Intentional Chocolate

Sceptics rightly complain that the miraculous benefits touted by so many suppliers of health foods have little or no scientific backing. Well I recently came across something that will really annoy them. An American chocolate manufacturer claims that chocolate imprinted with good thoughts can actually make you feel better. And it has the double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study to prove it.

Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate bases its claim on the traditional idea that food tastes finer and is more health-giving if it has been made with love and good intentions, or ceremonially blessed. (I don't remember hearing this, and it didn't sound likely, but what do I know.) The firm's founder Jim Walsh says dishes prepared by great chefs seem to work better than identical recipes created by less gifted folk. He believes there is such a thing as the 'Mother's chicken soup syndrome' - lovingly prepared foods by one who cares has curative properties.

The company says it was the first to grow cacao beans in the US, and spent years spreading the word about the 'true properties of chocolate, its amazing health qualities, the transcendent attributes of tastes, texture and most importantly its soul.' Then it gets a bit strange. An American scientist emerged from the Amazonian jungle one day carrying a message for Walsh from the cacao shamans of the upper Amazon. The shamans had communed with their devas, who said to tell Walsh:

The cacao tree is here on earth to heal the etheric heart of man and this mission is as important as plankton fixing oxygen from the sea. Continue your work; it is critical to cacao fulfilling its purpose.

Unsurprisingly, Walsh didn't really get this. But a bit later one of the company's main investors, who had suffered a serious heart attack, found that nibbling a cacao bean from the company's plantation brought a miraculous recovery from chest pain. This got Walsh's attention, and by degrees he arrived at the idea of a curative energy field that surrounds chocolate. He mentioned it to parapsychologist Dean Radin, who realised the claim could be tested.

The subsequent study by Radin, Hayssen and Walsh was published last October in Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. Their approach was to create four groups of people, with care taken to ensure a broadly similar demographic profile. Three of the groups were given chocolate that had been blessed by Tibetan monks and a Mongolian shaman, each using a different technique. The fourth group was given ordinary chocolate as a control. By the end of the week all three groups eating the treated chocolate reported improved mood, with less fatigue and greater vigour, while the control group reported little change. The overall significance was not great, at the p = .04 level, but jumped to p = .0001 for those who habitually ate little chocolate, well beyond chance levels even given the small size of the sample.

Before this experiment I might have dismissed the whole idea as a bit airy-fairy. But a result as robust as this has made me think again.

Comments

[Topher Cooper]

There was some discussion of this on Dean Radin's own blog:

If you are having trouble with that long URL try:

Which references the same page.

[Topher Cooper]

Whoops:

The references were:

http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2007/10/intentional-chocolate-article-published.html

and

http://tinyurl.com/27ompn

[Robert McLuhan]

thanks, need to catch up!

[judasnoose]

p<.05 is decent.

[judasnoose]

the key is repeatability.