Countries' Chocolate Intake Corresponds With Nobel Laureates

Here's a really, really good reason to increase the amount of chocolate you're eating, and not just you, but your entire country: the amount of chocolate consumed each year per capita in a given country is strongly correlated with the number of Nobel Laureates per 10 million people in its citizenry.

The study in which this was discovered, "Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates," was published in The New England Journal of Medicine, and suggests that "chocolate consumption could hypothetically improve cognitive function not only in individuals but in whole populations."

The research indicates a strong positive correlation of .79 (a perfect positive correlation has a value of +1) between chocolate consumption and the number of Nobel Prize winners in a country, and without Sweden's data, that correlation improves to .86.

A few caveats to note here: signs do point to this "paper" having been written in jest (although the two factors were graphed against one another and suggest a relationship, correlation is not the same thing as causation). A follow-up study urges readers not to fall victim to "the peril of over-interpreting correlations in health studies," and we won't; but regular chocolate consumption has been shown to improve cognitive function.