Depressed? You must like chocolate (More Government regulation in the works)

People who are depressed eat more chocolate than people who are not, U.S. researchers said on Monday, in a study that puts numbers behind the link between mood and chocolate.

They said people who were depressed ate an average of 8.4 servings of chocolate per month, compared with 5.4 servings among those who were not.

And people who had major depression based on results of a screening test ate even more -- 11.8 servings per month. A serving was considered to be one small bar, or 1 ounce (28 grams), of chocolate.

"Depressed mood was significantly related to higher chocolate consumption," Dr. Natalie Rose of the University of California, Davis, and University of California, San Diego, and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Many people consider chocolate a mood-booster but few studies have actually confirmed the connection between the confection and mood. And most studies have looked only at women.

Rose and colleagues studied the relationship between chocolate and mood among 931 women and men who were not using antidepressants. People in the study reported how much chocolate they consumed and most also completed a food frequency questionnaire about their overall diet.

Their moods were assessed using a commonly used depression scale. What they found was a marked association between chocolate consumption and depression. And unlike other studies that looked only at women, the link was true of both men and women.

But I am pretty sure government grants generate lies, aren’t you.

In general, no. But the two most egregious cases of where this is true, though, are the atmospheric scientists trying to push global warming and the researcher who came up with all the bogus results on ecstasy for his grants using methamphetamine on the rats instead of ecstasy. I guess all the bad sequelae made for better grantsmanship. Why would the feds want to fund research that had only benign results? You couldn't make a federal case out of this for going after illegal ecstasy operations. In fact, this was a drug used widely and with little negative outcome but the feds wanted some handle. They basically got the results they paid for and it became another fundable target in the War on Drugs. I guess the amount of money was greater than that scientist's integrity. We know that it's ALWAYS greater than the integrity of national drug enforcement agencies (and almost every other agency) that use NIDA to provide them with pretexts for their ongoing operations and livelihood.

And people who had major depression based on results of a screening test ate even more -- 11.8 servings per month. A serving was considered to be one small bar, or 1 ounce (28 grams), of chocolate.

I wonder if this will affect our future chocolate ration:

Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon -- not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words -- which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:

times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify
times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue
times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last. The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures.

Winston dialled 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from The Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened. Or again, The Times of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today's issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston's job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones. As for the third message, it referred to a very simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a 'categorical pledge' were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.

From 1984, by George Orwell - Part 1, Chapter 4.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.