"Chocolate Helps You Lose Weight" Study

A deliberately flawed 2015 study by journalist John Bohannon was designed to expose how easily bad science gets media coverage. The study, which claimed chocolate helps weight loss, involved only 15 participants and used 18 different measurements to find a statistically significant result by chance. Major outlets like *Bild* and *CNN* ran the story uncritically, while less than 10% of the coverage mentioned the study's tiny sample size. This episode reveals systemic failures in science journalism far worse than #8, where brain-training apps faced at least regulatory scrutiny—Bohannon's stunt shows no gatekeepers stopped a headline that made it to 200+ news sites before the truth emerged.