Chemical addictions, as we all know, have a tendency to be destructive. It really is quite scary. Fortunately most people have less damaging "addictions" in life. It’s no secret that a bulk of the world’s population enjoys a bit of chocolate, at least every now and then.

Statistics have shown that the average American consumes around 11 pounds of chocolate annually (depending on whose numbers you look at).

Chocolate may not be a life essential. It’s not as though it would be the death of somebody if chocolate just disappeared from the face of the earth. However, if you took it away, one of the biggest and yummiest pleasures you can get on the planet Earth would also be extinct.  And maybe a powerful brain food would be done too!

Quite interesting, a study last year in the New England Journal of Medicine displayed how chocolate not only tastes good, but it also has the power to make a person kind of smarter. Something like that.

According to an article with the title "Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive function, and Nobel Laureates," the majority of Nobel Prize winners come from countries that prove to have high consumption of chocolate.

For instance, Switzerland has about three times the number of Nobel Prize winners per capita, while the people in their lands eat twice as much chocolate on an annual basis.

According to the graph below (which I found in an article at Scientific American) showing a plot of chocolate consumption in kilograms versus the number of Nobel Prizes per country, there is a strong correlation of 0.79. (Sweden appears to be the biggest anomaly. If you take it out, the correlation jumps to 0.86.)

Pretty cool!  Perhaps this shows that when an entire country is "addicted" to chocolate, big things can happen.