The secret to genius? It might be chocolate

After being asked to peer review an article on flavanols, the substances found in tea, wine and chocolate, among other things, and seem to help slow down or even reverse the mental slow downs of aging, he began to toy around with a silly idea: If chocolate consumption could boost a septuagenarian’s brain power, might it also boost an entire country’s?

Messerli, who is Swiss, knew that his homeland had the highest per-capita number of Nobel Prize winners. “It occurred to me that the Swiss also had the highest chocolate consumption the world,” he tells The Salt. “I put two and two together and thought, Well, China must have much less chocolate consumption and probably not that many prizewinners per capita. Let’s just plot the two.”