Mark Miodownik researched the countries that have the highest chocolate consumption. Turns out, they are all located in Northern Europe. Switzerland is the leader; then Ireland followed suit, then there’s the U.K., Austria, Belgium, and Germany.

When you have a little too much time on your hands, you can look up the fertility rates in the said countries. It goes to show that females in these chocolate-loving countries happen to have fewer than two babies (except Ireland and France). Yup, that’s below the replacement rate. If this goes on, the said countries are bound to get smaller with time.

So does chocolate sometimes act as a proxy for baby-making? Perhaps. Or you could blame it on the cold. If you’ve been a keen observer, you might have caught on to the fact that no tropical country is included in the Love-Chocolate List.

Chocolate is not as astonishing when it’s warm. They either melt on the shelves, or you store them in the fridge (or you make them icky with some high-melt-point oils).

What happens though is that in warm weather we tend to devour them before they even get the chance to melt in our mouths. This spoils the solid-to-liquid transformation experience. Miodownik writes, "This problem may explain, perhaps, why the Mesoamericans, who first invented chocolate in the tropics, never created a solid bar but consumed it only as a drink."

I get it, there’s so many other factors to be considered when it comes to a country’s fertility rate. But still, wouldn’t it be interesting if a global chocolate experiment could be conducted?

We could mess with chocolate a little bit more in an attempt to make it just a little less temperature sensitive. After which, we get these new, dark, melt-in-your-mouth bars and give young people across the globe access, free of charge. Let’s wait a generation, and find out what comes about.

If fewer babies were made, and resources are freed up, making room for cleaner air and wild spaces, more trees and more butterflies, and more majestic beauty for us to marvel at, we can finally say to those little brown bars, just before they hit our palates and get devoured, "Thank you, chocolate."

This post is excerpted and paraphrased from http://news360.com/article/241991910. For more information get Mark's book, Stuff Matters.

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Joanna Maligaya

Staff Writer/Content Developer at Chocolate University Online

Ever since she can remember, Joanna has always considered chocolate as the ultimate food for her soul. She believes in the saying, “9 out of 10 people love chocolate, and the 10th always lies.”

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