... The higher a country's chocolate consumption, the more Nobel laureates it spawns per capita

[struggle4progress]

according to findings released today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

And guess who leads the pack? The Swiss, of course, closely followed by the Swedes and the Danes. The U.S. is somewhere in the middle of chocolate consumption and Nobel Prize winners per capita. To produce just one more laureate, the nation would have to up its cocoa intake by a whopping 275 million pounds a year, according to Dr. Franz Messerli, who did the analysis.

"The amount it takes, it's actually quite stunning, you know," Messerli chuckled. "The Swiss eat 120 bars - that is, 3-ounce bars - per year, for every man, woman and child, that's the average" ...

"I attribute essentially all my success to the very large amount of chocolate that I consume," said Eric Cornell, an American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in 2001 ...

Eat chocolate, win the Nobel Prize?
By Frederik Joelving
NEW YORK | Wed Oct 10, 2012 5:12pm EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/10/us-eat-chocolate-win-the-nobel-prize-idUSBRE8991MS20121010

[JDPriestly]

1. Chocolate no doubt raises the IQ and energizes. (Joking, but only a little.)

So, feed your kids lots of chocolate and who knows, they might become Nobel laureates. I would have loved that as a kid.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

2. Maybe it says something about colonialism and exploitation too

Top 10 Cocoa producing counties:
Ivory Coast
Indonesia
Ghana
Nigeria
Cameroon
Brazil
Ecuador
Togo
Dominican Republic
Papua New Guinea

Probably don't have a lot Nobel Laureates

[LiberalEsto]

3. I've been doing my part for years nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. link to the 'article'

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMon1211064

Graph does look convincing, though Sweden (lot of Nobels, in comparison to choc consumption) and Germany (less Nobels than the relation would predict) are outliers. Of course, Swedes award these prizes ...

[MrScorpio]

5. But where are the Belgians? Nt

[BillyJack]

6. Where's that :facepalm: gif when I need it! n/t

[sl8]

7. "... a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature"

http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/

[struggle4progress]

8. Holy moly! The real problem is that we're runnin outta pirates!