Last year it was ‘chocolate reduces your chances of heart disease’. This was a flakey conclusion at best, and misleading at worst: the vast majority of chocolate sales are milk varieties – which increase the risk of heart disease…if you’re genetically so prone in the first place. Much of the pro-chocolate information was fairly easily traceable back to those manufacturing the stuff.

Now scam has been replaced by scare:

‘People who regularly eat chocolate are more depressive, experts have found’

That gem appeared on the BBC website this morning. And as usual, it’s a non-story from top to bottom. Lets first of all tackle the two words ‘regularly’ and ‘depressive’. Regularly was defined in the research as six 28 gram bars a month. That’s a standard bar of chocolate every five days. It’s not chocaholic behaviour, or anywhere near it.

As for the ‘depressive’ definition, none of the sample were on medication for depression. So it’s highly likely that the number of depressives in this research was zero. A depressive is someone prone to regular attacks of clinical depression. Clinical depression is not just ‘feeling glum’: it’s the feeling that within the next half-hour somebody may well execute you. Trust me, I have A-level in this subject.

So, relatively normal chocolate usage was tested among people who weren’t depressed. That’s not exactly the basis for a headline suggesting that chocolate troughers tend to be potential suicides. There is not now (nor has there ever been) a correlation between eating chocolate and developing real depression. There’s some evidence that mildly depressed people eat more comfort foods, one of which is chocolate. That is a response to an ephemeral condition; it has nothing to do with causality.

Go to objective sources, and they will tell you that chocolate has myriad short-term effects – and some long-term ones both good and bad. These latter are very poorly understood, and they certainly should not be the subject of daft articles emanating from the world’s most famous broadcasting concern.

The reality is that chocolate consumed in moderation is almost certainly a health-neutral activity. The sooner doctors and researchers shut up about this sort of topic (and focus only on truly solid conclusions) the more we will be inclined to listen.