Do you love chocolate in spite of all the terrible things you've heard about it?

Or maybe are they part of the reason you love it?

It's so unhealthy.

It makes you fat.

It gives you cavities.

It's bad for your heart.

Today, we're going to go through a bunch of these popular chocolate myths

and see which of them can stand up to the scrutiny of our skeptical eye.

That's coming up right now on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid.

I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

Chocolate Myths

Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not.

I want to welcome all of you today

for coming here to Skeptoid, which you did because you know that May 15th is National Chocolate

Chip Day, which is totally a real holiday and totally not made up by the chocolate companies.

The day is in honor of Ruth Wakefield of Massachusetts,

who, in 1937, added chunks of Nestle chocolate to a batch of cookies. In exchange for a lifetime

supply of chocolate, she sold them the right to put her recipe on their packaging, which they

named for the place she worked, the Toll House Inn.

I'm going to start with a really quick brief on chocolate, as these basics impact quite a few

of our myths. Chocolate comes from the seeds of the cacao tree. According to DNA studies,

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