Chocolates are too good to lose sleep over correlation and causality in its case

When Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev exhorted his scientists in 2010 to come up with a modern version of the fabled ‘elixir of life’, they took two years to develop Nar —a probiotic yogurt drink. Maybe the concoction is working as the president looks pretty sprightly at 75. However, judging by the number of virtues that chocolate is racking up these days, he may as well be handed a lifetime’s supply of Gargantua — the country’s newly launched and most expensive brand, priced at $14,000 for six gold-crusted morsels — instead. Considering cacao confections are supposed to be good for the heart and skin, reduce chances of strokes and diarrhoea, protect from the ill-effects of the sun, help lose weight — and live longer, obviously — the bean wasn’t christened theobroma, or food of the gods, for nothing.

But now that chocolate has also been deemed by a recent study to obviate the need for mind-stretching and dementiadeterring activities such as crosswords and Sudoku by enhancing memory and abstract thinking skills, it could probably be posited one day as a school meal staple that students will not baulk at. Hopefully, subsequent research will not reveal that rather than it actually making people magically smarter or preserving little grey cells, geniuses just have a natural penchant for chocolates.