Chocolate habits of Nobel prizewinners

Abstract

Laureates are handed chocolate replicas of the medal in gold foil at the Nobel ceremony. This must mean that the Nobel Foundation thinks chocolate is important." "My wife is a chocoholic but so far has not received the phone call." "Chocolate made me who I am today." "The correlation could stimulate even greater efforts to compete with the Swiss, French and Belgians." "Your research is poised precisely in the vast space between balanced objectivity and total confusion." "I eat a lot of wine gums and biltong in case you are considering snacking in general." "I am upping my chocolate consumption to recapture my youthful IQ." COCOA CONNECTION Nobel laureates on chocolate

Scientific Activity Is a Better Predictor of Nobel Award Chances than Dietary Habits and Economic Factors

“…Using a limited number of countries, these previous studies explored some correlations between chocolate, milk, and wine consumption and Nobel awards, concluding that food might play a crucial role in obtaining Nobel awards. More specifically, recent studies published in renowned journals [1] , [5] proposed that increasing chocolate consumption might be an efficient way to improve cognition at the individual level and the chances of Nobel awards at the country level. Despite the amazing extent to which this proposal was broadcasted in popular and scientific media, our results obviously refute this hypothesis by showing that nutritional factors have a very modest influence on predicting the number of Nobel laureates.…”

“…Despite warnings on the danger of over-interpreting correlations, this initial observation was widely broadcasted by popular media, was taken as fact by several scientific publications [3] , [4] , and was accepted and extended in a letter published in Nature [5] . Moreover, to capitalize on this result, several recent papers have tried to identify other dietary habits that might predict the number of Nobel laureates.…”

Casual snacking as an automatic process: a grounded cognition framework

“…We chose chocolate snacking because chocolate consumption has been related to habits, even for otherwise rational and consciously profiled actors, as, e.g. Nobel Prize winners (Golomb et al, 2013). In addition, chocolate has been identified as the most frequently craved food product (Rozin et al, 1991).…”