. And they were extremely right to make that assumption.
The problem is that the majority of studies that concern diets are done this way and that is how you end up with at least 3 miraculous new and improved methods that are “guaranteed” to get you to lose weight, any given week.
What they are actually guaranteed to do is make you click the diet-pill advertisements on the websites that publish them. This is the main purpose of these fabricated results, because in the end, it’s all about the money.
John Bohannon worked alongside a group of filmmakers that plan on making a whole documentary about this false science, because more light needs to be shed on this matter, as it is capable of creating very real and very serious health issues for people.
In the end it all comes down to what you chose to believe and how honest you are with yourself. Despite the fact that is sounds incredibly tempting to follow a diet that includes daily chocolate meals, or to take some revolutionary pill that will make lose a multitude a pounds in a week’s time, deep down you have know that it’s actually all a lie.
So, probably the safest way to go about losing weight is assess the proposed solution in the most honest manner possible. Basically, if it sounds too easy or simply too good to be true, it is most likely not true. Sticking to a non-miracle long term diet and a fair amount of exercise is always going to be the best option out there, no matter how hard everybody tries to go around it.
Image Source: zmescience
