 Could eating chocolate get you a Nobel Prize? It's not as crazy an idea as it might sound. Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows a clear correlation between the amount of chocolate each person in a country eats and the number of Nobel Prize winners that country has produced. Of course, what makes the research intriguing is that we really want to believe it. Who wouldn't want to get smart overdosing on Lindor truffles? And to make it all the more compelling, there are plausible scientific reasons why chocolate might increase cognitive ability in some cases. The trouble is the research just shows an association between chocolate consumption and that coveted call from the Swedish Academy of Sciences. What it doesn't show is causation. As the author points out, it could be that smart people like eating chocolate or there could be some other factor that's common to both Nobel laureates and chocolate eating. Take owning a cat for instance. What if cat owners eat chocolate and are smarter than the average non-cat fancier? Amazingly, the cat chocolate Nobel thing works. Not only do the number of cats per capita in a country correlate with the amount of chocolate each person eats but they also correlate with the number of Nobel Prizes per head of population. The problem is, without evidence of cause and effect, these data are nonsense. And this is where risk comes in. It's easy to see associations between different things, especially when we want to believe. It's much harder to identify where those associations actually mean anything. And this is important if you're trying to work out whether being exposed to substance X, for instance, really is dangerous or whether you're just having a Nobel chocolate moment. For more bite-sized insights into the science of risk, don't forget to subscribe to RiskBites.