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ET Bureau Nov 2, 2012, 05.31AM IST
(A recent study released…)

What's new: Study links a country's choclate consumption with the number of Nobel laureates

Trying to justify that additional piece of dark chocolate that you just must have after dinner? This should help. A recent study released in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that the higher a country's chocolate consumption, the more Nobel laureates per capita it spawns. Dr. Franz Messerli, who runs the hypertension program at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York, did this after seeing another study that linked flavonoids, an antioxidant present in cocoa to higher scores on cognitive tests. What started as a way to kill time brought up startling results.

Working with industry data on chocolate consumption in 23 countries and a list of countries which had the highest number of Nobel laureates per capita, he saw that they stacked up neatly on a graph with higher chocolate intake linked with more laureates. It could be a freaky correlation, but not surprisingly, the Swiss are at the top of the pack, followed by the Swedes and the Danes. For the US, which ranks somewhere in the middle, cocoa consumption would have to go up by a staggering 275 million pounds a year to produce just one more laureate. Even if you don't go on to win the Nobel, you can console yourself that apart from some extra calories, that dark chocolate might at least contribute to the country winning another Nobel someday.