In 2015, a study from the Institute of Diet and Health with some surprising results launched a slew of click-bait articles with explosive headlines.

Chocolate accelerates weight loss, insisted one such headline.

Scientists say eating chocolate can help you lose weight, declared another.

Lose 10% more weight by eating a chocolate bar every day.

No joke, promised yet another.

There was just one problem.

This was a joke.

The head researcher of the study, Johannes Bohannon, took to I09 in May of that year to reveal that his name was actually John

Bohannon. The Institute of Diet and Health was in fact nothing more than a website and

the study showing the magical weight loss effects of chocolate consumption was bogus.

The hoax was the brainchild of a German television reporter who wanted to demonstrate just

how easy it is to turn bad science into the big headlines behind Diet Fads.

Given how widely the study's surprising conclusion was publicized,

from the pages of Build, Europe's largest newspaper,

to the TV sets of viewers in Texas and Australia, that demonstration was remarkably successful.

But although it's tempting to write this story off as a demonstration about global

journalists in the scientific illiteracy of the press, the hoax serves as a window into a much larger, much more troubling story.

That story is the crisis of science.

This is the Corbett Report.

What makes the chocolate weight loss study so revealing isn't that it was completely fake. It's that in an important

sense it wasn't fake. Bohanis really did conduct a weight loss study and the

data really does support the conclusion that subject to ate chocolate on a low-carb diet

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